Homeward bound

A wakeup call at 4..00 am, a quick shower at baggage in reception by 4.30am for a game of comedy buses started our day. Comedy buses is a variant of musical chairs where you load your luggage on a designated bus, get sat down ready to roll and then find that your bus is going domestic rather than international. Meanwhile, another busload have been told the selfsame thing. Off load all the baggage then swap buses. Only to find that the terminals are 100m apart and it doesn’t matter anyway!
A good sense of humour check.

There are plenty more at Cochin Airport where queuing has been refined to an art form.
Zigzags to have your checked bags x-rayed and sealed (perhaps). No barriers though so a test of discipline. Then queue again and again for passport control, hand luggage search ( I had to unpack mine!!) and so on . There must have been about 7or 8 stages. It does help to pass the time as the 2 hours checking evaporated before we boarded for our half hour flight to Colombo.
Transfer was easy and we boarded easily for a 1.30minute leg to Male.

Then we had ‘The bag incident’!.

During the flight there was a small number of passengers who seemed restless and noticeably seemed to walk around.. When it came to offloading at Male one passed us, opened a locker and put a bag in before exiting the plane!.
We drew this to the attention of the crew before a somewhat cursory hand-luggage check was done, the offending bag being removed from the aircraft.
We could relax for we had already decided that if it stayed onboard we were exiting!!

The rest of the flight was uneventful, even the ‘little darlings’ stopped using the seats as trampolines as other passengers readily swapped seats to put their inept parents within control range, even if that word seemed outside their vocabulary.

Some shuteye was preferable as the film selection was poor and we were looking at a 24 hour day from start to stop with the time-shift.
We were briefly stacked at LHR but landed almost on time. Bags came through quickly so after some rushed goodbyes we exited
Gill and Theresa were at Arrivals to meet us before straightforward drives home in quiet, quick, powerful cars on smooth, ordered roads!
India was great but has an awfully long way to make up.
Transport green credentials alone is a major issue for them and it is too easy to see the economic burden that the UK/EU takes on with requiring and delivering on much higher levels of environmental compliance.

We will carry with us many images of our Indian adventure. Here are a few.

George