Stories from the Road 2002
an ongoing travelogue

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Situation: I am in Bangkok and need to get to India - for the lowest price possible.

To begin with, the Bhutan Airlines office is only open from 10 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon. On most weekdays. And they take an hour off for lunch - at some indiscriminate time during their open hours.

So I am in the process of making a reservation with them (over a few phone calls) and I came to several realizations:

1. I am not in California any more.

2. The amount that I might save by using this airline may become negligible after accounting for all of these cut-off calls and the way this pay phone is eating up my money like the coins were pistachio nuts. Pistachio nuts! Oh, I miss pistachio nuts. I, I, … -- bad thought, bad thought...

3. Apparently my Indian experience has already begun and I am not even in India yet.

4. Learning to be patient without frustration takes practice and this was good for me!

Okay, so I handed the whole thing over to a travel agent…

Calcutta appears to be the bargain destination and even though it's 43 degrees Celsius there (112 degrees F), I figure that the amount I am saving by flying there and then taking the train to the south makes it all worth while. (Let me just add that I am travelling on a pinched teacher's salary - ahh, he's not a complete lunatic after all!)

My next error: not heeding the words of the travel agent, "Bhutan Airlines mostly for cargo. If they have extra room, they take some people." "Yeah, yeah," I said. "So what days do they leave for Calcutta?"

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Bhutan Airlines only leaves at one time per day: 6:30 in the morning. Small inconvenience except for the fact that to make this happen, one must get there two hours before this for checking in and immigration. Additionally, it takes at least an hour to get to the airport from downtown Bangkok. So a 6:30AM flight becomes a 2:45AM flight when one's alarm hopefully wakes them up. I decided to just go to the airport the night before and sleep there. After all, I was saving quite a bit by taking Air Bhutan.

Relatively freezing temperatures in the airport lobby, florescent lights that could light up a stadium, and the all night noise of people coming and going prohibited any sleep. I tried my best to get a few winks but the night consisted of tossing and turning under a row of plastic seats on an icy tile floor while my mind drifted on thoughts of my backpack getting lifted right there even as I laid, spooning it.

I kept checking my watch too. Had the alarm gone off? What time was it? Oh, only 20 minutes since the last time I checked. And 5 hours to go. I began to have second thoughts on this whole budget travelling thing. Stay positive Raku! What's one night?

We are on a runway bus, borrowed from another airline, and we are cruising along, negotiating the criss-crossing baggage cars, the wings of various aircraft, and airport employees on bikes (Bangkok airport is big). It's still early morning and the sun is low on the horizon, the light is warm and glowing. We continue on past the medium sized jets, past the big mamma jets with double decker seating, past the terminal under construction, and out towards the long term parking.

We maneuver around several small private planes and then pull up to ours. It's small, only sixteen rows of seats. It's nearly all white, with only the name "Royal Bhutan Airlines" in black, block-style letters.

Our plane looked like a can of generic beer.

We get off the trolley and step onto the plane, finding our seats with ease. The pre-flight safety instructions are given by one stewardess and seen by the whole plane - people seem to be particularly attentive. I thought it would be best to gather some additional emergency information so I reached for the literature stuffed in the pocket in front of my knees. I found the emergency instructions and noticed that they were in what looked to be Russian. The laminated instruction card had been borrowed from Air Baltic. Hmmm. I reached down to see what else I might find. Okay, a Thai Air barf bag. This was starting (or continuing) to be very strange. Had I actually fallen asleep on the cold tile floor? Was I having a bad dream?

I began looking around to see if the papers in front of other passengers were the same as mine. Perhaps Bhutan Air has special operatives who boarded the planes of other companies and "borrowed" these materials. If they were doing this to cut costs, what would be is store for us in the flight ahead?

Well, other than the time when half the plane's passengers screamed when the plane performed an experiment in brief weightlessness - look mom, the cup's floating - and the woman got to her Thai Air bag right behind me - and just in time, the flight was rather smooth. I was amazed at how dense the forests of Burma were and at how much water covered Bangladesh despite the monsoon not having come yet.

When I stepped out of the airplane in Calcutta, the first thing I experienced besides the scorching early morning heat on the tarmac, were two Indian men right in front of me arguing. They were standing about two feet from each other, one was yelling at the other, shaking his index finger in front of the other's face. The one receiving this was standing calmly, patiently, letting the other blow off his steam. A few moments later, they walked off, practically holding hands. This was a fascinating introduction to India. It would be an event that I would witness many times in the days to follow.