Day 18

The 24 hours of travel continued for me and Arjan with a 20-minute taxi from the New Delhi railway station to the airport, which cost as much as our train fare did. We had a few hours to wait for our flight, so we got some breakfast in the airport restaurant. At around 9:00, as we were both sipping coffee and reading newspapers, I read the headline article which said that the airport union had decided to strike, beginning at 10:00 today, exactly when our flight was scheduled to depart. Wonderful! Luckily, beyond a big crowd of strikers and newspaper photographers when we arrived at Mumbai, everything went pretty smoothly.

At the Mumbai airport, me and Arjan met back up with Dennis, who had come over from Pune and would be joining us on the trip down to Kerala. He had been feeling so bad a couple of days before that he had actually been considering skipping the whole thing and returning to the US, so I was happy to see that he was able to make it.

As the flight came down towards Kochi, all the greenery and palm trees immediately told us we were in a very different place. Also, ours was the only plane in sight at the whole international airport. Initially we considered taking a bus to Alleppy, our destination for the night, but we wisely took a taxi instead, pre-paid, with no sales pressure at all. It was a 90km journey, and in the 93F heat, the bus would have been pretty brutal, and wouldn't have fit in with the complete relaxation goal of this final segment in India.

We arrived to a very nice set of rooms (mosquito nets included!) at Cherukara Nest, a homestay guesthouse in Alleppy right near one of the canals. In the central courtyard of the century-old building we met a solo Dutch traveller and the four of us went out for a nice dinner of fish and ice cream together. He was on a 7-week tour of India and Sri Lanka. Interestingly, he had been to Indonesia and Malaysia before, but said that India is still a whole other level of intensity and crazyness beyond any of that.