travel troubles

I hate planning ahead, really hate it. It’s a pain personally and it can stifle spontaneity. When I did my London semester back in the day, I bought a Eurorail pass. During my vacation time, I took trains all around, stopping at whatever random country I felt like stopping at. I fully embraced the concept of winging it.

Sadly, I do not have the luxury of winging it here. At least not in regard to my long vacation, the one coming at the end of my time here, the one I’ve been looking forward to since Bangalore day 1. The way I set it up, I’ll finish working in early May, then I’ll have two weeks off to gallivant around the country. Jeremy’s Farewell India Tour 2007 ©. Since the infrastructure here is not quite as stellar as in Europe, and since the trains don’t have as much zip, I’ll have to fly from place to place. And when you have to fly, you really can’t wing it, so to speak.

There are three main places I want to travel to: Mumbai (Bombay), Nepal and the Andaman Islands. I never heard of the Andaman Islands until a few months ago (at least I don’t think I’d heard of them – sometimes my memory plays revisionist history tricks on me), when I stumbled upon a website called barefootindia.com. Now I really want to go. The islands are a couple hours east of mainland India, close to Thailand. They look very beautiful, and apparently are still in their not-yet-swamped-by-tourists-with-fanny-packs phase.

One of the big things to do there is scuba dive – and from the pictures I saw, it looks like an amazing experience. An underwater world filled with exotic looking creatures, interesting reefs and, umm, water. I’ve never scuba dived before (except briefly in a five foot tank outside a scuba shop in Albuquerque when I was twelve) but somehow the idea of doing so has permeated my brain. Now I have to scuba dive. It must be done.

Monsoon season rolls in around mid-May, scuttling opportunities to scuba. So I decide to make the Andaman Islands my first destination. Hopefully I can beat the monsoons.

But getting to the Andamans seems no easy task. I have been trying to book airline tickets for the past week, with varying degrees of dismal failure. It’s not unexpected. I mean, it’s not like I’m trying to fly from L.A. to Vegas -- I’m trying to reach some obscure little chain of islands in the Indian Ocean.

There’s no direct flight from Bangalore to the Andaman Islands – there are only flights to/from Chennai and Calcutta. So one of those cities will have to be my stopover, my “via.”

The “name” travel sites, shockingly, do not offer any flights to Port Blair, the Andaman Islands town with an airport (which, for reasons unknown to me, has the airport code IXZ.). One of the main sketchy Indian travel sites, india.makemytrip.com (which I used to fly to Delhi in December), has an Indian Airlines flight that goes out there, but it leaves Chennai really early in the morning, making a same-day connection from Bangalore impossible.

So I continue searching online, visiting all the local airline sites. Some of the sites work well, most work poorly. I learn the only airlines that fly to Port Blair are Jet Airways, Air Deccan and Indian Airlines. Jet only has hella expensive business class seats. Indian Airlines doesn’t have a workable connecting flight. That leaves Air Deccan, which actually has a terrific fare listed on its website. And as a plus, unlike many of the domestic airlines in India, Air Deccan has the same prices for foreigners as for Indian nationals. Sweet!

I go to the Air Deccan website, select my itinerary, put in my credit card information and click to purchase. It doesn’t work. There’s an error message. But of course it doesn’t tell me what specifically the error is, only that there is an error. Very helpful. I double-check all my info, re-enter my credit card number and (hoping I don’t somehow get charged twice), click the purchase button again. No dice.

So I find the, roughly, eight different phone numbers listed on the site. I should mention that making a phone call out here is a baffling ordeal, at least for me. You can’t always call the same number from a landline and from a cell. There are various codes to dial before the “main” part of the number, depending on a myriad of factors that I don’t remotely understand. They even incorporate the “+” sign, but only sometimes. How I long for the subtle simplicity of the three digit area code…

Anyway… after trying countless digit combinations, I finally reach Air Deccan. I wait on hold for ten minutes, enjoying the latest Bollywood tunes. Then a real person picks up and I tell her my purchasing problem. She explains that I couldn’t buy the ticket on their website because my credit card wasn’t issued in India. Makes sense, though it would’ve been nice if the website could have told me that. I ask if I can purchase tickets over the phone. She says I can’t. She says I can only purchase tickets at one of their two Bangalore offices, paying with cash. She directs me to the one at the airport. Yes! I get to go to the airport on a day I’m not even flying anywhere! Hurray!

After work, with wads of paper money weighing down my pockets, I go to the airport. I wait in a very short yet very slow line at the Air Deccan counter, distracting myself with the “Bounce” game on my cell phone while staving off wannabe line jumpers by blocking them with my elbows. Everyone in front of me is frustrated, arguing with the clerk. I don’t care what they’re arguing about. I just want to get to the front of the line so I can buy my ticket and go home. I’m tired, I’ve been working all day.

Finally I reach the clerk and he tells me they don’t accept cash. I’m taken aback. “But they told me on the phone that I could pay cash here.” The clerk gives no reaction. “Well can I use my credit card?” No. “Can I write a check?” No. “Well then what do you actually do here if you can’t sell me a ticket?” The clerk just smiles dumbly, seemingly amused by the reaction to his own powerlessness. Now I can see why all the people in front of me had been arguing with the guy.

The next day, also after work, I go to the other Bangalore Air Deccan office. The place looks fairly legitimate. And there’s a cool electronic map of India that shows the status of all current Air Deccan flights. I manage to get to a ticket agent in short time. I show her the flights I want, the same ones with the great price I’d found on the website. Strangely (?), those tickets now cost twice as much. Hmmm… I’m annoyed, but I just want to get the tickets and be done with it. And the price is still way better than the Jet Airways business class tickets. Unfortunately I don’t have enough cash in my pocket. I’m a few thousand rupees short. The ticket agent says I can use the ATM across the street. I ask if she can hold that reservation for me since I’ll be right back. She says she can’t.

I come back ten minutes later, my pockets even more overloaded with cash, courtesy of the fine ATM at ICICI bank. I go back to the same ticket agent. She looks at the computer screen again and – what do you know? – one of my flights now costs 8000 rupees more than it did just ten minutes earlier. That’s nearly $200. So I’m pissed. I thank her for nothing and walk out.

On the drive to the Air Deccan office, I had noticed a small travel agency. So now, not wanting to end another day ticket-less, I walk inside. It’s 5:45pm. The woman behind the counter is exceedingly friendly, which is refreshing. She says they can’t hold reservations, I would just have to buy the tickets outright. Sounds perfect to me.

Weighing all my options, I realize that unless I want to spend a buttload of money, I’ll have to fly into Chennai on one day, and then fly to the Andaman Islands the next. It’s not ideal, but whatever.

The woman behind the counter and I discuss flight options, itineraries and such. We find the flights that best suit my needs. I’m ready to buy the tickets. But she says that I can’t. “But I thought you said I HAD to buy them, that you couldn’t hold reservations?” She says that after six, they stop selling tickets. It’s 6:15 when she tells me this.

So that evening, I go back home, determined to book those Indian Airlines tickets myself at india.makemytrip.com. And of course my payment doesn’t go through. At least the website was kind enough to say it was because of my lovely non-Indian credit card. But then, I figured that out already.

Now it’s today. I call the makemytrip office from work. The young makemytrip man I speak with, Shashank, is very helpful. He sets me up with the flights I want at a reasonable price. He’ll even keep the tickets on hold for 24 hours while he waits for me to fax over some form and a copy of my credit card, front and back. I’m not so keen on the idea of faxing copies of my credit card, but my options are limited. And I had to do something similar (with much trepidation) when I used makemytrip for my December Delhi flights, and that worked out okay.

So I get my papers together and am ready to fax. But where’s a fax machine? I work at the massive Infosys campus, Electronics City. The center of a tech hub in a tech city. It should be easy to find a fax machine, right? Right??

My friend/boss Eshwari knows of only one fax machine on campus (I’m sure there are more hiding). We take the long walk to another building, where two guys attempt, repeatedly, to send out the fax. Doesn’t happen. The machine just won’t send it.

Fine, I say, I’ll just have the concierge at my service apartment send it. He tries to fax and he also fails. Repeatedly. And I’m pretty sure the number I was sending to wasn’t the problem.

So I give a call to good ol’ Shashank at makemytrip. He says I can just email him the forms and the copies of the credit card. Thank goodness. I email him all the needed stuff and the ticket is purchased. At least I think it’s purchased. I know my credit card was charged...