Still En Route

1/20/10
Delhi

Made it to Delhi. Now just one more flight to get to Srinagar, then a taxi ride to Gulmarg. I've been traveling for a while now. Maui, L.A, Chicago (6-hour layover), Delhi (15-hour flight followed by a 12-hour layover). All in all, I think it's around 58 hours of traveling. A shower sounds pretty good right now.

So my flight from Chicago was by far the longest flight I've been on. Ever. As I was killing time in Chicago O'Hare Airport, I walked under a large hollow globe made out of metal. I quickly noticed that India and Florida were exactly on opposite sides of the globe. I just stopped in the middle of the bustling rush of morning commuters and stared at that globe, slowly excepting the fact that I was about to literally fly half way around the earth. And I had already traveled nearly a quarter of the way around the world going from Hawaii to Chicago. I think the other way would have been faster.

So I didn't need to look up which gate I would leave from. I just found the one with hundreds of Indian people sitting near it. Immediately I noticed close to 40 small children running around, screaming, crying, and doing things to get yelled at by their mothers. Did I mention this flight is 15 hours long?

I had an older Indian man sitting next to me who had a completely different outlook on the value of personal space. We got to talking and I guess he didn’t feel we could communicate properly unless our noses were touching. A couple of times I just had to laugh. Then I gave him gum.

We left at night, and landed at night. A whole day passed somewhere in between. Our flight path took us almost directly over the North Pole. It’s actually quicker to fly far north then drop down, using the Earth’s rotation to shorten the distance (Coriolis effect). There was daylight for a couple hours, but you’d never know because not a single person opened their windows. I just don’t understand that. What better way to pass time than stare out at new territory from a vantage point 5 miles above the Earth? Since I was sitting in the isle, I was getting a little antsy. I mean, we’re somewhere near the North Pole, there might be Santa’s house down there. Something. I found an emergency access door that had a little slider window that I had to half crouch and crane my neck over some stewardess sleeping. So here I am, hands on bent knees, using my forehead to lean against this window. Over a slumbering stewardess…totally worth it. Below me was an unreal snowscape: completely white in all directions with blue shadows and peach-orange light hitting the tops of hills and trees. Three Layers of thin, wispy clouds caught the light at different spectrums and reflected progressively lighter of orange. I was over Russia, somewhere near the Arctic Circle. This was their noon light. The sun was just sitting above the clouds. There were some signs of roads and villages down below in the frozen land. Man, it looked like a hard place to spend a winter.

This brief light was soon gone, which was a bummer because we were about to drop over Afghanistan and Pakistan and I really wanted to see those mountains.

Customs was a breeze. However, getting through the guard to the Domestic terminal was a little tense. He didn’t speak much English and got really interested/ opinionated when I showed him my ticket to Srinagar. He wanted to know why I was going, who I was with, and what were in the bags. Before he gave my permission to pass, he made a weird gesture. He squatted down a little, grabbed his crotch and waved his other hand below his junk. I didn’t really have anything to say to that. I just figured he had a bad taste in his mouth for Kashmir. But I kept on getting weird looks and responses when I showed guards and ticket agents my itinerary. Eventually I figured out they were trying to tell me it was really cold up there. That first guard was trying to tell me I was going to freeze my balls off. Now I get it.

So going on the final hour in Delhi airport and things are looking iffy. On the departures display board, nearly every flight has “CANCELED” in big red letters next to it. Let’s hope this fog clears up.