68/ 100 Indian Taxi Flights

This will be the last post about this particularly stressful journey (which began back in Story 62), I promise. Mercifully, our flight to the desert city of Udaipur, famous for its lakes, was almost at an end.

After a couple of hours trying to listen a podcast in my fancy Bose noise-cancelling headphones that had to be turned up to 11 because of the engine noise, we landed in Udaipur, unable to hear anything. We had never been on a Dash 8 aircraft before and being on something so cramped, and with turboprops rather than jets, really makes you appreciate the comfort of the larger planes. I’ve flown on the enormous double-decker A380 and it is so calm and peaceful you are barely aware of it’s movement.

Much to the relief of my ears, we landed in the beautiful city of Udaipur. At least, we had been told it was beautiful – it was actually pitch black by the time we arrived. This city in the heart of the Thar desert was completely new to us and we couldn’t wait to disembark the plane and get exploring. As we were in the front row we were allowed to leave first but, of course, there had to be a final small problem. We weren’t parked at a terminal and instead we were simply on a taxiway, some distance from the terminal building that we couldn’t actually see. At the bottom of the steps was an airport official, and he wanted to see our boarding passes.

Since we had already boarded, which was surely obvious because we were already on the plane, I mistakenly thought we would have no further use for the passes and had shoved them into my pocket, or my rucksack, or maybe my magazine, or maybe I could pass the blame onto Fiona? I had to face up to the fact that I’d lost them (they never did turn up). Even with a large queue of passengers behind me the official was adamant. This was India and every piece of printed paper was sacred. I was tired and annoyed and simply couldn’t even understand why on earth my boarding pass would be needed. I asked him why I couldn’t leave the aircraft without it and he seemed even more confused than I was as though only a moron wouldn’t know.

Fortunately, the same friendly stewardess who steered me away from making a terrible dinner choice earlier in the flight stepped in to help this befuddled foreigner. This flight was, as I had forgotten, basically an Indian taxi flight. The plane didn’t only go from A to B. Some passengers, like us, got on in Varanasi and left in Udaipur but others stayed on the plane and flew further to several other destinations. The official was simply making sure that I was leaving the plane at the right stop.

Despite flying all over the world before now we had never experienced these hop-on hop-off type flights. I also had never needed a map and compass to walk in the pitch black from the plane to the terminal across the huge expanse of tarmac and, as we were the first to leave the other passengers encouraged me to take on the role of pack leader and it was my duty to get my fellow travellers to safety.

I nearly failed miserably by heading to the wrong building but then I found a group of replacement passengers travelling across the tarmac wasteland towards us. They were trying to locate our plane so that they could begin their own onward journey. After pointing out the distant aircraft, parked in the darkness, and advising them against choosing the sandwiches onboard, we went our separate ways and made it to the terminal building, eventually guided to safety by a lady waving frantically from an anonymous door in the side of the building.

I asked her why the staff didn’t walk passengers too and from the aircraft. She replied that it was too dangerous.