32/ 100 Plastic Window Dogs

IndiGo Flight 6E 2034 into terminal 2. IndiGo flight 6E 2235 out of terminal 2 a few hours later. This seemed like it was going to be, as they say in India, Makkhan ki tarah aasan – as easy as butter. Same airline. Same terminal. Same day. How hard could it be?

We all disembarked the plane and walked into the long and ambiguous corridors of Delhi airport. Every now and again there would be a sign pointing towards flight connections so we followed as best as we could until we were spilled into a wide concourse. Aside from a few seasoned travellers nobody from our flight seemed to know where to go next so I tracked down someone from our airline IndiGo who gave me some confusing information.

Apparently we now had to walk through an unmarked door in the corner of the concourse, up the escalator and out of terminal 2, through the mayhem and madness outside the airport before returning back into terminal 2 as fresh passengers to be processed all over again.

Absolutely delighted by this news we duly did as we were told, stepping outside, figuring out the complicated system of facial recognition devices that never work, and passport checks outside, before finally being let back inside by the police. Again I nabbed a member of staff and they told us we would now have to join what I knew from past experience was the worst security line in the universe.

People moan all the time about airport security checks here in the UK but that’s a doddle compared to India. I recently watched a video by a travel blogger who ranked India with China as the equal worst countries to fly through because of security checks. First you have to queue in a Disney-style system of taped lanes for about 30 minutes before your documents are checked. The whole time you are in the queue you have to ignore all the people who just file past you and duck under the barriers right in front of the officials.

After another 15 minutes you reach the entry into the next section where the actual scanners are. At least by now you’ll have had plenty of time to figure out your plan of attack. When you’re given the nod you have to decide which queue is the shortest (not easy because it is chaos) and grab yourself a plastic tray from somewhere for your stuff. Some staff are shouting that you need a separate one for your empty bag and others are shouting that if you do that you’ll be sent to the back of the line.

Once you have located a tray you fill it with anything remotely electronic (including cables), metal things and your belt. This whole time you are being jostled about while the staff stand there doing nothing whilst looking very angry. You take your tray to the end of a second line that leads to the scanner and join the end of the queue, again. However, other passengers there think nothing of just squeezing in front of you; either bodily, or by just reaching from their line and jamming their tray in front of your tray, delaying the entire process because they will be in one queue whilst their stuff is now in another.

Periodically they would close down a conveyor and everyone already in that system would have to begin all over again. Thankfully ours stayed open. A tall Sikh man and his entire family strolled past us all and attempted to jump the queue. As the only other tall person there who was also a man I was encouraged by my Indian queue-buddies to stop them (I did) so they went away and pushed into some other queue.

Next you get to the metal-detector guy (women get a woman). He was perhaps the rudest man you could ever meet, probably because he knows you can do absolutely nothing about his disgusting attitude for fear of being delayed even further. Fiona says her scan lady was really nice so perhaps it’s just the men that are grumpy.

Then, eventually, we were back inside the terminal we had left some 90 minutes earlier. If they had those red, amber and green smiley customer satisfaction buttons like they have at Heathrow I think the red one would have worn through.