Mumbai International Airport

On the plane, I completed my Immigration card (black pen leaked all over me – although luckily not on the card). As I had been sitting in the front of the plane, I was one of the first off. There was quite a long walk from the gate to the Immigration desks, and a lot of people getting off other flights too (there was a big Delta flight and a big BA flight, all arriving within a few minutes of each other). Lots of pilots in spiffy uniforms to admire!

There wasn’t much of a queue to get through immigration. It was quite slick. One big queue, then a chap who points out which desk to wait at. So there’s never more than one person waiting at each desk, and with lots of desks open, it was fairly speedy. I got the appropriate blue stamps in my passport, and then headed off to find my suitcase.

And had a long wait. Ages. Just like when I arrived in Delhi, except it wasn’t as busy this time. I was reassured that it wasn’t lost because the air crew were hanging around waiting for their bags too (must have been in a special Priority bin – my bag did have a Priority label on it for some reason). Anyway, it arrived eventually and the four of us marshalled our trolleys and headed on towards Customs.

Just before Customs [slightly disturbingly, I’m finding it really hard to type Customs… my fingers automatically type Customers. Argh! Too many years of design.] there was a final bit of bureaucracy to go through: an Xray scan of baggage.


There were multiple exits to the area so we just joined the queue that looked as if it was for “everyone else” (not air crew, unaccompanied children, transit etc.). As we queued, an official looked us up and down and pointed for me and Ruth to head through an exit that didn’t have X-ray scanners on it. But left Maneer and Shabana to go through the scanners. Excessively discriminatory.

Then we passed through customs without a hitch, and faced the crowd of placards to try and spot our ride.

We had a little difficulty finding our cars – because we’d been given the wrong hotel name for where we were staying. We saw a sign for Intercontinental “The Grand” with WNS, but nothing for the Marine Drive one. Presuming that WNS is a big company with lots of people visiting, I sort of assumed that there must be another one for us. Anyway, we asked them to show us a list of names of their guests that they were waiting for, and found our names, so assumed that there was some temporary hiccup, and off we went with them. When we got to the hotel we found that the sign was correct, and we are booked in here for the duration. A slight shame, as the other hotel is very near all the “things to do” in Mumbai. However this one is closer to work and therefore will mean less time wasted in travelling. I was never going to expect to go into town every day, so a few extra long journeys to go shopping or sight-seeing don’t matter, compared to a long trip home every night when I’m tired.

The hotel is fabulously impressive. “Grand” even. Will do a photo tour on the next blog entry.

Anyway, found my room, waited for my baggage to be delivered (had a few Rupees left over from the last trip so the lucky bellhop got a little tip), did the important things (found out how the wireless internet access worked!) and then went to bed.

The temperature outside, even at 2am, was really quite high. Must have been around 30degrees. But the humidity was the noticeable thing: stepping out of the airconditioned car, my glasses steamed up! Today, I noticed the glass wall & doors to the outside world were all steamed up too. My photos may be somewhat fuzzy if the lens stayed steamed up. The bedroom has air conditioning, but it hadn’t been turned on. So I turned it up to full for a while, then got too cold, then turned it down and got too hot, so found a moderate compromise. I had a massive headache from the heat / travel / noise / tiredness so it was quite hard to get to sleep. Must keep rehydrating.