A Craptacular Day

Last Saturday, 26 June, is a day that is literally epic in its horribleness - wretched, tiring, draining, soul enervating - and yet, as my friend Sandy would maintain, it was a story of redemption (grin). In was bracketed by a couple lovely meals with my close friend John - first at a restaurant called Bombay Blue, which was new to me, but one which I hope to visit again - and then at the end of the exhausting day with John, Volga, Will and Jeff at their house (but that's worthy of another posting). It featured the first appearance of the mythic Mr. Babu (but that will have to wait for a separate posting as well). My infamous temper made an appearnace, but that's certainly not worthy of a separate blog posting.

The course of the day was shaped by a couple unfortunate events, that merged together to form a tsunami of travel distress. First off, and this is what unleashed the terrible Scudder temper, the Sea Palace Hotel's credit card machine broke, and they couldn't get it fixed forever (actually, it broke the day before, and it was still broken on Saturday when we were thinking about leaving). The problem was this - they wanted to be paid in cash, because the card machine didn't work. Now, sometimes hotels overseas will say that when it's not true, simply to save money on transaction fees, but in this case I believe it was true. On the one hand I don't blame them for that - things happen, and technology is generally a curse. However, what set me off was their attitude about the entire thing. By the credit card machine being broken, they essentially forced us to give them a thousand dollars cash which we were saving for incidentals along the way, which is a brutal thing to happen at the beginning of a journey - it would be different if we were just planning on leaving that day to get on a plane. Plus, when it looked like we'd have to stay there another night (more on that in a minute), they demanded in being paid in cash first before they would let us stay another night - assuring us that the credit card machine would probably be fixed the next day when it came to check out (even though the next day was a Sunday, and they had not managed to fix it in the day leading up to the moment) - but, of course, if it were not fixed then we'd end up having to come up with even more cash (which we didn't have) to pay them. Like I said, things happen, but they needed to do a lot more to try and find options to help us out, because it was not our fault that the credit card machine broke - the answer was not simply to start pressuring us to come up with cash. Thus, the appearance of my truly ugly temper (which we don't need to go into). In short, despite the great location, never, ever stay at the Hotel Sea Palace!!

Now, the second disaster, which bled into the first, was that our train reservations were cancelled. From the very beginning we were on the waiting list, which in a country of a billion people, and with the world's largest train system, is very common. John had even paid the extra money to have our reservation confirmed, which would have moved us up the wait list (somehow this is different than bribe, but I lack the synaptic plasticity to tell the difference). Anyway, we no longer had that option, and we had to find a way to get to Vellore, now that the 26 hour train ride from Mumbai to Katpadi station outside Vellore was out. This required that John and I spent the rest of the afternoon working away on the hotel's computer with internet in the staff lounger, and which was so slow that every time we tried to finalize a reservation the system would time itself out and we'd have to start over again. Essentially, we had to do two things: 1) find a flight down from Mumbai to Chennai (which proved really difficult because the only two options were either late that night, Saturday, or very early the next morning - beyond the fact that even when we made a choice the computer would time out before we could finalize it), and 2) find a hotel for that night. At the very least we found some real options.

So, we packed up, paid the hotel in cash, and left (although they pleased with us to stay, and that the credit card machine would be fixed within the next ten minutes, or at the very least within my next reincarnated life cycle). By this time it was late in the afternoon, and although it was a Saturday the nightmarish Mumbai traffic jam had begun. Here the sainted Shukla took over and for two hours brilliantly, tirelessly and a bit maniacally weaved his way thourh traffic, at least twice passing through someone's living room as a short cut. First we went to the domestic airport so that we could buy the Spice Airways tickets for the next morning's (Sunday) flight to Chennai, which was easily done. Then we had to finalize our hotel reservation for that night. While searching we had found this insanely cheap rate at a hotel near the airport - and, in fact, that price was so low that it made us a little nervous. So John's wife Volga, while we were bruting out way through the traffic jam, actually drove over to the hotel to make sure it wasn't a flop house. Having passed her standards we still had to find a way to make the reservation, which meant that we had to find an internet cafe. Shukla drove "slowly" through the crowded neighborhood near the hotel and we looked around at the row of shops - and if you've ever been to India you know the shops I'm talking about - each one about ten by ten feet, and jammed on top of each other. However, we found one, and John and I rushed in - classically, of course, it had a great connection and we were also able to run off copies of the hotel agreement as well as a couple plane tickets for other flights that I had forgotten to run off before leaving Vermont. Armed with that evidence, we made it to the hotel to check in, and, as we suspected, the guy at the front desk was astonished at the price, which was around a quarter of what it would have cost if we had just walked in off the street. So, at least we had a place to stay for the evening, and could collapse for a little bit.

That was not the end of the evening, however, because John had invited us home to dinner (which is another post) and we finally made contact with the elusive Mr. Babu (who is sort of a darker, quirkier Tom Bombadil, but that's definitely another posting).

So, an exhausting day, but also one that, as Sandy would propose, as a tale of redemption - none of which would have been possible without the efforts of the sainted, John, Shukla and Volga.