It was a transfer day today. We were headed to Mumbai, the huge city on the Arabian sea that is more commonly known as its former name, Bombay. We only had two nights and two days there before heading to the north. The wake up time this morning was 4:30, so we had a couple of zombies in the back of the cab for the hour long weaving drive to the Kochi airport.
The flight arrived a little late, getting in mid morning. We were flying in and out of Mumbai, so we elected to choose a nicer hotel close to the airport for the convenience of short airport transfers. The Lalit hotel was advertised as a five star hotel, and it seemed to tick all of the boxes. When we got to the hotel, we discovered that they'd booked us in a room with a king size bed and an extra cot. That didn't really mesh with what was on the Booking.com website where we'd booked the room. After trying to escalate it several levels, we were getting absolutely nowhere, and I quickly moved from disappointment, to annoyance, to anger to apathy - Beth remained pretty steamed.
It got more comical as we got to our room. This nice, young girl in charge of "customer experiences" accompanied us to our room, and when we got there she gave us a tour of the room, opening up the curtains and saying "and you have a great view....of the ....airport....and a...slum.... Ok, we will close the curtains" - sure enough, out our window was, from the top moving down - the top edge of the airport terminal, the elevated expressway, then a full on slum. It would have been funnier, but, you know, the slum wasn't that funny....
Soon, we discovered that wifi was only free for one hour for one device per day, and the safe was not working, which required 3 techs in our room for about half an hour. All told, we counted 9 people that we interacted with to get checked in and have all the little problems ironed out. Five star indeed....
When all the hotel employees had finally cleared the room, we jumped in a taxi to the nearby Phoenix Market mall where we grabbed a quick lunch and sat down to watch Everest - not a bad flick, though it had pretty poor character development. I was shocked (not really) how many times Abby asked me how similar our Nepal trek would be to what was happening onscreen. Umm... Everything but crossing the crevaces, climbing the lhotse face, traversing the ice fall and the last jump up the Hillary step.... Otherwise, yes, pretty similar Abby!
We hopped in a Tuk Tuk for the drive back. The drive was really showing us a working class and poor side of India that we had not seen. We drove by many mini-slums and a metal recycling neighbourhood that was no doubt fed by the people of the slums. The noise and activity level have amped up many times over from anywhere else we'd been. The girls saw things we just have not seen on the trip to date.
The hotel is actually pretty good, despite the rocky beginning. One thing we really noticed this afternoon was the security procedures everywhere. Getting in the mall - separate male/female metal detector and hand inspection lines. Hotel - barricade chicanes up the driveway, guards inspected trunk, hood and underside of car, all hand luggage and luggage x-rayed before going in and everyone hand scanned as they go into the hotel.
We have another early morning tomorrow as we are meeting our guide downtown at 8:00am.... Hopefully everyone keeps smiling :-)
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