Met a Kiwi in the guest-house early this morning. I’d taken him for an Englishman, actually, because of his accent, so was relieved to discover that he was now returning to NZ after having spent several years in London. He too was flying out today, + he asked us about somewhere to go for breakfast, so we all went down to the small place we’d been to last night. The Kiwi (I never did find out his name) was amiable enough, + had a good sense of humour, but was a fair way outside our own economic bracket – he reckoned the absolute minimum one could live on was £8000. That meant, of course, not being able to save or anything. He had also flown out to Leh a day or 2 ago, + assured us that the plane would be half-empty, so that there would be no need to get to the airport early in order to book a good seat. We shared a jeep out to the airport – just airfield really – but there discovered a lot more people than we’d been led to believe would be around. Not that it really did them all that much good. The airport consisted of one very broken-down aircraft hangar, + as the door had not yet been opened, everyone was standing outside in a raggedy sort of queue, to which we attached ourselves. There was the usual small trouble with a couple of pushy Indians trying to jump ahead – nobody is quite as strict in his queue-observance as an Englishman. There was a remarkably plummy colonial English voice belonging to a man in the queue behind us, + if he hadn’t maintained it so consistently, I swear I would have thought he was taking the mick. He was middle-aged, with thinning + greying hair, but wore jeans + a silver-grey windcheater, + was something to do with investments in Jamaica. This last I discovered from the Kiwi, with whom he had struck up a conversation – they were 2 of a kind, really.
The doors finally opened, + we gradually moved forward to take our turn at the chaos within. There was nothing of the quiet order, + certainly not a trace of the common courtesy, of the ordinary international airport check-in. One’s ticket was snatched from one, the voucher ripped from within, + it was shoved back into one’s hand along with the boarding-pass. I had meant to ask for a window-seat, but in the confusion, compounded by having to shove back the Indian who was still trying to push past me, I just took what I was given: a seat in the middle of a bank of seats on the wrong side of the plane. V al at least has a window-seat, tho’ on the wrong side.
The next stage was the security check. Our bags were given the once-over before being taken away, but our hand-luggage rec’d the most thorough + scrupulous of searches. Even the camera was peered at + thro’. Val got annoyed with the girl doing the peering when she treated the camera roughly – she hadn’t been able to get the lens cap off, so had been a bit tetchy. We were then body-searched. Mine own was a rather skimpy affair, a swift run up + down with a metal detector, but Val was given the works – the works short of stripping, anyway – including a good hefty squeeze of the breasts.
There were several false starts from the waiting-room, when people thought they could go out onto the runway, but weren’t allowed. Eventually, people were allowed out in groups of half a dozen or so. It seemed rather an unnecessary precaution, for out on the field was another queue for another body search before we could climb up the staircase. It was inefficiency, of course, + as a French traveller said, it showed total paranoia, but it was also understandable. Recently a group of 4 terrorists hi-jacked an Indian Airlines plane to Pakistan, using only a camera, which they pretended was a bomb, + a couple of knives.
The flight itself was unexciting, only a half-hour affair, + without even a token offer of drinks, or even sweets. The view was very good, but we could not see it properly. At the other end, it was pleasant that, as an internal flight, we didn’t have to undergo the usual customs, immigration, etc. Getting back into the centre of Srinagar again was a more expensive business than we had imagined, even tho’ we shared a taxi with the Kiwi + a plummy English girl.
We had both looked forward to being back in the homely comfort of the Mona Lisa, but when we were back there, sitting in the lounge once again + drinking tea, we felt curiously depressed, tho’ it was difficult to pin down exactly why. We sat on the roof for the rest of the afternoon, which was, of course, pleasant enough, + then went ashore to eat the usual indifferent meal. It is nearly always difficult to get a shikara back again late at night, but this time we piled aboard one with an Indian family. The particular advantage was that we got taken on a short free tour, as our little paddler dropped them off first. We got tantalising glimpses of the outside of many, many houseboats – there is a maze of them tucked away behind us. We almost wished that we had visited a few before going to Mona Lisa, but the hassles wouldn’t have made it worthwhile.
And back to Srinagar, though it does seem that we were not as happy to be back as we thought we might be, though one has to guess why.
