Below Belief

After a wet day exploring the sights of Udaipur, including the fabulously opulent City Palace, we return to sleep at the hotel and I begin to feel distinctly unwell. At first I think it’s the beer at lunch time. Later I think it’s definitely flu-like. Later still, I think it’s rabies and fatal. I’m wearing all my clothes, sweating like a rapist and not sleeping much. Liz is slightly concerned when I wake up in the middle of the night and my T-shirt is totally drenched. I tell her this is normal for flu. Anyway, no point in worrying a doctor, the symptoms are uniformly fatal…
In the morning, I wake up to find I’m still alive and miraculously not foaming at the mouth – it’s just a sore throat and fever shrouded in paracetamol. We have a great breakfast of omelette and lemon lassi and then I go back to bed. Lizzie goes shopping and probably enjoys the freedom.
At 4pm, after endless packing, we catch a taxi to the airport. It’s the smallest airport I’ve ever seen and is a tarmac landing strip with no planes. There is no-one around but we are early. I take more paracetamol and eat some chocolate but I’m beginning to feel better, thank goodness. Much later, after a confused paper check-in process and manual baggage loading, we board the plane which has arrived from Jaipur. It stops once at Aurangabad en route to Mumbai. Inside the walls are decorated a tasteful brown paisley but the curry is good.
Can’t stop laughing at the front page headline on the free newspaper, Delhi Midday, we are given on the flight: “Onion price crisis hits Delhi!”. Apparently, a bad harvest is putting the bhajis in trouble. The best thing is it’s written in Indian-English which means when you read it you have to assume the voice of an Indian waiter and slip “Poppadoms? How many lager?” into every other sentence.
Bombay airport is entrenched in monsoon rain but it is still 27°C at 10.30pm. We’ve toyed with getting a hotel here but given our previous success in Delhi, trying to find one at night in Bombay seems just too intimidating. It will also cost us a fortune to get into Bombay, just to come back to the airport tomorrow. So we choose the easy option and bed down for the night here. Unfortunately, there’s no lounges available so we have to make do with hard marble floors and wet rucksacks. We joke that I bring Lizzie to all the best places… Dream that I could put a 5-star hotel on expenses but we’re still students.
Sleep comes unnaturally for four hours and then the noise and the air-con prevent any further rest. As soon as it opens, we’re in the four-star Oberoi for full breakfast and that cheers us up despite the expense. From rough sleeper to guest in 20 yards. Luckily and amazingly my flu is gone.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 1998 at 1:43 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.