Galen & Rebecca Kennel’s Weblog

Merry Christmas to everyone! It doesn’t look much like Christmas here in Hospet, Karnataka, India. Not a single decoration – no music – no snow!

We have seen lots in the last 2 weeks since I updated my blog. I hope to find a decent internet connection in the next few days to upload lots of photos. Today we catch the train to Vijayawada. . .

Wishing you the BEST of the Season!

We get up early to go out and see what bird life we can find in this tropical paradise. When we get to the hotel lobby, we see that the front door is closed and that there are people sleeping on the floor. The clerk who had checked us in gets up and comes to open a side door for us. Oops, it looks like some of the guys who work here also live here.

It is just getting light now. The streets are still quiet. We can hear the horns of the bicycle bread men. They come around with large baskets on their bicycles, selling freshly baked buns. Each one seems to sound his horn differently. I guess that way you know when your bread man comes.

We go over to Emidio Gracia Road and turn to go towards town. We want to climb the steps that we saw leading off of this road.

Once on top, we find ourselves in a government compound of beautifully restored colonial buildings. We wander around on top of the hill, coming across other beautiful buildings, some restored, some being restored, and some that should be restored. Our photos tell it best.

It is hot and humid here in Panaji. We aren’t used to it, so go back to our hotel room during the heat of the day. We watch the street in front of our hotel being cleaned up by what appears to be a family unit. The city installed underground electrical wires, so all the streets are in various stages of repair and disrepair. The crew in front of our hotel is hauling away the excess dirt and rocks.

The men scrape up the dirt and load it into large basins, then help to lift the basin onto the women’s heads, and the women carry it over to the truck, going up a ramp, and dump it into the truck. When the truck is full, they load all of their tools, ramps, water jugs onto the truck and drive away.

Amazing. I wonder how much they get paid for this. Who owns the truck? What caste are they? Where are they from?

Here are the photos.

6:00 AM and we are once again catching a plane – maybe this will help us adjust to the time change between here and Europe. As we leave Moncton, the captain announces that since we are flying over US airspace, it is a US law that there can be no congregating of people in any part of the aircraft, including line-ups for the lavatories. Feeling very secure now, I can settle back in these narrow seats and relax while the flight attendants come through trying to sell food and drinks. Next they come through with the free stuff – soft drinks, juice, coffee, tea, and cookies or ‘bits & bites’. Then it is time to straighten the seat back and prepare for landing.

Toronto is windy and rainy and still dark. We collect our bags from West Jet and make our way to the Delta desk. The young woman checks our bags through to New York and then to London. She will also be flying on the same flight as she is going to New York and then to India. We see her later at the gate waiting area with a young Indian-Canadian man who speaks so quickly I can barely keep up with what he is saying. This is probably be what it will be like in India. I wonder how two laid-back Canadians will manage in the whirlwind that I assume is India. For now though, all we need to do is get through the US customs here in Toronto and then through JFK airport in New York to connect with our British airways flight this evening to London.

After the Delta desk, we follow the painted line on the floor and end up in a room where we will queue up to go through US customs. We then realize that the sandwiches and fruit that Claudia packed for us in Moncton will have to be eaten before we get in line to go through customs. Not able to go back to a lounge area, we stand against the wall and eat our lunch and watch the lines get longer. There is one queue for US passport holders and one for the rest of us.

After the customs line, we go through security. Here we have to take our shoes off as well as out jackets. We might get good at this after a while – handing over our boarding pass, putting everything into the grey tubs, walking through the detector passageway and then collecting our stuff. A group of immigrants, all with plastic bags from IOM, are going through security at the same time. I watch as the security person asks for one man’s boarding pass. The poor man doesn’t understand a word of English and just stares back, not knowing what to do. The security guard asks him for his pass again, this time a little louder, and then pulls him into a separate glass ‘cage’ and pats him down. He is still standing there looking terrified as I step out of the security area. Welcome, little man. May you have a chance to build a better life for yourself and your family.

Our Delta flight is leaving from a satellite terminal, so we take a shuttle bus out to the gate. There I look for something to spend the last of my Canadian coins on – $1.48 gets me a mint candy roll – the cheapest thing they have in the kiosk. I have one penny left.

We have to walk across the tarmac with the wind blowing rain into our face to get to the plane. This is a tiny plane, four seats wide. It looks like the pilots are the check-in people Is this possible?? Our backpacks don’t fit into the tiny overhead compartments so we stuff them partially under the seat in front of us. Now I know why people were handing over their carry-on luggage to be pink flagged and loaded into the plane baggage compartment. The one flight attendant announces that before we can take off, two people have to volunteer to move to the back of the plane to balance the weight. I’m beginning to feel a little nervous. And we thought West Jet was a ‘no-frills’ airline. There are no movies. This one-hour, low-budget flight cost us more than any of our other flights, including the trans-atlantic flight.

It is interesting flying into New York. It is clear below and we can see the islands, harbours and bays along the coast. The sun is shining and it is actually warm. The JFK airport has the AirTrain, a free train that makes a big circle, stopping at each of the terminals. Since we are ‘luggage free’ and have several hours until our flight to London, we are able to walk around and explore. The train is a little confusing at first, as there is one train that only goes in a circle around to the terminals, and one that goes to all the terminals and out to connect to the rest of New Yorks transport system. We finally figured out that you have to wait for the sign to read ‘All Terminals’ and that will be the train to take.

We have lots of time to go through security and hang out in the British Airways terminal. There is a station for laptops and a free internet connection, but no one is able to get the internet to work. It is finally time to board so we stand around in line, thinking it is better to stand now as we will be sitting for the next 5 to 6 hours. The plane is huge, with a second level – probably for 1st class so that they don’t have to be bothered by the rest of us. We squeeze through the first class on the main level, past the smiling attendants busy making their clients comfortable. Our seats are at the back, behind the wing. Galen mentioned that the back is the safest place to be if the plane crashes so when I selected our seats I had a clear image of a plane doing a nose-dive. Now it feels very inconvenient to be so far from the front. There are no attendants here, fussing over our comfort. On each of our seats is a pillow, a blanket sealed in plastic, and a bag that contains headphones, socks, an eye cover, a toothbrush

It is hot inside the plane. The large man in the seat in front of us keeps wiping the sweat off his face. We sit in the plane for the half hour it takes to load everyone. After taxiing for several minutes, the pilot announces that it could take 45 or more minutes until we can take off. I can watch the planes take off past us, with one leaving every minute and a half. We inch forward in the queue until, after an hour and a half since boarding, we finally take off. I can see the other planes in the queue below and count at least 30.

Once in the air, the cabin cools off a bit, but still stays warm. The crew comes through with complimentary drinks. Over the roar of the engines, I can barely understand the British accent of the attendant. I end up with two small bottles of white wine. Then comes dinner – a choice of chicken or beef, with rice. The cheesecake is actually quite good.

The map on the seat back keeps showing the time at the place of departure and the destination. 10:00 pm in New York, 3:00 am in London. I decide I should try to sleep. I put the eye shield over my eye – wow – this actually works. Too bad I can’t find a comfortable place for my head. And what am I supposed to do with my legs?

About two hours later, the crew is coming through the cabin again, serving breakfast. Juice, pastry, yogurt, coffee. The crew appear happy and upbeat – they are at the end of their day’s work. All the passengers around me look like I feel -tired and disoriented. The captain announces that we are nearing Heathrow, but may be in the air for another 45 minutes as we queue up to land.

And then we are on the ground. And then we are in line again waiting to go through ‘passport control’. Anyone from the UK or European Union can go through the fast line. We are, once again, in line with the ‘others’. You just can’t trust these foreigners. There appears to be 2 or 3 officials to handle these hundreds of people, with more arriving all the time. After about 20 minutes, I do the math. There are 6 rows of people ahead of us. About 30 people per row. About 180 people filing past 3 officials every two to three minutes. We might be here for hours. At 7:30, a few more officials show up. Now we are actually moving. A woman sits at a desk at the front of the queue and signals to you where to go. It is finally our turn to hand over our passports. Why are we here? For how long? Where will we stay. We must have got all of the answers right as he hands the passports back to us and we move on, looking for the signs that lead us to our bags.

This can’t be the right way. We walk and walk and still the baggage sign points ahead. We go down a set of escalators to an empty carrousel. The sign shows our flight and there are a few people that we recognize, so we sit down to wait. The last time we saw our bags was in Toronto. That seems like last week. Or even last year.

The bags do arrive. And we go through the door into the real world. The real world of the London Heathrow Airport.

Thursday, October 18 – Fog blanketed Jordan Station as we were leaving for the airport so we didn’t get to enjoy the fall colours and views of the escarpment as we travelled to Hamilton for our flight to Moncton. Flying over the New England States the clouds break enough for us to see lots of lakes below. I wonder where we actually are. Then we see what looks like red hilltops – are there strip mines here and if so, what are they mining? Then I realize the red is from the colour of the maple trees. As we drop lower over Moncton, the brilliant colours of the trees become more clear. Too bad my camera is stashed away for the landing. Over the next few days I take lots of pictures – how can you tell when you have enough photos of coloured leaves???

The photos I took around Moncton are available as a slideshow.

The Canada/US border. On approaching it, we have two choices. One route promises a 15 minute wait, the other 20 minutes. We take the Peace Arch route. The incoming and outgoing lanes are separated by a large expanse of grass with tidy flower beds with the white arches towering over everything. Families and groups of people pose to have their photos taken. “May these gates never close” we read as we drive through the high tech surveillance equipment that takes multiple pictures of us, including the underside of our vehicle. What are all these detectors detecting? Radioactive material? Bombs” Drugs?

After the high-tech screening, and the information they gather from our license plate number, we finally get to a human being.

“Where were you born? Where are you going? Do you have any fresh fruit? Vegetables? Beef?”

Beef? Like, roast beef? I just happen to have some lovely roast beef that we had been making sandwiches with all week and I brought the balance of it along. It’s frozen and in the cooler.

The woman makes a few marks on an orange piece of paper and tells us to park over there and go inside.

We park a little ways away from a group of officers and walk inside. A large sign announces that there are no public washrooms here. That’s rather inconvenient. I wonder how long we will be here and what a person’s options for relieving oneself might be.

The room is large with lots of serious people shuffling papers and staring at their computers. We stand in line about 10 minutes before we reach a relatively pleasant official. He takes our piece of paper, our passports and our keys and tells us to go and stand at a different counter. He hands our items off to a tall, not so pleasant looking man who wants to know where the beef is. Well, it’s in a little cooler, but towards the last we were sticking things into the van wherever it looked like it might fit and I really don’t know where it might be. I offer to go out with him to find it. He doesn’t look pleased about this, but we go out together. After I show the cooler to him, he tells me to go back inside. I’m not allowed to watch him confiscate my roast beef, although I do see him putting on his latex gloves – one wouldn’t want to be contaminated by a Canadian mad cow. This must be serious stuff. What if I would have been carrying the beef near an American cow and happened to drop it and the cow ate it before I was able to pick it up. You can never be too careful.

About 30 minutes later our keys and passports were returned to us, along with the piece of paper that we were to give to the group of officers standing around outside so that they would know that it was now safe to allow us to enter the US and that our little package was on it’s way to a secure disposal station somewhere in central Washington.

The final day in Victoria was a rush. How to get the final things packed, stored away or taken along, house cleaned and still catch the 4:00 ferry to Port Angeles, WA. No need for a reservation on the ferry – we’ll be there by 2:30 and it isn’t a long weekend. We made the final trip to our storage to drop off the cleaning supplies and the last few items and were on schedule as we pulled up to the ticket booth.

“Do you have reservations?”

“No.”

“Sorry, we’re full.”

Oops. OK, what are our options now? Wait until tomorrow for the 10:30 sailing, or drive to Sidney and catch the ferry to Vancouver. We are headed for Portland, OR to visit Galen’s family and really don’t want to drive the half-hour north to Sidney, then go even further north on the ferry, only to have to drive back south through Seattle. But we also don’t want to dig out our sleeping bags and spend another night in Victoria, so it is off to Swartz Bay at Sidney. As we near the ferry terminal, the overhead sign announces that the 4:00 sailing to Tsawwassen is 43% full. Whew! We’ll make it.

Sixty-five dollars and seventy-five cents later we are parked in line. We don’t even get out of the vehicle to look around at the do-das for sale or walk out to watch the ferry traffic. We just lay our seats back and fall asleep. We’re too exhausted to think about the last few furious days of packing, sorting and cleaning, or even to think about the days and weeks ahead.

Once on the ferry, it seems to make sense to have a bite to eat so that we don’t have to stop somewhere along the way. Later as we drive towards the border, I wonder if the funny feeling in my stomach is from the excitement or could this be the first case of food poisoning on our trip and we haven’t even left Canada.