Travails of a Lonely Traveller

I am sore. I have huge bruises on my arms and my neck and shoulders feel like I have been carrying boulders for the best part of two days. I am grumpy, irritated and sleepless. Recognise the symptoms? It is jet lag compounded by my first experience of travelling home alone from England.

So there I was in summery Falmer counting down days to my happy homecoming in rainy Kochi.

Every day, I added a little bit extra to my bulging suitcase. Not much, I figured, definitely not more than the weight limit allowed for students – a good 46 kgs. Now what didn’t penetrate through my thick skull is that I needed to be less worried about the permitted weight limit and more about how I was going to carry it all.  

The roads in the UK might be ideal for rolling suitcases, but unaffordable private transport means that you have to walk long distances lugging a 30 kilo suitcase, a 15 kilo backpack with your heavy laptop in it and a bulging ladies handbag that I positively couldn’t have made light.

And Uncle Murphy who made those weird laws, loves me a lot. So he ensured that he kept peeking over my shoulders throughout my trip to India.  For starters, I miscalculated the time required to walk downhill with the listed luggage towards the station. What is normally a 15 minute trek turned into a 25 minute painful progress. Barely  made the train to Brighton for the connecting one to London. I had forgotten to check if there was enough time between the two trains. So I had just 5 minutes to take my luggage out of the Brighton train and waddle towards the one headed to London.  

At London began the next ordeal. There was a tube strike on – typical of London public transport, but why on the day I was travelling. More delays. By the time I changed lines and got to Heathrow, I could feel my left hand threatening to drop off. The right one had a purplish bruise developing – I haven’t figured when I picked that up yet.  The Indian queues were as usual pretty pretty long. So by the time, I checked in my luggage and headed for security check, I was already late. 

London airports have become notoriously fancy about security checks. So despite  depositing all my lotions and potions in transparent plastic bags, I was one of the unfortunate few who had to stand silently as the security personnel sorted through my toiletries and laptop bag…Aaargh..more time lost..so the much praised Heathrow Dutyfree shopping experience mocked me as I rushed to the boarding gates.

A Heathrow-Mumbai-Kochi trip that begins at 9.30am, lands at a highly inconvenient 11.30 PM India time in Mumbai. Though my friends were on hand to help me while away some time, by 3.30 on Saturday morning, I was a grumpy grouch. The flight to Kochi was at 5.30AM, landing there about 7.15 in the morning. What are the chances that you land in Kerala on the day of a hartal? Pretty high. Thankfully, my ever reliable Dad was at hand to cut short the torture in my torturous journey home.  What would I do without him??


A journey spread roughly over two days – the pet peeves that my grumpy, tired and bruised body and mind has about the travails of UK-India travel…that’s episode two.