From Incredible to Merry Olde

Sarah and I bid a fond Saturday morning farewell to Chennai recently—we were surprised and delighted by the dozen or so friends who were waiting on the street to wave us off as we boarded the bus—and after a few slips between the cup and the lip, we are now comfy and cozy in a charming cottage fondly known as “Little Chauntry,” not far from Windsor, outside London.

Our journey began with an eight hour trip from our house to the airport—the airport in Bangalore, not the one in Chennai. Tamil Nadu, the state Chennai is in, has done a solid job of handling the virus and they decided not to open the Madras Airport in August, even though many other restrictions were relaxed. That meant our scheduled flight had been cancelled for a third time.

In the long run, that proved to be fortuitous, as we decided to follow the path several other departing AISC faculty had taken, making the 340km drive from Chennai to Bangalore. It turned out that British Airways was flying out of Bangalore on our chosen date for their first post-Covid scheduled trip—and it was a direct flight to London so we got to avoid the joys of international transfers.

The school provided a small bus to haul Sarah and me and our favorite half-dozen suitcases. Okay, they weren’t ALL suitcases, but they were a definite challenge. At any rate, we left our home in Thiruvanmiyur and headed west on what eventually became a lovely six-lane unlimited-access highway. Right, unlimited, as in one could turn into or pull out from tea stalls, coconut carts, farm lanes, and even houses at any point, so the speed limit is held to a heady 80 . . . as in kilometers per hour, so just 48 miles per hour with no minimum speed.

After a pair of checkpoints in Tamil Nadu where our driver confidently flashed the permits they’d acquired to transport us through the state, we finally arrived at heart-stopper number one, the border at Karnataka, the neighboring state. Due to the virus lockdowns, traffic between most states in India has been tightly restricted and controlled. We had to acquire permits in advance to enter Karnataka, and the transportation company had sent us copies of ours just a couple days before we left.

At the border checkpoint, we had to get out and enter a shed with many different lines for different types of permits. Our driver led us to one queue and when we got to the counter, the clerk looked at our permits, looked at us, and said “Wrong permit, if you are ‘normal,’ you have to quarantine for 14 days!” Did we look normal? Can you feel your heart stop?

You can imagine our train of thoughts of the falling dominoes of all our travel reservations at those words, but between our driver and a friendly young border control manager who told us he liked to help senior citizens, we were given brand new permits with the correct category—we were not “normal” after all, just “transit” travelers—in about 15 minutes and away we went. Deeeep sighs of relief and thankful again to not be merely normal!

So, after eight plus hours, we arrived at the Bangalore airport—stunning architecture—and the Taj Hotel Bangalore, right across from the main terminal. We had an entire next day to relax and unwind after the few weeks’ rapid pace of packing and selling and so many fond farewells before our flight out early Monday morning.

We enjoyed as usual the excellent foods at a Taj Hotel—with the exception that, much to our surprise, no alcohol could be served—and the staff did an excellent job of mask and visor wearing plus social distancing. The menus were a QR code you scanned and then read on your phone. Clever!

A good night’s sleep and an alarm at 2am had us dropped off at the terminal well in advance of our flight time, so all good, right? Not so fast! After filling out two copies of a health check form outside the terminal, we found the BA counter and checked in—since this was their first flight post-Covid, we were asked to pose with their manager holding Indian and British flags. We then headed for immigration and wow, they were just opening up and we were among the first in line. Wonderful, what could go wrong?

We all know what it’s like to learn a new job and we’ve all been there when a newbie is struggling to help you and doesn’t seem to understand things, right? Well, how about that situation when it’s your ability to leave the country that the newbie doesn’t understand? Heart-stopper number two and more falling dominoes, anyone?

Since we have lived in India for a few years, we have a newer document called a “Stay-visa” that is renewed online and is simply a printout of the approved visa with nothing stamped in your passport. Rather clever of India, frankly, and a smooth way to do things. BUT, our newbie clerk had apparently never heard of the concept nor seen one, so he was quite troubled by the fact that the visa stamps in our passport had expired like two years ago.

Eventually, with help from his neighboring clerk, he did manage to figure out how to deal with us, after a long delay, and we could at last breathe again, so off we went for our ten hour flight direct to Heathrow and potential heart-stopper number three: the British Border Control requirement to self-isolate for 14 days and the need to submit an online notice stating your exact address, phone, etc. We were told to bring hard copies of our filings and we dreaded another border crossing with documents that might or might not please everyone’s interpretation.

So, once we landed—the first time at Heathrow we didn’t have to take a bus to the terminal, woohoo—we followed the crowd under signs that told us that our American passport would allow us use the e-scan lines for passport control. Boom, five seconds, no ogre stepping from the shadows, no other process, and our hearts could beat happily as we found our way out to Maidenhead—with a brief stop to grab a few huge bags of groceries and wine and beer from our old Chennai friends Peter and Swapnil who live nearby—and Little Chauntry to begin our isolation.

At last, we’d made it from our much-loved, Incredible India, to the next stop on our Expat Odyssey, Merry Old England. Let our isolation begin!

And what a charming isolation setting we found in Little Chauntry . . . but, perhaps that should be another story, right?