SXR-DEL, PT. TWO

Departing SXR is an airport dance unlike any other: It begins as you show an onward ticket and join a long line of honking cars at the airport gate. (We skip this line, maybe because of Mr. Hassan). Next, in between the gate and the departure terminal, the taxi, the bags, the passengers and the driver are thoroughly screened. One-hundred yards further the taxi stops at the departure terminal where the entrance requires an additional screening and an onward ticket.

From there I proceed to the airline counter to check-in luggage and get a seat on the plane to Delhi (DEL). The agent finds a seat on an earlier SXR-DEL flight, and I take it. Despite that it is still too early to enter the departure lounge, so passengers must mill around in this forward lobby area. Eventually we mob up only to enter a bottleneck for screening into the departure lounge. My carry-on gets inspected well here, and immediately again thirty feet away, on the other side of the bottleneck.

All of this comes as no surprise - I had done it all 24 hours earlier and then fog cancelled the departing flight. I had also spent an hour or two in the SXR office of Mr. Vijay and his great staff, sorting out all of the official paperwork and stamps I would need to pursue my lost luggage claim in DEL. Marginal weather delayed this flight too, but it finally breaks and then (after each passenger identifies each checked bag) the luggage is loaded up, the passengers buckled in, and the plane is taxiing down the runway to Delhi.
Photo credit: MHIP