2006 World Trip - Calcutta (again)

Knowing that Calcutta is a living nightmare, we booked ourselves into a luxury hotel which cost us less than twenty pounds per night - and ensured before booking that we would be able to watch England’s first match on ESPN.

We were still ill and continued to feel sorry for ourselves, but began to eat one meal per day.

Feeling ever so slightly better, until we had to dash to the toilet (anyone else notice a recurring theme here?), we called a taxi to take us to Calcutta airport, whilst we watched England play their first match.  Relief was evident as we looked forward to leaving India behind, although the experiences we’d had there really were life-changing.

Just when we were saying goodbye to India, our taxi broke down in the middle of a busy main road in the dark.  Our driver kept turning the ignition key in hope of it restarting, and eventually got it going, only for it to break down a couple more times.  Eventually Mark and the driver pushed the car to the side of the road as we exchanged our ‘not-surprised-that-something-went-wrong-in-India’ look. 

Our driver shouted at another taxi to take us the rest of the way to the airport for half the fee, so we unloaded and reloaded our bags between taxis and set off once again for our gateway from India.  Although the driver tried his best to kill us with his racing driver manoeuvres, we eventually pulled up at the tiny Calcutta International only to find that their were a few armed guards on the door who weren’t letting anyone in whose name wasn’t on their list (kind of like an elite night club - except our names should have been on the list); so Mark had to leave Anna with the armed guards whilst he went and spoke nicely to the happy-to-help girls at the Singapore Airlines desk, who quickly walkie-talkied authorisation through so Mark was able to return to the guards with a piece of paper which seemed to satisfy the bouncer urge in them.  So we checked in and eventually boarded our lovely jet bound for clean Singapore