Don't worry, the plane will arrive soon...

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March 9 - We arrived at the airport in Trivandrum at 12 Noon for our 1:35 flight to Mumbai (and then connecting onto Udaipur). This was the beginning of a very very long day. In the morning I had taken my malaria medication and washed it down with the instant Nescafe coffee the hotel had in our room. As I then did not eat for another hour or so.. it did not sit well in me and I felt very sea sick the balance of the day.
When we arrived at the airport we discovered that our 1:35 flight was delayed to 4pm. This would mean we would miss our connection to Udaipur and be stuck in Mumbai for the night. After a bit of back and forth with the airline and our agent (luckily I activated my mobile phone to work here in India) we were able to get a hotel in Mumbai for the night and a flight to Udaipur at 5:50AM the next day. Our flight from Trivandrum that was scheduled to depart at 1:35PM, didn’t actually leave until 5:45PM. We sat around the airport for close to 5 hours. The time passed relatively easily though (as we read, ate and watched the original Pink Panther). Once in a while I would check the departures board for an update as the flight was further delayed and found it funny that they displayed 2 times for every flight. The first was “Scheduled Time of Departure” (i.e.1:35pm) and the second time was “Estimated Time of Departure” (which kept changing throughout the afternoon until the final time read 5:30PM… the flight still left 15 minutes later).
We arrived in Mumbai at 8pm, tired and bleary eyed from a long day’s travel. After about 45 minutes of dealing with where the airline was putting us up for the night and ensuring that we were booked for the 5:50AM flight to Udaipur, we departed the airport for the hotel. A driver took us to the Orchid Hotel about 10 minutes from the airport where we would sleep until 4:30am. Although we were very disappointed that we were not in Udaipur, at least we had a decent hotel close to the airport and would have a full day in Udaipur on the 10th.

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