Getting to Delhi

Getting to Delhi was some mission.  One tends to think of Asia as being in our backyard, but Delhi is a lot closer to London than Wellington.

Started with a four hour flight to Sydney or Air NZ.  Then had a few hours at Sydney Airport.

As proof of how small the world is, I ran into a couple of friends at the airport – Sonia and Brett.  I met Sonia a few years ago at a cokctail function in Sydney when I was pretending to be the deposed prime minister of a former communist state. Brett served on the Executive of the IYDU with me and is a former President of the Australian Young Liberals.

The next flight was Qantas to Mumbai – 13 hours.  I wasn’t looking forward to it as I was cattle class and it was packed full. Normally I regard this as akin to water boarding. But the fact they had personalised entertainment systems made all the difference.  I got to Level 80 on Tetris and watched Atonement which was a great movie – about two sisters, and the younger one gets the boyfriend of the older one falsely convicted of rape just before WWII.

Mumbai Airport turned into a bit of a nightmare.  It should have been simple as I already had a boarding pass, but I had to go through customs and check my bag back in.  I asked where to go, to check in for my flight and was told by the armed soldiers who seem to also be the helpdesk to go out the door, along the road, up a floor and back in there.

I did that, and after queueing up at Jet Airways, got told this was international only, and I needed to go back to the other terminal for domestic transit.  I went back there and then got sent somewhere else which was wrong, and finally after over an hour of being jerked about, I started to get fairly stroppy.  Now raising your voice in a pissed off manner isn’t probably advisable to soldiers with sub machine guns, but my refusing to budget until someone personally walked me to the right location actually worked.  And Murphy’s law it was around 20 metres away from where I started.

Got taken by bus away to the right departure gate (the airport is absolutely huge – took over 10 minutes driving over the runways), and  then onto the two hour flight to Delhi.

Despite leaving at 11 pm the flight to Delhi was also packed full.  By coincidence I was seated next to ICANN CEO Paul Twomey, so we chatted various ICANN issues.  When we landed at 1 am, dozens of people switched their cellphones on and were chatting within seconds of the wheels touching down (some minutes before we actually stopped). I was amused both by the speed at which people started phoning, but also that it was 1 am in the morning, so God knows who the calls were to.

ICANN had a travel desk at the airport, but it turned out only at the international airport.  So I had to negotiate a taxi fare into the hotel. After we negotiated what was still a rip-off price (but less so) they then tried to convince me there was also a US$10 car park exit fee.  I pointed out they invented this as there was no fee paid.  They then also tried to get me to pay for a petrol fillup on the way (I refused) and then at the end also asked for a tip for the good service.  I finally gave over another US$5 just for the sheer gall.

I blogged previously on the interesting approach to red lights, the driver had.

So finally got to the hotel at around 2 am.  I have to say I was kind of glad the other hotel burnt down as the replacement hotel is very nice – the Taj Mahal Hotel Delhi.
The rack rate here is incredibly expensive, but thankfully ICANN is paying.

I’ll blog later on about the issues at this meeting – a lot are about the issue of allowing top level domains in non-English scripts.