The middle of the night in the desert

Shimla, Saturday 19 January 2013

Just going back to my journey to India...

It's been about three years since I last did a long-haul trip, and there were some things I'd forgotten. Some of them came back to me at around 1am on Wednesday 16 January in the Middle Eastern desert...

The flight from Manchester is slightly late arriving into Doha, which appears to be an airport in transition. We land and come to a halt on the tarmac, with no terminal apparently in the vicinity. Herded into buses, off we trundle in the night. We pass plane after plane, going round and round - some of the passengers are joking we'll end up back at the same plane an hour later. It's clear from the conversations that many of us are in the same boat - short of time to get to our next flight. An Australian Manchester United fan on his way back to Melbourne strikes up a conversation with a couple of Mancunians who are on their way to Thailand. The Australian had spent several weeks in the UK, seeing Man Utd play five or six games. He's keen.

We pull up at a building; the doors swish open, and a dapper-looking airport employee calls out: 'Blue?! Does anybody have a blue label?' Our luggage and boarding passes were colour-coded at Manchester - blue or yellow. The blue terminal was for those staying in Doha. 'Is this blue?' shouts back an Asian man standing beside me. 'No, it's yellow!' replies half the bus. 'Stay on the bus!' Turns out he's from Kathmandu, and he tells me how much he enjoys living in his suburb of the city, where it's quieter... what he loves is getting up in the morning, wrapping himself in a blanket, and taking his lemon tea onto the roof, where he can sit in the chill morning air and admire the Himalayas.

Next, the yellow terminal. We all bustle off and into the airport, looking round for clues as to where our connecting flights will leave from. We're vaguely steered into a lobby area and the woman in front of me grabs a young man in Qatar Airways uniform, asking him where she should go. 'Upstairs, madam,' he says, and adds with a good-natured laugh: 'Better hurry, madam, flight is boarding!' He'll have seen it all before, of course. I realised once inside that it was the terminal I'd spent several hours in on my last long-haul flight, to Kathmandu. I find my gate and go through, just as they begin shouting: 'Last call for Delhi.'

But it's a case of hurry up and wait. We're now huddled in a downstairs room on the tarmac, waiting for buses to take us to the plane. One bus after another fills and leaves. The timings on the ticket suddenly seem irrelevant. No one seems bothered that there's no way this plane is leaving anything like on time, because half the passengers are scattered round the airport on buses. It's as the bus pulls off that I look out across the huge expanse of tarmac, and suddenly get my travelling mojo back. Here I am, in the middle of the night, in the Qatar desert, with endless hustle going on outside... little tugs pulling trailers full of food and luggage, ground crew walking and driving around in balaclavas and scarves against the wind and coolness. I hope my bag is out there among them, on its way to my plane. I'd forgotten this thrill of travelling... how surreal it seems, on a bus in the desert darkness, my body not really sure what time it is anymore, all of us no longer citizens of anywhere, but rather people in transit, citizens of a twilight transit world.

Finally, we pull up at our plane and make our way up the steps. In three hours, Delhi...