The Journey

Having packed frantically the day before and on the actual morning of departure, the journey passed, surprisingly, without any major hiccups. Having flown into Heathrow on the night of the 5th of January, excited by the prospect of the adventure that lay ahead of me, I spent a restless night in the Ibis Hotel. I eventually passed out only to be woken, what felt like mere moments later, at 05:30 by the wake-up call I had requested from the hotels reception.
Waiting for the hotel’s shuttle bus to the still relatively new Terminal 5, I inhaled my last few breaths of clean cold area, unsure of when exactly I would next encounter either cold or clean air, positive that it certainly wouldn’t be anytime during the next three months amongst the hustle and bustle of one of India’s largest and most densely populated cities, Chennai (formerly Madras).
Checking in was remarkably easy and I boarded the flight in high spirits despite the lack of sleep and the fact that I stupidly forgot that I had a bottle of water in my hand luggage which resulted in a ridiculously thorough search of my bag and a full-body search, in fact I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had asked me to strip to my underwear or performed a cavity search. In hindsight the fact that once the bottle of water was discovered I opened it, took a large gulp and said “See it’s water!” in an attempt to show that it wasn’t a component of some sort of explosive, probably didn’t help.