Category: Travel

Travel day. My original itinerary would have meant that I spent all day at Mumbai Airport, but thanks to colleagues in Pune I found myself booked on a direct flight to Hyderabad. This represented yet another “first”: my first flight on Air Sahara. The equipment was a Canadair CRJ, ex-Midway and now VT-SAO. Security at Pune was tight: my checked bag was X-rayed and then sealed; I was “wanded” twice, and my carry-on was X-rayed and then inspected.

Pune is actually a huge Indian Air Force base; the civilian terminal is just a tiny part of the whole. We walked out to the CRJ following a Jet Airways 737-800 that was taxiing out, and we were close enough to the departing aircraft for the jet blast to make some passengers cringe. As we taxiied out, following a very circuitous route, I could see at least a dozen Sukhoi Flankers and SEPECAT Jaguars on the military ramp.

I was in seat 4A, but of course the low-mounted windows of the CRJ meant that I didn’t have a very good view. Never mind, I was busy: even though it was only a one-hour flight, we were served a hot “snack” (vegetarian or non-veg) that any US airline would have called a full lunch.

After an on-time arrival, I met the hotel’s representative at Hyderabad airport. I had phoned that morning to alert the hotel of my change of plan, but somehow the message hadn’t got through: he was still expecting me at 7:30pm. Never mind: he rustled up a car, and we crawled through the traffic to the Begumpet district.

So now I’m ensconced in the ITC Kakatiya Sheraton in Hyderabad, where I’ll be until Wednesday. Tomorrow I’m planning to get an all-day guided tour of the city, including Golconda. Then if all goes according to plan I’ll be rendezvousing with a colleague for dinner tomorrow night. (Right now he should be at Heathrow, enjoying a 9 hour layover!)

My last full day in Pune. The highlights were:

• Beating the traffic! I asked for the driver to come at 8am: he arrived at 7:50, and we made it out to the office in 20 minutes. (Yesterday it took over an hour.) I arrived ahead of most of the regulars; fortunately I had a badge that worked. (To maximise the overlap with the rest of the team in Massachusetts, the Pune group tend to start work late and end very late.)

• Speaking at an all-hands meeting for the engineering team here in Pune. My subject was engineering culture and practices in Sun. The group seemed pretty enthusiastic, so I wasn’t too worried about running over by a few minutes.

• Having my travel rearranged, so that instead of having a 6 hour layover at Mumbai airport I shall now be flying direct to Hyderabad tomorrow. Thanks, Monish and Ulka for arranging this.

• And finally, giving an invited talk to the Pune chapter* of the Computer Society of India. The subject was “The Future of Distributed Computing” – and no, you can’t have my slides! They only make sense when I’m talking – maybe not even then. Anyway, there was a good sized audience, and they seemed to enjoy it. (I know that I did.)

So tomorrow I leave Pune and head for Hyderabad. I’ve enjoyed myself here: the ex-Storability team are a really great bunch of engineers. I’m looking forward to returning.

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* Memo to the CSI Pune chapter organizers: lots of pages link to you as http://csipune.com, but that URL seems to be parked.

Just a brief note, as it’s late and I have to be up early tomorrow for a series of meetings. Setting aside the work… and the driving… what’s left? Oh, yes: food. Last night, after checkin in to my second hotel in Pune (The Pride), I ate in the Golden Arch. No, not Golden Arches – the Arch [singular] is one of the restaurants in the hotel. Very pleasant, Kingfisher beer tastes much better in India than whatever they ship to the USA. It has a nice touch of bitterness that most lagers lack.

And yes, the connectivity in the hotel is pretty good: desktop 10Base-T, with only occasionally glitches.
UPDATE (10/22/05): Well, not so good. I finally ran some bandwidth tests, and got figures in the range of 80kbps (that’s kbits, not Kbytes). Surely some mistake….

Today I started late due to traffic – the recent rains have washed out even major roads, and things are a mess. After a meeting with the site director, I went out to lunch with a group of managers. We drove (on the Mumbai-Pune toll highway, and at a really impressive speed) to a hilltop resort in Khandala called The Duke’s Retreat. The Duke in question was Wellington, whose famous nasal profile can be seen in a nearby ridge. After returning to the office for more meetings running in to the evening, a few of us braved potholes and traffic to reach another noted area restaurant, the Ambrosia, which lies about 20 kms. west of the city centre. [Forget the negative reviews on the website: the food was excellent, and service was very prompt and attentive.]

Enough. I must hit the sack. Big day tomorrow.

I tried to post a day 2 entry from my Treo at Mumbai Airport, but I fumble-fingered the UI and deleted all my typing, so I gave up.

On Monday night I flew from London to Mumbai on Jet Airways. The service was superb: far, far better than on British Airways the night before. Unfortunately the guy sitting next to me was a fidgeter, and my sleep was occasional and fitful. Dawn over Iran was cloudy, but I got a wonderful view (and some pictures) of the bleak landscape in southeast Iran and western Pakistan: brutally bleak, a uniform dusty off-white with only brilliant white salt flats providing relief. And then after we reached the coast we vectored inland, over Karachi, and well to the east before heading south to Mumbai.

I arrived at the rather shabby 1960s-vintage international terminal, endured the bureaucratic tedium of immigration (there always seems to be one more form, or one more signature), rechecked bags for the connecting flight, and took the shuttle bus to the new domestic terminal. Here I made a mistake: I assumed that there would be services (ATM, food, shops) on the far side of the security barrier. Wrong: there was nothing. It was more like a bright airy modern bus station; lots of seats, and TVs, but no services and (apparently) no way back to the rest of the terminal. Without Indian money or liquids, I was stuck for four hours. I dozed, watched TV uncomprehendingly*, and eventually my flight was called.

[Need to speed this up – I have to unplug in 10 minutes.]

The flight to Pune was short and sweet (complimentary fresh lime juice), my bag appeared on cue, and the car to take me and two other passengers to the hotel was there. The journey… well, it was an eye-opener, as in eyeball to eyeball with a cow in the middle of the road. The roads were very bumpy (exacerbated by recent heavy rains), and the traffic was chaotic – but everything kept moving, and we got to the hotel.

At this point I should describe my first dinner in India. Sorry, no – I was falling asleep on my feet, so after a couple of phone calls I just drank a litre of water, fell into bed and slept for 11 hours.

So now I’m at the Pune office of Storability, the company that came to Sun by way of the StorageTek deal. I’ve cleared my email backlog, met a number of the staff, and had a delicious lunch at a nearby restaurant. I’m now preparing to head back to the city to check in to a different hotel, which is supposed to have much better connectivity.

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*The bilingual aspect of Indian communications is oddly confusing. On the TV, they kept putting up “News Flash” in English, followed by the headline in Hindi. It wasn’t until I reached my hotel room and turned on the BBC World News that I learned that a government minister in Indian-administered Kashmir had been assassinated in his home by an Islamist gunman.

Flew BOS-LHR last night on a 100 percent full BA 777. The bad: a middle seat. The good: World Traveller Plus. We reached the Heathrow area 20 min early, the sat in the Ockham hold for 25 minutes because of fog. We were lucky to get in: visibility was around zero.
Eventually I got my bag, picked up a rental car, and drove down to Woking for meetings with StorageTek UK. I felt they went very well. Late in the afternoon I returned to Heathrow and checked in for my Jet Airways flight to Mumbai. I managed to get a window seat, because I want to see dawn over Iran.
And finally I had a hot meal (having missed breakfast, and having had sandwiches for lunch). I’m now waiting to board, composing this on my Treo.

After yesterday’s high-stress, today is tranquil. (Apart from the constant rain, of course.) I have my tickets, my passport, my visa. There was one moment of concern when I found that I had paper tickets for all six of the Jet Airways flights but only one of the three British Airways segments. A quick phone call from Susan sorted it out: all of the BA flights are e-ticket, so the extra flight coupon was a mistake.

So now I simply have to pack (thanks for the dress code suggestions), watch the Chinese GP, polish my slides one more time, and go. Next stop LHR…. (Which will be a good place to fix 53J, come to think of it.)

Itinerary seems OK now… all hotel reservations are confirmed… and I remembered to call my credit card issuer to alert them to my travel plans, so that their fraud detection system doesn’t have a conniption. I’ve sent out copies of my slides for various presentations that I’m giving (though I’m not quite finished with one of them). I still haven’t tracked down available WiFi hotspots in BOM, where I have two lengthy layovers. (The map at USAtoday/Jwire is less than helpful…) I’ve booked a ride to BOS on Sunday. All that’s [still] missing is my passport with the visa for India, without which all of this is pointless. Time to nag the visa agents again….

[UPDATE] Hmmm. It seems that the visa process is less deterministic and transparent than I had thought. I sent all my paperwork to the visa agents in California; they then sent the paperwork to the Consulate General in New York (which I could have done), and the CG is supposed to express-mail the documents directly to me. And there’s no obvious way to check on progress. (I have a tracking number, but USPS knows nothing of it.) Had I known all of this, I’d have been tempted to take a day off and scoot down to New York to take care of it in person. As it is, I shall just have to wait. Patiently. And. Hope.

(I’d assumed that this visa agent thing was a bit like buying a new car, when the dealer employs a “runner” to get the paperwork through the Registry of Motor Vehicles. I thought I was paying for someone to drop off the application at the CG in person, and pick up the completed paperwork when it was ready. I guess I’m naive.)

Web sources on business dress code in India are ambivalent, not to say downright contradictory. I think I’m meeting customers on only one day; the rest is geek-to-geek, or geek-to-executive. Will business casual be OK, or do I need to take some extra dress shirts and ties? (Or shall I pull a JG and just wear Duke and Jini shirts?) I assume T-shirts and cargo pants will be OK for travel days….

For some reason known only to the travel agency bozos, my itinerary came unravelled and had has to be re-woven. Naturally while this was happening one of the key flights became full, with awkward knock-on effects. As Susan was patiently fixing things, I noticed that on one flight my seat had changed: I was now in 53J in a British Airways 747-400. I checked in at SeatGuru (an essential resource) and confirmed my fears: this is a window seat in the very last row, right in front of the toilets (i.e. noisy and potentially smelly), and with limited recline. That’s no way to spend nearly 10 hours. Fortunately this flight is in a couple of weeks; I should have time to change it….

I flew out from Boston to San Francisco yesterday evening for a week of meetings. Travel has become pretty routine of late, so I’m glad to have three new experiences to relate.

First, I flew out of the new Terminal A at Boston Logan. This replaced the old Eastern Airlines terminal, which was used by Continental after Eastern’s demise. The new terminal is for the exclusive use of Delta. They only just finished this, and I was curious to see what it was like. Bright, cheery, nicely laid out… and relatively empty. Oops. And the newness extended to some of the facilities: for example, the Fuddrucker’s hamburger place was advertising beer and margaritas, but they haven’t got their liquor license yet. Overall it reminded me of some European terminals, and the density of upscale shopping outlets was reminiscent of Heathrow.

Second, I got puffed. That is to say, at the security checkpoint I was selected to go through one of the new devices that subjects you and your clothing to an intense puff of air, directed upwards to dislodge any particles in your garments or hair; the system then “sniffs” the air for any suspicious chemicals. The process takes about 10 seconds. High “geek interest” factor.

And third, and the reason I was using terminal A, was that I was flying on Song for the first time. This is Delta’s “airline within an airline”, a bit like United’s Ted. One type of aircraft (757-200), one class, and relentless fun. (Yes, they will mix martinis for you in flight – $7 each.) The competition is clearly jetBlue, but the style borrows from Virgin Atlantic. The seats are OK – leather (not necessarily a plus), limited lumbar support, decent pitch. The seat-back video is good, and includes the kind of flight map that you usually find on international flights.

As for the flight: the cabin crew issued dire warnings over the PA about it being a full flight, but there were only 155 seats filled (according to the display outside the gate), and I had the 27 D-E-F row all to myself. We pushed back 30 minutes late because of a minor maintenance issue. The flight was very bumpy: the pilot kept changing altitude between FL320 and FL360 trying to find smooth air. Nonetheless I was able to get plenty of sleep. The verdict: recommended; a good (and frugal) way to deal with the “bus ride” between BOS and SFO.