After 3 nights in Goa we headed back to the airport to take our supposed direct flight to the state of Kerala in a city called Cohin (also spelled Kochin). Yes, its confusing, many cities have two different spellings. We booked our flight online and purposefully chose thislight bec. it was direct. We arrive in Cohin (or so we thought) and exited the airport. We had booked our lodging and requested a car pick us up courtesy of the hotel (this is quite common).
When you exit the airport there is always a string of men holding signs for various passengers. It can be quite nerve racking as you walk down the line, hoping that the next sign will have your name on it....as you approach the end of the line, you begin to walk slower and slower dreading the mob of tuk-tuk drivers all clamering at the chance to wisk you away in their tuktuk. If you are one of the unfortunate ones who does not see a sign with your name on it, you try to hide the disappointed look, you whisper that plan B is to find a phone, and you plow head on through the mob, at first with a no thank you, then a no, then just a shake of the head and then just eyes straight forward with a look that a serious destination is in persuit.
We call - the owner says the driver is just 15-20min away. We go back past the mob, behind the safety bars of the airport security line and sit, and wait and wait. 30min later, we call again - supposedly the driver is there waiting for us but we don't see each other. He's supposedly wearing a yellow shirt - this is a small airport mind you - so while Yenyy talks on the phone to the owner, I go and tap various men wearing yellow shirts saying "Delight Hotel?" - fortunately there weren't that many yellow shirt wearing men so I didn't make a huge fool of myself. The hotel owner calls the driver on his cell phone - we continue to have this bizarre 3 way conversation - supposedly he's there we're both supposed to wave - there are the two Americans waving in the middle of the street and this poor driver waving his Delight sign with no progress being made on either end.
"Are you sure you are in Cochin the owner asks". We pull out our ticket stub - show it to the woman whose phone we are using - and ask her if we are in Cochin. She confirms that we are (on reflection we think she might have thought we asked her if our ticket stub said Cochin and not whether we were really at Cochin airport, but who really knows). We ask for the drivers direct cell phone number. We ask the woman to call him since he doesn't speak english very well, but of course neither did the woman who owned the phone. Talk about a serious miss communication and hugely important details being lost in translation - it all happened here.
After two hours of this phone charade, we gave up. It began to rain...hard! The woman invited us into her booth - she was kind and took pity on us. We said we'd just hire another driver - so she called one of the guys over and said to make sure they took good care of us and to drive slow. We were very appreciative of her kindness.
It wasn't until we showed the driver where we were trying to go that we realized we were in Chenni - a completely different State and over a 6 hour drive away. Exhausted, confused and now frustrated we thank the woman - give her a bunch of American coins which she asked if we had and a five dollar bill, and ran back to the airport ticket counter. There had been a mistake...OBVIOUSLY! There was a layover no one told us about that was supposed to be for just 25min - but the plane was delayed for exactly two hours and was going to take off in 10 min. We could still make it....and long story long we did...just barley. And the poor driver - who waited 2hrs driving in circles looking for the non-existant Americans - well we apologized and still paid him, all parties felt bad about it, but in the end we all had a good laugh, and another bizarre story to take home.
