Helen Stephenson's India Trip - June-July, 2006 - Aerial views of the sub-continent

Friday July 7^th

Time to pack up and go home!

The hotel staff surprised me with a box of High Elevation Darjeeling Tea when I was checking out.

I had a car booked to take me to the airport and my packing took longer than I expected and I wasn’t quite ready when the car arrived.

Anyway, the car got me to the airport by the time I wanted to be there, and it was only when I went into the lounge for Virgin business class travellers that I discovered that my flight was an hour later than I’d thought and I was actually early! No wonder there weren’t any queues at the check-in desk.

When the flight was called, there was further security screening of hand baggage and the little battery operated fan in my backpack came in for scrutiny. When my backpack got put to one side for extra checking, I thought it was the Jobo Giga One that interested them, but when I opened it and took out the fan, that was what the operator had apparently seen and not been able to identify.

I’d made sure I had a window seat on the left of the aircraft for my return journey as the business class seats are angled and the seats on the right and the centre have the reading light on the right and it casts a shadow when doing puzzles. I wanted a window seat as I was hoping to take some photographs, and I did indeed take a few. It was a pity I didn’t have a rubber lens hood with me, as I was troubled by reflections, and when I tried my polarising filter, that only made things worse. After a while, the direction we were flying meant that it was very bright outside and all the portholes were closed, so that put paid to my photography, but I did get some pictures early in the flight. I should have checked where we were at the time, but we were probably over north west India or possibly Afghanistan.

The pictures were very washed-out, but a session in PhotoShop brought out a lot more detail. I’ve done the best I can with the reflections, but some of the pictures do show the joins where I’ve done work. Maybe I’ll have another go at my favourites one day and see if I can do better.

Anyway, here they are, in the order in which I took them. The early pictures are possibly over north west India and the later ones could be over Afghanistan.

I also took some pictures as we were coming in over London, but cloud cover meant that I only had a short window of opportunity between dropping below cloud level and needing to fasten my seatbelt and the pictures I took weren’t very satisfactory.

We landed early and I’d cleared all the formalities and was in the car being driven home at the time when I was due to land. London traffic was well snarled up and the satellite navigation system (fitted to all the cars used by Virgin, it seems) didn’t have any particularly good route to offer. The driver put on Radio Five for me so that I could follow the tennis, and it helped to pass the time it took to get through the traffic jams.

I did get home eventually, and Stephen was standing outside waiting for me.

That is the end of my account of my three weeks in India. It was a lot of hard work and some very good fun. I hope you've enjoyed reading about it and looking at my pictures as much as I enjoyed the actual experience.