Jan 2009

Written: Jan 17, 2009

In my 4 days and 4 nights here, I’ve skied inside the Mall of Emirates, walked around Deira (old trading areas of Dubai), checked out the Burj from a distance (architectural symbol of Dubai). I’ve also met and partied with some friends of Rukmin. I even joined in on some post-partying karaoke with 2 British guys called Martin and Rich (seriously guys, “Two Become One”?)

I had a great time; I was able to catch-up with Rukmin and meet some interesting new people. Thanks to everyone for their hospitality and now I’m off to Mumbai!

Note: The normal Dubai price for a bottle of beer at a bar was 32 Dhs ($10.25) so I'm never complaining about Toronto prices ever again.

Two days ago, I was in the process of catching up with friends at a party when the following conversations repeated itself:

Friend: How are you doing? What's new?
Me: I'm flying off to Dubai tomorrow and will be traveling Dubai, India and Nepal for 1.5 months.
Friend: What ?!?

Even my closest friends were surprised at how sudden my departure was.
So how did this whole idea start? When did I start planning and how did I manage to get 1.5 months off?

I would attribute it to the following 3 factors: an email, a woman and a picture.

In early December, while I was finishing up my previous project I received an email about FlexLeave, a type of leave of absence lasting between 1 week to 3 months (till the end of Feb). The program had many benefits including retaining access privileges, time with the company still count. At first I thought it'd be a good way to take time-off without using my vacation time which I'm saving up. If a new project didn't work out and I run out of chargeable work I could take FlexLeave to keep my chargeability up.

I met this woman at an alumni party and she told me about her travels to India and Nepal. She was the one that planted the seed of traveling India/Nepal in my head. When she told me about her experiences, my mind tied the FlexLeave program to traveling India/Nepal. I thought to myself, "This just may be possible." However, at that point I wasn't 100% sure if I should do it now or later and whether I would get approved for it.

Finally, while reorganizing my travel pictures I came upon my one of my favourite from the RTW 2007 trip. It was the one of me overlooking Machu Picchu in the final days of my trip. Everything came back to me; I caught the travel flu (wanderlust) and became insomniac. I couldn't sleep; I checked flights, Wikitravel and researched constantly.

I talked to my manager/career counselor about my next project, business needs and determined that I qualified for the FlexLeave program and it made sense for me to take a bit of time off to travel while new projects were getting to start-up. Thankfully, my CC/HR and upper-management were all very supportive and soon enough I had the go-ahead and tickets! I even managed to perform a miracle before departure my getting an Indian travel visa within 1 day by drop-off, which is not allowed for people of non-Indian origins. I pleaded with the official that it was an emergency and I didn't have a ticket within 72 hours to show (a requirement for emergency visas which also only lasts 1 month) since I was going on standby. I wanted to get it immediately since I didn't want to spend my time/money in Canada but rather in the beautiful country of India. Six hours later, to the amazement of the other people of Indian origins standing in-line to get their pick-up, I had a 6 month tourist visa! Wei: 1, Indian Bureaucracy: 0.

I would have some mixed luck in the first few days of my trip. The night before my morning flight to New York, American Airlines called to say my flight had been cancelled due to weather. After a tense 2 hours, I was able to adjust my flight t NYC and the connection to Dubai to a later time. There were 2 advantages to this change; first of all, I wouldn't need to transfer between LaGuardia to JFK since I would now fly directly into JFK. Secondly, I would fly the Airbus A380 from New York to Dubai instead of the 777 earlier. Unfortunately, I had more bad luck and my AA flight was late so I missed my connection to Dubai. This was the first time I'd ever missed a flight and I was pissed since I was delayed by at least one day and did not think I would be on the A380 anymore! However, all was not lost; I had flight interruption insurance so I had $1000 available to spend on hotel, meals and sundry expenses. My flight the next evening was also on the A380 and I used this chance to alter my flight schedule slightly so that I would stay longer in Dubai.

The A380 was a gigantic plane. There are sleeping rooms with full beds and showers on the upper-deck and a bar! The food of Emirates Airlines was amazing as always and the ICE entertainment system is even better than what I had the last time I flew with them.

And so, here we go! It's good to be on the road again.