Shaky Arrival!

#ibmcsc Kazakhstan It was exactly 5 minutes past 11 o'clock when flight LH 0646 touched down on a Saturday summer night on what seemed like a desolate airstrip and a sparsely populated airport (one might argue this is true for any Indian travelling abroad as we are so used to being in the middle of hundreds of people everywhere). This was my introduction to Astana.

Despite being treated like a king by Lufthansa on what seemed like a brand new Airbus A340 (did I mention that the flight had been selected for a passenger survey [wink]), I was sleepy and eager to hit the bed in the shortest possible time. That said, I couldn't help notice the generous use of green all over the airport. Maybe it is the national colour, or so I thought.

The policemen I saw at the airport reminded me of the Soviet era what with their unusually large & slanted service hats. Passport Control was fairly quick and once at the exit, I couldn't find my hotel driver holding a placard with my name. I took a couple of rounds of the entire area just in case there was another exit but it was clear to me that this was not a typical time of arrival for flights for there were hardly any people around.

Enter the iPad 2 - my best buddy everytime I get lost. Thanks to the free airport internet & my phone which was on international roaming, I pulled up the hotel website and dialled their number. Oops...incorrect number. Again...incorrect number. All of a sudden, I felt as if I was stranded on an island in the middle of the ocean.

My sleep vanished and I told myself not to panic: how could someone who has travelled to so many countries in different parts of the world panic? So I looked up my IBM mail for the NGO coordinator's local number that she had emailed to everyone the week before (I was too busy to even read email that week [sigh]) and noticed she had put an "8" instead of a +7 (International Code for Kazakhstan) before her number. So I dialled the hotel again by prefixing 8 and voila! Just the voice of the hotel operator speaking fluent English was sufficient to make me feel at home. A taxi was on its way is what I was told and I felt relieved. Used the occasion to let my family know via Skype that I had reached (and deliberately ducked the question when they asked "uptil where").

I was the only soul sitting on the chair at the terminal exit chatting away on my iPad when I saw a guard walk in my direction: he seemed suspicious. I must add that the feeling was mutual. I had wild hallucinations of being thrown into a dark Soviet-style prison without ever getting to know why, so I quickly disconnected my Skype call and sat quietly. He walked away. Maybe I was too loud...but hello, there wasn't a soul around to hear me anyway!

Within a short while, the hotel called me back to announce that they were sending a lady driver. Lady driver! To pick me up past midnight! My first reaction: does my name & voice sound as feminine to Kazakhs as it sounds to most people in India that they thought it fit to send a lady driver to reassuringly pick up a 'lady'? However, I was mentally exhausted & saw no point in brooding over this. I quickly reconciled to the fact that 'someone' was picking me up [phew] in what seemed to me a ghost town on that night.

In no time, a lady arrived with a walky-talky looking for someone. She didn't have to look too hard as I was the only person at the terminal. And soon enough, I was zooming past wide Astana roads to the King Hotel. The lady spoke a little English and asked me if I knew about Mittal Steel. Yes - I answered, smiling away in recognition of the fact that I had been recognised...as an Indian national! I knew Mittal Steel had a huge plant in Kazakhstan and was certain that this was the basis of her question.

Once at the hotel, I entered my room at half past one o'clock in the morning. I quickly unpacked and went to bed with a tough wakeup target of 9:30 am after an effective travel of 25 hours. The front desk had told me that breakfast was only available until 10:30 am and after missing my airport pickup, I didn't want to miss my first meal in the country!