Flying out of Bangalore

The trip to Bangalore is wrapped up and I’m sitting at the new airport here. It looks pretty nice but the airport is a long way out from downtown (and that is just the start of the problems). I left at 6pm (pretty much rush hour) and it took just over two hours to get here. Even when I arrived at midnight, it took over an hour to get here. One of the business people who talked at the regional meeting summed it up as “organized enough to build a new airport but not organized to build a good road to the airport”. It seems to be pretty accurate to me. There is a nice, broad highway that goes from the airport to the main highway out of Bangalore but they didn’t make any improvements to the highway for the airport traffic. For a Seattle comparison, it would be the same as if you put a new airport near Carnation and built a nice freeway to Monroe to hook up with Highway 2, don’t bother to do anything to any of the highways that feed Monroe, and assume that the Seattle-bound traffic will be fine.

As hard as it might be to believe, but the security check at the airport is worse than the TSA.

Here’s the flow:

• They check your ticket and passport to let you into the building.
• At check in, they check your passport.
• After you check in, you go through an outgoing immigration where they check your passport and collect an outgoing passenger form. They stamp the passport and the boarding pass
• After you leave the immigration, they check it again to make sure both were stamped
• At security, they check your boarding pass and passport again
• They let people through one at a time and perform an individual search for every person going though the hand pat-down and wand treatment
• The security people stamp your boarding pass
  

So, from door to the gate, you get your passport checked six times. I am sure that they will check my passport at the gate again, too. For extra irony, the security and immigration people are all within easy viewing distance of each other and the flow of traffic is controlled and guided. Even with almost no line, the process took almost 20 minutes. I can’t imagine how it works with a typical rush. Good thing I got here early…

Bangalore is an odd place - reminds me of parts of the Philippines and Malaysia in the dust, unruly traffic, and the odd combination of old and new buildings. Bangalore is high-tech boom town that rivals Silicon Valley for creativity and energy but the living conditions are no different than any other part of India or Southeast Asia. The regional office is in a really nice building that is only a couple of years old but it is immediately adjacent to building that could have been there since ‘50s and haven’t had and repairs since the ‘70s.

I didn’t have much of chance to look around but I did get to sample some good food. For the meals that we had earlier in the week with the large groups, they toned down the spiciness a little but later in the week I talked them into turning up the spice when it was just a couple of us. There was some good stuff to be had. Only one person out of the group of 12 visitors managed to get sick so it looks like the food was fairly trustworthy. They did take us out to some of the fancier restaurants, though, so I can’t say for sure that the food is completely safe. It tasted great, though.