Kissing someone else's mother goodbye, I suddenly got very excited.

'Helen, one day we'll look back on this and think: 'I wish I hadn't bought that big bottle of water in Boots, I can't take the bastard past this gate' I said, tightening my surprisingly light (16.2 kgs) backpack around my taut, muscular frame. 

The flight to Mumbai was pretty much a success as no one died and I also quickly realised that every time I asked for red wine a woman with orange hands would bring me some, gratis. (French for free.)

The ending of the flight was especially exciting, as we had to circle around for an hour in various pockets of high and low pressured monsoon air. The atmosphere rapidly changed from 'Ooh, that was a big jolt, teehee!' to 'Is this sort of thing normal?' and finally 'Fuck me we're all going to die'. Those being Helen's last words before curling into a sobbing ball of flesh. 

It's at moments like these that I really take the situation onto my broad shoulders, so I did just that. 'Another two red wines please. Oh, and a small Sprite for the lady.'

This may seem as though I was being a little unfair and perhaps a tad insensitive about Helen's very real fear of flying. However, dear e-reader, let me enlighten you to the first nine hours of the ten hour flight. Here's the black-box recording:

21:00 Helen (H) 'Do you want to sit in the window seat Chris?
Chris (C) 'YES PLEASE DAGLEY!'

21:08 After approximately eight minutes of looking at a man bang the wing of our plane with what can only be described as a sledgehammer - our fellow patron of the air finally joined us and sat down in the aisle seat. She was a pretty Indianish looking girl of about 20 or so years.

21:11 (H) 'Do you still have a bunged up nose Chris?'
(C) 'Not many Hel, it'll be okay though as the prospective view out of the window will no doubt clear all of my senses like optical olbas oil, leaving me invigorated and full of the spruce of joyous life!'
(H) 'I want to sit next to the window and look out of it.'
(C) 'Okay my love!'

21:12 I discover that Helen has no intention of looking out of the window, but has tactically positioned herself as far away from this new girl as British Airways would legally allow her. She was probably the single smelliest person I have ever had the misfortune of being nasally competent near. And at this point as you will recall, dear blog-glancer, I couldn't smell my elbow from my arsehole.

I could taste her armpits on the air. It was actually ridiculous how bad the smell was. Its potency was frankly impressive. I had been sacrificed to the BO goddess. And Dagley was the priest tearing out my well deodorised heart. Thus when the she-beast started to cry about crashing and dying, I was half-thinking that maybe that wouldn't be such a bad turn of events.

In retrospect, survival was probably the logical answer. If only Lynx did an Africa for women.

After the iron bird we entered the iron vole, my first Mumbai rickshaw. A baptism of fire to say the least. Whilst 'driving' along at forty miles an hour on a road that had the topography of Ray Liotta's cheeks, our cabbie was trying to ask directions from the driver of a moped that was carrying at least four generations of a family. 

But, again, we didn't die, and eventually we reached the catering college that we were to bed down in.

That night we met Girish, an Indian feller that Helen had contacted through work, who had booked our train tickets for the next day, down to Kochi in Kerala. We took our first (and at the time of writing, only) public bus to downtown Mumbai, had a mooch around, had a good curry and went down to see the 'Gateway to India', a place that means nothing to anyone - least of all Indian people.

But, again, we didn't die.

Not even an incident with a pigeon.

So, the next morning we got down to Mumbai station, where it was clear that a lot of people probably had died. But that's for another fruity bloghurt that you can lick the lid of. (Clare this is a metaphor, please don't get upset.)