Night Market and a Red-Eye Home

The plan, if you can call it that, was to stay awake until the Uber arrived at eleven. After dinner I decided to explore the night market for a couple of hours to pass the time.

The market was worth the walk. An hour of browsing stalls in the warm evening, picking up things for the flight: dried mango, some kind of nut mix, a packet of biscuits with a name I couldn’t pronounce. Nothing essential. The right way to spend a last hour in a city.

After the night market I had nothing to do but sit in the hotel room with a bag of flight snacks and wait. Sleeping for two hours before a long overnight flight is worse than not sleeping at all. I had learned this.

The Uber arrived on time. The airport road at eleven at night was nearly empty, a contrast to the same road at rush hour that afternoon. Fifteen minutes, no traffic.

Check-in was already done. All that remained was to collect the boarding pass, clear security, and get through immigration, which took about forty minutes without incident. I found a restaurant past security, ordered chicken (it is hard to go wrong with chicken at an airport at midnight), and settled in to wait.

The flight left Mumbai at 2:25 in the morning, on time. My seat was 59D, which looks alarming on paper but turned out to be genuinely good: the row sits at the rear of the cabin where there is no seat directly behind, so I could recline without any drama. There were only two of us in a row of four. I moved to the aisle seat, the other passenger stretched out across the remaining three, and we both got as much sleep as a night flight allows. No films, no podcasts. Just rest.

We landed in Amsterdam slightly early, which mattered because the connection was exactly one hour and required both passport control and security. I made it through with about twenty minutes to spare, enough for a quick pass through the duty-free hall and nothing else. Then the short flight to Stockholm, which landed on time.

I ordered a Bolt from the arrivals hall. 469 kronor, reasonable for a city transfer, and I was home before noon.

Twenty-eight days. Two countries. One overnight train, several domestic flights, a safari, a houseboat, and more local buses than I kept count of. The only things that went seriously wrong were a sunstroke on day seven and a connection I nearly missed on day thirteen.

I would go back.

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