The Long Way Home

We thought that was supposed to be the end of it.

One last night at Spice Village, then back to Kochi, on to Dubai, and home to the UK. A long journey, certainly, but a straightforward one.

It did not quite turn out that way.

While we had been travelling, events far beyond our holiday had begun to unfold. News filtered through that the United States had carried out bombing raids in Iran, and the situation across the Middle East was becoming increasingly uncertain. With airspace restrictions changing day by day, the usual routes home through Dubai were no longer possible, and suddenly our carefully planned return looked far less certain.

As the situation developed, our tour company told us that we would not be flying home as scheduled. Instead, arrangements were being made to reroute us completely away from the Middle East. The new plan was to gather the group in southern India, move us across to Sri Lanka, and from there board a specially chartered aircraft that would take us directly back to the UK a few days later.

It was not especially dramatic for those of us involved, more a slow-moving logistical exercise than an adventure, but it did mean the end of the holiday would be rather different from what we had expected.

On Thursday we left Spice Village and travelled back towards Kochi. At first, everything followed the original plan, and we spent a night in the same hotel we had stayed in earlier in the tour. The following day, however, we were moved to a large hotel close to the airport, where around a hundred fellow passengers from different parts of the tour had begun to gather. There was a strange feeling of being in limbo, no longer really on holiday, but not yet properly on the way home either.

On Friday we flew east across India to Chennai, where we spent the night in another airport hotel, bags half-packed and plans still uncertain. There was not much to do in the area, and it was not somewhere suited to wandering out for a walk or exploring. We felt especially sorry for some of the other groups, who had already been there for several days waiting for arrangements to be made.

The hotel was clearly not expecting such large numbers at short notice, and the service struggled at times, something I am sure they would have preferred to avoid as well. Information from the tour company was not always as clear as it had been earlier in the trip, which led to a little frustration among the group, myself included.

Still, we made the best of it. My wife and I spent a couple of hours in the morning up on the rooftop, sitting in the sun beside the pool, and for a while it almost felt as though we were back on holiday again rather than waiting for news of how to get home.

Roof Terrace and Pool

The following day we continued on to Colombo in Sri Lanka: another short flight, another hotel, and another wait, all of us now simply looking forward to the moment when the journey would finally turn towards home.

This hotel was much larger and far better prepared for the sudden arrival of tour groups. It was full of Distant Journeys guests, with another nearby hotel also being used, and in total more than four hundred passengers had been brought together from different tours across Asia to join the charter flight back to the UK.

Tuk Tuk Tour

With a little time to spare, five of us joined a short tour organised by the hotel into central Colombo, including a trip up the Lotus Tower for a view across the city. After India, Colombo felt noticeably cleaner and more orderly. The traffic was still busy, but more controlled, and pedestrians seemed far more disciplined, not quite to UK standards, but a definite contrast to what we had become used to.

Our first stops took us through the older parts of the city, where wide colonial buildings with white arches and shaded walkways lined the streets, reminders of the British period that still shapes much of Colombo’s centre. In places the architecture felt almost European, but step onto the next street and the atmosphere changed completely, with busy shopfronts, bright signs, tuk-tuks weaving through the traffic, and handcarts piled high with boxes being pushed along the roadside.

We passed the old lighthouse at the seafront, standing on its solid stone base and looking out towards the harbour, and then drove on to the red-and-white striped Jami Ul-Alfar Mosque, one of the most distinctive buildings in the city, its patterned walls and arches looking almost too elaborate to be real in the midday sun.

From there the tour moved on to one of the city’s Buddhist temples, where the noise of the streets gave way to a quieter, more reflective atmosphere. Inside, golden statues and offerings filled the shrines, flowers laid carefully before the Buddha, while outside a sacred tree stood protected by railings and cloths, with worshippers moving slowly around it in prayer.

The final stop was the Lotus Tower, Colombo’s most modern landmark, its tall green column rising high above the city with the purple lotus-shaped top visible from almost everywhere. From the viewing platform the whole of Colombo spread out below us: lakes and canals cutting through the city, port cranes along the shoreline, old neighbourhoods giving way to newer high-rise buildings, and beyond all of it the deep blue of the Indian Ocean stretching to the horizon.

The view from the Lotus Tower

It was only a short tour, but it gave us a final glimpse of another country we had never expected to visit at all, and a reminder that even an unplanned detour can add something unexpected to a journey.

That evening we had our final meal of the trip before boarding the coach for the airport. By this point all four hundred passengers were working their way through check-in, security and immigration, swapping stories of delays, rerouted flights and unexpected hotel stays as the different groups compared their experiences.

Last Photo: flying home

Despite the long night ahead, an eleven-hour flight followed by coach, car or train journeys across the UK, spirits were high. After everything that had happened, everyone was simply glad that the way home was finally in sight.

In the end, the journey home turned out to be almost as memorable as the holiday itself, not because of where we went, but because of how unexpectedly it all unfolded. What should have been a simple flight back became a slow gathering of people from different parts of India, then Sri Lanka, all of us sharing the same slightly unreal sense of waiting for the final piece of the journey to fall into place.

It was not the dramatic ending you might imagine, just a series of hotels, airports and conversations with fellow travellers, but somehow it felt like a fitting close to the trip. India had never quite gone the way we expected, and perhaps it was only right that the journey home did not either.

By the time the aircraft finally lifted off from Colombo and turned towards the UK, there was a sense not only of relief, but also of quiet satisfaction. It had been a long trip, at times tiring, occasionally chaotic, often fascinating, and very different from anything we had done before.

Not always easy. Not always comfortable. But certainly memorable…. and, in its own way, exactly the kind of adventure we had come for.