Delhiwale: Foreign holiday, with no jet lag

You can spend a whole day here travelling across countries and hopping flights with zero baggage

Isn’t it a hassle to file visa forms for EU nations? Besides asking us for our passport, we have to furnish our return flight ticket, salary slips, bank accounts and a signed letter from our employers.

For a dream escape from the capital, board the Airport Metro Express from New Delhi railway station and get off 20 minutes later at Terminal 3. Go up a series of escalators and enter a hall. (Mayank Austen Soofi / HT Photo)

So, we have devised a way to savour the charms of foreign travel while remaining in our own city. Once every week, we board the Airport Metro Express from New Delhi railway station and get off 20 minutes later at Terminal 3, Indira Gandhi international airport. We go up a series of escalators and enter a hall.

This is our dream escape from Delhi — located just before the corridor that connects the arrival and departure terminals.

The hall has two or three open cafés. Our favourite spot is a window-side table (you can sit even if you don’t order anything). Here we spend hours watching the travellers in various shades of emotions — sad, happy, excited, nervous.

The view from the window is also special. Planes descending on the tarmac, one after the other, seem to bring us close to the exotic places they are coming from.

And did we mention the flight informational panels?

Scanning them is like reading a poetry anthology of dream journeys: The check-in has begun for the flight to Paris. The plane from Geneva has landed. The arrival of the Helsinki flight has been delayed by an hour — oh, that probably means it is flying over Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains at this very moment.

Later, when we take a return Metro, we feel like we’re entering our city after a long holiday.