When we last left Matt, Andy, and Ben they were in the Mumbai airport, optimistic and jacked up on free espresso. What happened next? Let's find out, shall we? PART TWO: To Chennai. The delay in our flight was worth it as the sun broke on the horizon during take off. We were in the home stretch and it was dawn. The two seemed to fit together. We flew from the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal across the entire breadth of southern India. As we crossed the subcontinent, the mist over the sea began to dissipate, revealing ochre mountains that rose up through the clouds. Ancient mountains, not unlike the Appalachians in the US. Worn and tired with large, rocky bald spots. The full history of India was undeniable when I saw a small stone wall lining the top of a ridge. Only unified since 1947, India used to be many smaller kingdoms that would need such walls to defend themselves. The ridges were in stark relief and the light was so angled that even hay bales cast a long shadow across the many fields that separated the mountains. “Mountains” almost seemed the wrong word. They looked more like the swells that would have run across the earth after someone smacked the Indian Ocean, sending a rush of ripples off towards the Bay of Bengal, breaking over one another. As the waves calmed they smoothed the land into what are now thousands of farms and sent smaller waves on ahead of them. The large plains gave way to longer ridges that punctuated the land with greater density. The dusty brown of the previous hills became softer as more and more trees appeared. From the altitude, the trees looked like patchy green fur that hugged the peaks and valleys where small streams and creeks could be seen. Eventually a wide muddy brown river came into view and the plane was roughly following its route. Bridges and more roads signaled that we were approaching a more developed area, and it was only when a huge dam appeared that I realized that the wide, meandering muddy river wasn’t a river at all. It was dry. This was once a mighty river. I would estimate that it is the size of the James as it winds through Richmond. It was a strangely unnatural sight, but it was only the beginning of the journey from nature to development. Soon the roads grew more plentiful and framed hundreds of orchards. It looked like a dot-matrix printer had produced an image of a forest – very dense, but extremely regimented in a grid. Adjacent many of the orchards were reservoirs and shimmering rice paddies. The combination of the rising sun and the moving plane produced a spectacular sight. Each square rice paddy would light up and shimmer for a second, clearly delineated by the verdant, risen borders and then the light would flow organically into the next paddy, and the next, and the next. It made me think of an electrical charge moving through the motherboard of a computer. The golden glow would quickly fill each square and then ooze into the next. It was mesmerizing. This flight was mercifully short compared to the others. I will never look at a 2 hour flight the same way. You could wrap me in plastic and put me in the microwave for 2 hours and it would be a treat compared to the ordeal of the previous flights, I thought at the time (please don’t microwave me). They served a traditional Indian breakfast with lentils, sweetened semolina, rice, bread, some cereal, and coffee. I was reading the paper, reviewing all the profiles of our clients, staring out the window, taking the notes from which I am pulling right now. After all the abuse of the previous 30 hours, I felt like the multi-tasking master. The four hundred shots of espresso in Mumbai probably played a role as well. We started our descent and then something weird happened. As a frequent flier, you know when something is a little off. We are going down and then all of a sudden the pilot cranks the throttle and starts pulling up hard. A minute or two later another jet rips below us at a 90 degree angle. The captain comes on to say that we can’t land due to visibility and that “the plane you just saw passing below us is also in a holding pattern”. Ummm. Yeah. Once again, this was an opportunity rather than a near death experience. The captain took a long wide loop out over the Bay of Bengal so we could see the beach. What a beach! Half a mile wide and as long as the eye can see. Deep blue. Perfectly calm except for the break of the surf. Big houses and boats lined up. It looked like paradise. Little did I know. As we started our descent again the land below became rapidly urbanized. Large lumbering buses that look 50 years old, tons of motorcycles, a random basketball court (in India?), and the palms. The palms! Tall and beautiful, we were undeniably in the tropics. We were also undeniably in a very poor country because, as the plane drew closer to the ground, I could see palms growing out of houses. Ramshackle, cobbled together, shacks and shanties. Children playing in the dirt. Tattered laundry strung between rooftops. All this just from the plane.