We were headed to Kolkata (Calcutta, of old) to spend our final night in India before jetting off to Thailand. Finally, we’re on our way out of here. Or so we thought. Phil (Claire’s dad and our helpful travel consultant) called as we were on the train, just a few hours away from the city. “Bangkok airport’s closed. Protests.”

This country won’t let us leave just yet. I’ll spare you the long story: we confirmed the news with the airline in Kolkata, our flight had indeed been cancelled. From Kolkata, destinational choices are somwhat limited and Squiffy didn’t much like the idea of flying backwards to Delhi or Mumbai to open-up our options. If we couldn’t get to Thailand, we couldn’t get to the Angkor Wat in Cambodia either. Should probably shelve Loas for the time being also — we’ll come back to do the three in a future trip. Perth, Australia, sounds really great right now and we could connect from Singapore. Don’t have an Aussie visa though. In fact, let’s just fly to Singapore and explore the surrounding area until our visa comes in. Next flight is only another day away. Booked.

So we had a ‘free’ day in Kolkata — actually a city that we really didn’t want to see at all. Many guidebooks claim that Kolkata is the poorest and dirtiest of all major Indian cities. Actually, from my experience, I’d dispute this. We were done with dirt and so paid a bit more for accommodation (to £13/night), food and took taxis around town. We ate cheese and tomato sanwiches for breakfast at a five-star hotel and I discovered that our hotel did the best Indian curry that I’ve come across in my month and a half in this country. Kolkata also has a great book store and nearby booksellers on street. We stocked-up with a number of cheap Indian-print books to tide us over in the next leg of our tour. No, I’m pleased to report the Kolkata that we saw was actually rather nice. Having said that, it’s still India and we now quite desperately want to leave the dirt and noise of this country behind.

That morning, as we were biting into our toastie, terror struck. Last night the Indian news channels had reported a “firing” at the Leopold Cafe in Mumbai, but details were scant and we figured that it was an individual, isolated shooting. The plasma screen in this town-centre Western-standard hotel opened our eyes to the bigger picture. Several major sites around Mumbai city were under siege, held by terrorists who had already killed and injured scores of innocent people and were potentially holding hundreds more hostage. We spent much of the day glued to the television, the news channels constantly feeding out speculative–often incorrect–details. Even though we were on the opposite side of India, it felt very close to home and we were extremely shocked and saddened for the people caught up in the tragic events. Whilst extremely grateful that we were well away from Mumbai, our disappointment at not being able to leave on a flight to Bangkok turned to dread when the news channel reported that all major Indian airports were reported to be on high alert: was it going to be safe for us to fly to Singapore even? It was one of those days when the reality of trouble in this part of the world was brought home to us, and we just wanted to be at home in the UK.