Uncertain Voyage

After traveling extensively across Europe over the past three years, we decided it was time to explore a different part of the globe, somewhere easily reachable from Paris within a few hours. North Africa seemed promising, with Morocco and Egypt at the top of our list. However, the weather wasn’t ideal for either destination. Despite the weather concerns, we settled on Morocco and began gathering tourist information. For most French people, Morocco is practically a backyard, but being Indian, we needed to obtain a visa.

The visa process began with numerous frustrating attempts to get through to the embassy by phone. Eventually, we decided to visit the embassy in person to submit all necessary documents. The process went smoothly, and the woman in charge informed us it would take 15 days to get our visa. When we asked if we should buy our tickets to Morocco, she referred us to her higher authority, who assured us gently that we should have no problem obtaining the visa after 10 days and that it was okay to buy the tickets.

Excited, we started planning our trip and gathering more information. However, Santanu, ever the skeptic, was hesitant to purchase the tickets and kept postponing it. Despite his excitement, he called the embassy the day before his CISM test to check the visa status. The answer was negative. Santanu went to the consulate in person on Monday, June 12th, and received the same negative response. He was told to return on Thursday, June 15th, to collect the visa for our journey scheduled to start on Saturday, June 17th. Unfortunately, Thursday brought no luck either, leaving Santanu furious.

As the saying goes, “**Man proposes, and God disposes.” **Our excitement dissipated like a puff of smoke as we didn’t receive the visa within the promised timeframe. Since Santanu’s holidays were mandatory, he would lose them if he didn’t use them.

We had a backup plan for Morocco, but it was never seriously considered. The plan was to visit French cities and towns we hadn’t yet explored, such as Nice, Bordeaux, Bayonne, and Chamonix, along with parts of Switzerland. It might sound like a crazy idea, but we are truly adventurous when it comes to traveling. The search for last-minute tickets began, and since there were no discounted tickets on the SNCF website, the only option we found was a round-trip ticket from Paris to Lausanne for Friday, June 16th.

We started making phone calls to friends who had already been there for more information. For this trip, Santanu wanted to travel with his big red North Face backpack and was not interested in making any itinerary plans or pre-booking hotels. He seemed to embrace the spirit of the famous Bengali song by Hemanta Mukerjee, “**Path harabo boleyi toh aaj pothey nameychi…” ** (I got down on the road only to get lost ..).

Bonne voyage!!!