Words

4 January, 2008

 

Airport Refugee

 

After almost three full days of non-stop travelling, the sensory experiences began to mesh in my numb mind. The only noticeable difference, as I forged an island-hopping, airport-laced path from the north-western hemisphere to the south-eastern portion of the globe, seemed to be the mutability in the accents of other travellers. Other than American English turning into Fijian and other Pacific Islander languages and finally back into a Kiwi-dominated dialect of English, the planes, the terminals, the layovers and the overprices amenities became one string of blurry ground oases amidst so many trips back into the stratosphere. It took five flights to get to where I was going so it must be special. My sore neck could attest to the fact that the last four nights - or, more accurately, periods of restless rest, as they can properly be called, because nights were a misnomer during so much jet-lagged time-zone manoeuvring – had been spent in positions that would make a contortionist jealous.

 

My already foreboding journey from Seattle to southern New Zealand didn’t start well, when, on my way to SeaTac on New Year’s Eve, 12 hours before my flight was supposed to land in Los Angeles , a representative from the airline, bless her heart for working during a holiday, called to announce that the flight had been cancelled. I was hesitant to accept their offer of a new flight, which would be indirect, stopping in San Francisco, because I feared a delay on either leg could potentially doom my next, much longer trans-Pacific flight to Fiji from LA. But the airline offered no choice. The next morning, like clockwork, my departure to San Francisco was delayed, when the plane pulled off the runway mid-takeoff, and sat on the tarmac for an hour, the captain eventually revealing reluctantly that an emergency light flashed during our attempt at takeoff.

 

The ground crew fixed the problem and we were off, but I was sure that I would miss the next flight, from San Francisco to LA. Fortunately, my predictions of New Year’s flight delays were more accurate than I thought, because arriving in San Francisco I learned that my connecting flight was also held at the gate. I had just barely enough time to jump on board for the short trip to LA. At this point I felt like I was in the clear.

 

Schedule:

1. January 1^st  12pm Seattle > 2:50pm San Francisco

2. January 1^st  3:15pm San Francisco > 5pm Los Angeles

    (5 hour layover in Los Angeles )

3. January 1^st  10pm Los Angeles > 5am (January 3^rd) Nadi , Fiji

4. January 3^rd  3pm Nadi , Fiji > 7pm Auckland , New Zealand

    (15 hour layover in Auckland )

5. January 4^th  12pm Auckland > 2:50pm Queenstown, South Island , New Zealand

Total Travel Time = somewhere between 3 and 4 days

 

Right up until landing, I expected to enjoy a day exploring Fiji, possibly taking in a much anticipated day at the beach after enduring the beginnings of a typically cold Pacific Northwest winter. But a midsummer morning deluge dampened my plans. Exiting the airport terminal at 5:30am, after passing the welcome group of local men in flower print skirts, fresh bougainvilleas tucked neatly behind their ears, strumming an artificially joyful Fijian riff on their petite ukulele-type island guitars at this ungodly hour, I entered a dowsing downpour. Immediately turning back into the terminal, the hawk-eyed taxi drivers on the arrival curb noticed my change of direction.

 

“Bula (welcome), suh! You don’t want to see the island today?”

“Not a chance in this awful weather”

“You will be missing out.”

 

I wondered on what. Drizzle?

 

Exhausted, I walked into the international departures terminal and collapsed on a sticky leather sofa in the intense humidity - the rain outside the terminal somehow managing to moisten everything inside as if there were no roof. In an attempt to mediate my jetlag – somehow the 1^st of January had become the 3^rd during my flight – I slept intermittently for five or six hours, soaking up moisture, sweating in my unwashed jeans smelling of old but sweet new years’ Champagne, and breathing in thick mouthfuls of wet, tepid air. Even the local men were feeling the heat. Various airport workers had wandered inside the terminal for the old sloth ‘n sweat on the comfortable leather couches. But they had an advantage over me: rather than pants, they were wearing only some sort of colorful sarongs, tied around their waists, allowing any possibility of a cooling breeze to gush into their open-ended garb and chill their steaming nether regions. I didn’t blame them. In fact, I was jealous. But I was a little concerned about the guys sitting on the couches across from me, legs folded. When they slunk into more comfortable sitting positions and readjusted their legs, there seemed to be a high likelihood of me experiencing the male version of a Sharon Stone Basic Instinct moment, leaving nothing to the imagination. Apparently it was just my imagination running wild, however. These guys had been in public before. They knew how to do a sitting shift without exposing themselves.

 

The rainstorm turned out to be a boon though, because in order to get out of the humidity I decided to check into my flight three hours ahead of departure. I ended up needing all three of those hours, though, because when I attempted to check-in, the ticket agent asked for, “Identification and proof of onward travel please.”

“Proof of onward travel?”

“Yes. A ticket, an itinerary, something to show me you have a flight out of New Zealand. We are required to see proof or you won’t be allowed to fly. You do have an onward ticket, right?”

“Oh, oh yes,” I lied. “Yes, but I don’t have it printed out so…,” I waited for him to let me slide. I wasn’t aware of this rule and was planning on buying onward tickets for each segment as I traveled.

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t issue you a boarding pass until you show me proof. There’s internet available in the café and you can email me your itinerary, I can print it, and you will have proof to show me and the immigration agent in Auckland.”

“Uhh,” I balked, having no such email proof to show him. But the wheels were already spinning. I had “produced” such a fake itinerary once before, in Brazil, under the nose of questioning authorities, with success. It seemed the only option.

“Okay, I will send it to you,” I asserted and ran toward the café nervously, beads of humidity starting to form on my forehead.

 

The café manager alerted me that their internet connection was down due to the storm. I felt panic and sweat emanate through my skin. I scoured the tiny third-world airport for internet connections, passing broken-down kiosks and non-connected machines, until I came across what must have been the only functioning terminal in the entire Nadi airport: a kiosk attached to a wet, slimy keyboard, whose keys stuck on virtually every stroke, producing double letters. It was the only one working so it would have to do.

 

I quickly searched a couple of online websites that produced reasonably professional looking tentative itineraries, pasted one into my email, invented a six-digit confirmation code, made the changes that were necessary for the itinerary to look real, and emailed it to the check-in desk.

 

It worked.

 

The agent printed the itinerary and showed it to his boss, who nodded, looking skeptically at me, and handed me my boarding card. Disaster averted. Soaking through clothes not averted.

 

My plane arrived in Auckland around 8pm the evening of the 3^rd. I had fifteen hours to kill before my morning flight to the South Island. And I was unbelievably fatigued. My options were: to call my old Kiwi friends in Auckland; venture into the city to find an overpriced dormitory to sleep in; or bide my time close to the airport. My options soon evaporated. My friends didn’t answer their mobile phones and the cheap hostels I rang were all booked. Option three, then. It was summer, I reasoned, the beautiful season when outdoor living, even at night, is appropriate and welcomed, as far as I was concerned. Hooray for summer. Checking the flight monitors in the international terminal, I noticed that the last flights arrived around midnight and the first flights in the morning departed at 5am. Therefore, I could foresee only about a three hour gap when the airport might close and an airport refugee like myself would be kicked out of the terminal and into the streets.

 

I had time to kill so I wandered the terminal. Eventually I found myself three floors up, in a dark, cool level, called the Lookout Lounge, above the airport and overlooking the outdoor area of the international departure gates. I noticed a set of bench-like chairs perfect for sleeping, pressed close to the shadowy ten-foot-high glass viewing panels, where I could lay flat and drift off to sleep using my travel-soiled clothes as a pillow. There I could watch the 747s and 767s approach, offload passengers and gear, reload, and depart silently into the night sky. Finally, genuine comfort.

 

There I for the next six hours. Amazingly, nobody came up and rustled me out of my sleep, sending me to the streets. In this paradise, the only noise interrupting my jetlag coma was the incessant hourly announcement, in a softened Kiwi accent, that “The Auckland Transit Authority would like to inform passengers that they may not board the aircraft with any liquids or gels.” I drifted in and out of sleep in this manner, my sore neck rearranging itself for a semblance of comfort while my travel-weary brain drifted in and out of dreams of planes taking off, landing and forever moving on.

 

The next morning I checked back in for my final flight to the glacial-ridden fjordlands of the southern portion of New Zealand’s South Island. Despite my fatigue I managed to heed the announcement, still in my head from the night before, and did not board the aircraft with any liquids or gels, other than the carry-on mush that my brain become.