It is indeed odd how an experience such as travel changes you. Now that I have reached the ripe old age where I am receiving such AARP offers as membership and insurance, my travels are still as central to my life as anything. Indeed I have learned to work, in order to feed my passion for more. I work, I tend my garden, I review my photos, and secretly plan my next foray abroad. I remain in contact with new friends and old, in countries where I might be able to catch a glimpse of the sun, especially when it is foggy and cold here.
My first trip abroad, after having been married but a year, was to teach in Guatemala. The school buying our flight there, two years later, a savy travelrs we first stealthily obtained work with a school on the plantation of a major banana exporter and rode there banana boat back to the states. Landing in our first international post in the dead of night, we left it at sunset with the jungle and birds and harbor, with people waving to us o the dock as the ship steamed out the harbor.
Now, I being of stanch and proudly naïve stock, had assured both myself and my wife at the time, that all would be well. After all the schools Encyclopedia Britannica (the leading source of all things knowledgeable at the time, this being 1980) said the country was quite beautiful, populated with cheery Mayan peasants, and sunny all the time. I had neglected to check the date of the source it being found in my elementary school library in Portland, Oregon, which being as things are, was woefully out of date. The parts about the sun, the cheeriness of the peasants, and the natural beauty were still correct, the part about the bloody, violent, US supported civil war hadn’t quite made it to the edition that I had gained access to.
So, all things being apocalyptic, as we made plans to move there, Mt. St. Helens blew up, and soon rained ash upon our beleaguered burg. Packing vials of the ash, and clippings from the newspaper related to nature in its primitive fury, we boarded our flight south, which at the time seamed endless. Only to find that such occurrences were common, indeed a volcano that was a mere 20km off the end of the runway at La Aurora, could be seen jetting fountains of lava into the sky from the city, and could be climbed when it was “resting”, and it routinely buried villages in meters of ash .
Arriving, with trunks and luggage (filled at the time with things that proved to be useless), I instinctly knew that one must arrive with trunks, though with post 9/11 one has learned to travel with a backpack and a laptop) at 1am, we were greeted not only by the American School’s vice-principal and whisked past the military guards (where they here for the teachers?) and to our apartment house. I remember flying for hours in the darkness, only to turn and see suddenly the lights of the city below. When the plane landed people clapped. When planes land now, people don’t clap, they just want to get off the plane and get something to eat.
At risk of sounding like, the late and my very much beloved Mrs. H. B. who I did house repairs for when I lived in Portland, and who had been an ambassador to the League of Nations and had in “her day” traveled widely and tastefully – never first class but always comfortable – she traveled everywhere - including throughout then Nazi Germany (with diplomatic immunity) with a very large hat and a pair of Pekinese dogs - travel now is not fun. Thought there are many airports that have managed to remain civilized while giving you the once over, my home port is not amongst them, it being plagued by masses of people that once populated bus depots in the past, and now are choosing to fly. But I digress…
There I was in Central America, in the middle of a civil war, and travelers were greeted in the middle of the night (after having been well fed, and attended to I might add) with a marimba band! Here, if one can even call anything related to customer service, service, the treatment is often cold if not rude. And there is rarely marimba music, though some airports have ingenious underground tubes of light and sound that pass as entertainment, in a Disneyland people-mover sense of the word.
Now I must admit, on my last trip abroad as a Fulbright scholar to Nepal, I was asked to bring books, which if you know about professional college tomes, tend to be both ridiculously expensive and heavy. The woman at the United check in counter in Sacramento, a check-in counter known to be surly if not mean, was going to charge me $350.00 for the 7 lb overage I had accrued. Luckily I had a small back pack in the top of my one bag, and she suggested I fish out book after book, as she watch the gage change until I was at the limit. I tried to convince her that both I and my books had planned to fly on the same planes but she would have none of it! Rules being rules are to be strictly enforced, especially by employees of bloated bureaucracies and transnational corporations whose budgets are bigger than that of the impoverished country that I was going to visit. On my return, via Royal Nepal Airlines to Hong Kong, the check in clerk noticed that my bag was 2 kilos over… he looked at the gage, and then at me, and asked, “how did you like Nepal?”
I smiled, and said, “I hope to return soon”.
He replied as he heaved the bag over to the belt with the bagged tag attached, and returned with a smile.
“We look forward to your next visit, sir”.
My first trip abroad, after having been married but a year, was to teach in Guatemala. The school buying our flight there, two years later, a savy travelrs we first stealthily obtained work with a school on the plantation of a major banana exporter and rode there banana boat back to the states. Landing in our first international post in the dead of night, we left it at sunset with the jungle and birds and harbor, with people waving to us o the dock as the ship steamed out the harbor.
Now, I being of stanch and proudly naïve stock, had assured both myself and my wife at the time, that all would be well. After all the schools Encyclopedia Britannica (the leading source of all things knowledgeable at the time, this being 1980) said the country was quite beautiful, populated with cheery Mayan peasants, and sunny all the time. I had neglected to check the date of the source it being found in my elementary school library in Portland, Oregon, which being as things are, was woefully out of date. The parts about the sun, the cheeriness of the peasants, and the natural beauty were still correct, the part about the bloody, violent, US supported civil war hadn’t quite made it to the edition that I had gained access to.
So, all things being apocalyptic, as we made plans to move there, Mt. St. Helens blew up, and soon rained ash upon our beleaguered burg. Packing vials of the ash, and clippings from the newspaper related to nature in its primitive fury, we boarded our flight south, which at the time seamed endless. Only to find that such occurrences were common, indeed a volcano that was a mere 20km off the end of the runway at La Aurora, could be seen jetting fountains of lava into the sky from the city, and could be climbed when it was “resting”, and it routinely buried villages in meters of ash .
Arriving, with trunks and luggage (filled at the time with things that proved to be useless), I instinctly knew that one must arrive with trunks, though with post 9/11 one has learned to travel with a backpack and a laptop) at 1am, we were greeted not only by the American School’s vice-principal and whisked past the military guards (where they here for the teachers?) and to our apartment house. I remember flying for hours in the darkness, only to turn and see suddenly the lights of the city below. When the plane landed people clapped. When planes land now, people don’t clap, they just want to get off the plane and get something to eat.
At risk of sounding like, the late and my very much beloved Mrs. H. B. who I did house repairs for when I lived in Portland, and who had been an ambassador to the League of Nations and had in “her day” traveled widely and tastefully – never first class but always comfortable – she traveled everywhere - including throughout then Nazi Germany (with diplomatic immunity) with a very large hat and a pair of Pekinese dogs - travel now is not fun. Thought there are many airports that have managed to remain civilized while giving you the once over, my home port is not amongst them, it being plagued by masses of people that once populated bus depots in the past, and now are choosing to fly. But I digress…
There I was in Central America, in the middle of a civil war, and travelers were greeted in the middle of the night (after having been well fed, and attended to I might add) with a marimba band! Here, if one can even call anything related to customer service, service, the treatment is often cold if not rude. And there is rarely marimba music, though some airports have ingenious underground tubes of light and sound that pass as entertainment, in a Disneyland people-mover sense of the word.
Now I must admit, on my last trip abroad as a Fulbright scholar to Nepal, I was asked to bring books, which if you know about professional college tomes, tend to be both ridiculously expensive and heavy. The woman at the United check in counter in Sacramento, a check-in counter known to be surly if not mean, was going to charge me $350.00 for the 7 lb overage I had accrued. Luckily I had a small back pack in the top of my one bag, and she suggested I fish out book after book, as she watch the gage change until I was at the limit. I tried to convince her that both I and my books had planned to fly on the same planes but she would have none of it! Rules being rules are to be strictly enforced, especially by employees of bloated bureaucracies and transnational corporations whose budgets are bigger than that of the impoverished country that I was going to visit. On my return, via Royal Nepal Airlines to Hong Kong, the check in clerk noticed that my bag was 2 kilos over… he looked at the gage, and then at me, and asked, “how did you like Nepal?”
I smiled, and said, “I hope to return soon”.
He replied as he heaved the bag over to the belt with the bagged tag attached, and returned with a smile.
“We look forward to your next visit, sir”.
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