En Route

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Maui to Honolulu (3PM - 4.45PM)

The first leg of the journey was wholly unremarkable. I spent the hour before I got on the plane on the phone, chatting to the Northern English Waitress. She regaled me with tales of the Gold Coast including a failed attempt to get a tattoo or a lip piercing (she settled for a second in her ear - rebel.) The majority of a flight from one Hawaiian island to the next is, for the most part, getting to altitude and then descending.

Honolulu to LAX (4.45PM - 6AM LA time)

Honolulu airport was a five hour affair that included a second call to the Northern English Waitress, a coffee and brownie from Starbucks (there’s literally nothing else there ok, give me a break) waiting for two hours before I was allowed to check my bag and myself in and then being told that I would have to go through the same process again at LAX. I went through the gates, listening to Monty Python’s Contractually Obligated Album (“Here comes another one”) and watched a documentary on CNN about some serial killer from Atlanta in the 80s. The flight itself was mostly spent sleeping. I weighed up whether or not to purchase a headset and watch the in-flight movie but upon discovering that it was “Prince of Persia” the decision was made for me. Seriously, why is Jake Gyllenhall putting on a British accent to play a Persian?

LAX to Bogota (6AM - 9PM Bogota time)

I landed at LAX, picked up my bag and went straight to the Avianca desk. Being only just a little later than 6AM, they weren’t open. I camped out on my pack and read my book - “The Gringo Trai”, a book that promised to be about wild, drug-fuelled times in South America but failed to deliver (but to be fair, I’ve been glad in hindsight to have read it). People started lining up for Avianca about an hour and a half later and I eventually decided to join the queue. Waiting was a mistake. Avianca was my first taste of the famed South American incompetence. When they finally opened the desk and started checking people in, the queue moved at a snail’s pace - mainly, I suspect, due to their more than generous baggage allowance of no more than TWO bags of 23 kgs each! I thought my 16 kgs of luggage seemed excessive until I saw the Avianca queue. To these South Americans, 46 kgs wasn’t a limit, it was a challenge! Two sisters who had been to LA on a shopping trip took the cake for most ridiculous baggage but the amount of luggage in that queue was unbelievable. And the kicker was that they didn’t have a luggage conveyor belt behind them to put the bags on once you had checked in - you then had to take it to another scanning point to get it on the flight.
I went through the gates, had some breakfast at Wolfgang Puck’s (good eggs, shitty decore), bought another book and some cough drops (the week of recycled air in Hawaii had finally caught up with my throat) and boarded the flight for Bogota. I found m seat and met Oscar.
Oscar was a Peruvian but his family lived in the States and he had spent the last three months of the Summer holidays with them in Arizona. He was a really friendly, chatty bloke but he had a total lack of aeroplane etiquette. He spoke in a voice that could be heard around the cabin and topics for discussion, well...
Scene: The wheels of the plane have literally just left the tarmac.
Oscar - “I think if the plane crashed I would be the only one to survive. Like, if the plane went down, everone else would die but I just have a feeling I would be ok...”
Scene: Mid-air
Oscar - “What would you do if terrorists took over the plane?”
Me - (Painfully aware that this isn’t a discussion I want to be seen engaging in, so using my smallest voice) “I dunno. What would you do?”
Oscar - “Man, I would take them on. You know, you’re gunna die anyway, might as well go down fighting. That’s why I think they should give all the airline stewards guns...”
Oscar had just turned 21 and was heading back to Lima to be with his wife, who had just given birth to their first son. She was mad with him. I asked him how old his son was.
Oscar - “He’s five months old.”
Me - “Haven’t you spent the last three months in America?”
Oscar - “Yeah, that’s why she’s mad at me, she didn’t want me to go. So I guess she’ll be mad for a while but I give her a month and then she better get over it.”
Given the context of that conversation, I wasn’t so offended when, having given my seat to two Dominican women at Bogota airport, Oscar said laughing, “Man, you’re so white”.

Bogota to Lima (9:55PM - 12:50AM)

Though I had enjoyed Oscar’s company, I was glad to be sitting slightly further away from the guy on the final leg of my flight - I was in seat 15A and he was in 15F. But when I got on the plane, two old women had taken 15A and B, so I was once again seated next to Oscar. This time around he slept. I knocked over “The Gringo Trail” and started the book I’d bought at LAX - “The Bricklayer” (typical American crime novel about a former FBI agent who was a “loose cannon” but only he can solve the crime they’re facing. Garbage, but enjoyable enough garbage, kinda like a Matthew Reilly novel).
Landing at Lima, I walked through customs (again, no questions of tickets out of the country) picked up my bags, exchanged some US dollars for Peruvian Soles and met the cab driver the hostel had sent to pick me up, holding a board with my name on it and everything!
I walked in to the Lima night to hear the wail of car sirens. Jorge, my cab driver, seemed eratic but it turns out that just the way they drive in Lima - lanes are present but optional and the horn is to be used at every possible opportunity. He dropped me off at my hostel, the “Flying Dog B & B” in the affluent suburb of Miraflores. It had been 30 hours since I’d said goodbye to Blake and Rhiannon at Maui. I fired off a quick email to the Northern English waitress and one to my little sister and fell into bed for the next 13 hours.

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