Goodbyes were short and sweet. As soon as my bag was checked in at Heathrow, my Dad and I said goodbye, had one of those quick, awkward hugs that men do, for some reason, and that was that. Every now and then, the universe in general and the bit of it that’s electronic and plays music seems to get the idea. I’m leaving home properly, leaving my country, for a bit of an adventure, and my newly bought and frankly fucking recalcitrant MP3 player, as I’m walking out of departures and down the long maze of corridors to the boarding gate, randomises round to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’. Even if you don’t make a habit of listening to the Zep, you’ve heard Kashmir. It’s this one:
Properly filmic, dynamic walking music. Sometimes things sync up. Also, for the first time ever, I went upstairs on a 747. Not for the shiny flat-bed nonsense with the champagne and all that, but they had some economy seating up there too, and I’d highly recommend it if you get the chance. Five or six rows, no screaming kids, two stewards just aching to refill your g&t, an almost perfect toilet-to-passenger ratio. Almost worth the 800-odd quid ticket, in fact.
In Miami, I turned into Hugh Grant to deal with the customs and immigration people. It seemed easier just to add ‘I’m terribly sorry’ to every sentence and let them think ‘another dumb Brit’ than actually try to interact with them on a human level. They might actually be automatons, come to think of it. Although the chap who told me to take off my belt and boots before going through the whole body scanner (!) was slightly more interested than any TSA operative has a right to be.
American Airlines flight from Miami to La Paz was. Well. I’d rather not go through it again, let’s put it that way. I was so far down the alarmingly small plane that I began to scan my boarding pass for the words ‘sitting on the engine’. I was in the middle of a row and I am not a small, easily compactible dude. The food was genuinely god-awful – I had fundamentally the same thing as on the Virgin flight – beef stew, mash, carrots and french beans, a salad, some sort of biscuity thing and a bread roll. On Virgin, the beef was tender, tasty, undersalted but something I’d not be unproud of if I’d cooked it myself. The mash was smooth and potatoey, which is all you can ask of it, and the vegetables had crunch and texture. The (greek) salad was absolutely superb in taste, if a bit heavy on the feta-to-olives ratio for my preferences. The biscuity thing was biscuity. The chocolate pudding was small but perfectly formed, and sublime right down to the lower strata of banoffee stuff. The bread roll looked and tasted like a bread roll. On AA, by stark contrast, the whole beef-mash-veg thing was swimming in liquid – not meat juices or gravy, just…liquid – which was a shame because the cut of beef, forequarter flank or whatever they call it in the States is quite good in any other circumstances. The salad was the cheapest bag-salad you can imagine, all misshapen chunks of iceberg lettuce and dried out carrot shreds, and the dressing was the most astonishing interpretation of ‘oil and vinegar’ I’ve ever seen. It glooped. It glopped. It very possibly moved about the dish under its own steam. The bread roll was a small beige thing that I ate only because it didn’t seem likely to be biodegradable if they threw it away. And the ingredients of the white, sweet butter – 44% something and 4% actual dairy product – left a huge neon questionmark hanging over the other 52%. The biscuity thing was biscuity, but somehow less so.
I passed 6 hours and 50 minutes in flight, and about an hour and a half waiting on the taxiway, in a strange position of inability to find any remotely comfortable way of sitting. If this blog reads a little rambly and disconnected, more so than usual, it’s because I woke up at 6am on Sunday and I haven’t slept since. And I’m in the bar of the hostel, waiting for them to tell me I can check in.
I’ll go into more detail about the hostel and La Paz in another post, but suffice it to say I’ve had a wander around, and it’s filthy, polluted, bright, noisy, dangerous and bloody fantastic. A bit of light-headedness in the airport, and the walk back from the centre of town to the hostel this morning got my heart pounding good and proper, but apart from that I’ve felt very few effects of the altitude. From where I sit, though, I can see the top of the ridge that marks the edge of the El Alto slum city (and it is a slum, there’s no other word) and it seems like another world. Some exploring needed, I feel.
I’m going to sign off now, go and check in, then have a shower, then sleep for approx. 3 years. Cheerio for now.
