Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

After the decidedly troublesome trip back from Cancún to Providence, the final leg of our journey from Providence to Amsterdam couldn’t have gone more smoothly.

We took the bus from Providence to Boston, arriving for check-in more than two hours ahead of our flight’s scheduled departure time. With a strikingly short queue in front of the counters, the check-in formalities were soon completed and we made our way through the security checks.

After some refreshments, we boarded the plane and were delighted to find it only about 25% occupied. I suppose most people who travel for pleasure around this time of year do so over Christmas and New Year. Few people are going anywhere in the second week of January, except for business travellers. This is clearly the time to travel.

With so few passengers and so little luggage to get on board, our plane managed to leave the gate ten minutes early. A strong tailwind meant that our flying time was just 5h 57m, possibly the fastest crossing I’ve ever made.

Eloïse sat through Jungle Book 2 in its entirety and seemed enthralled by it. After watching a film, I laid down across the four seats at my disposal, made a nice pile of four pillows and went to sleep for a couple of hours. Sarah stayed next to Eloïse, when she really should have moved across the aisle and lain down. Consequently, she hardly slept at all, which was a great pity, as this was such an easy flight to stretch out on.

When we touched down in Amsterdam, we were a full hour ahead of schedule and arrived at a blissfully smoke-free Schiphol. At last!

It took just seconds to pass through passport control. As we emerged on the other side, our bags were the first ones to come out on the conveyor belt. All four bags came out in a row.

The green customs channel was unmanned, so we strolled through it, out of the building and straight to a taxi large enough to accommodate all of our bags and child items.

In spite of the Monday morning rush hour, we got to our front door just a few minutes after the time we had actually been scheduled to land. All in all, this was almost certainly the easiest, most relaxed flight we’ve ever taken. What a relief.

After turning on the floor heating and grabbing a few hours of sleep, we rushed to get Eloïse ready for peuterspeelzaal and then went to Bagels & Beans for lunch. Afterwards, I started working my way through the large pile of post and then went to the supermarket to buy in supplies.

It’s good to be back. I feel as if we were gone for ages, when, in reality, it was really just a little more than three weeks. It must be my sympathetic nesting instinct coming to the fore.

Before we get on the plane to Amsterdam, I wanted to give a quick plug for The Edge in Providence.

The Edge serves delicious coffee (the best I’ve found along the east coast of the US, although I’m admittedly not well-travelled here), as well as tasty sandwiches, wraps and cup cakes. On top of that, they have magazines, free wireless Net access and a few toys for children; and all of that in a relaxed, friendly atmosphere.

In short, if you find yourself in Providence and like excellent coffee, give The Edge a try. I particularly recommend the traditional cappuccino and the Black Cat espresso melange from Intelligentsia.

…than the bullshit begins.

In fact, it had begun before we even touched down in Charlotte. Our flight from Cancún was carrying no I-94W forms on board, one of which I need to fill in before I can re-enter the US. This is the first international flight to the US that I’ve ever been on that didn’t carry a pile of such forms.

With only a 70 minute layover in Charlotte, I did not need to be wasting time filling in my forms on arrival, when I could have done so on the plane. US immigration is notoriously slow and must be undergone (yes, undergone is the right word here) at one’s point of entry, not one’s final destination.

Well, Charlotte turned out to have the slowest immigration processing of any American airport I’ve ever entered the country through. I timed the queues: they were processing individuals at the rate of slower than one person every five minutes. Simple arithmetic demonstrated that, with the number of other poor unfortunates in front of us, it was going to be very tight getting onto our next flight.

We finally got through immigration after being sent to another queue, where a couple of gracious passengers allowed us to go ahead of them when they overheard us talking about missing our connection. There were twenty minutes to go until our flight left. Sounds like plenty, right? Wrong.

You see, they have this other great system here, whereby you also need to reclaim your baggage from the conveyor belt at your point of entry. Once you’ve done that, you carry it about 200 m to another conveyor belt, upon which you place it back into the system. Busy work for psychiatric patients, I call it. How did anyone dream this up? Why can’t this be automated?

But it gets better, of course. Because you’ve now had access to your checked-in bags, you’re now tainted. This means that you now have to go back through security (because you could have taken something out of your checked-in luggage that is not allowed in the cabin on your next flight), which in our case means not just removing laptops from bags, emptying fluid from bottles, removing belts, shoes and whatnot, but also having the car-seat examined, the buggy inspected, and last but not least, Sarah subjected to another body check on account of her refusal to walk through the x-ray machine as a pregnant woman. Of course, all of this had already been done once earlier that day in Cancún.

As if that’s not bad enough, before we could even go through security, we had to queue for the pleasure. The queue for our concourse (C) was too long — we didn’t stand a chance — so we had to scurry down to concourse B, go through security there, then scurry back to C.

It never rains, but it pours, so our gate, C19, was the very last one at the back of the terminal. We hurried as fast as we could with our car-seat, buggy, camera, laptop and other hand-baggage — not to forget Eloïse, who was a trooper and sat cooperatively in her car-seat the entire time as we raced it down the concourse — down to gate C19, where we just managed to make it onto the plane as the door was closed behind us.

Even then, the fun wasn’t over. We were located in the row behind the emergency exit row and a child’s seat is not allowed there, so after sitting down and fastening first the car-seat and then Eloïse into it, we had to be moved. The same thing had happened on the outbound flight to Cancún.

Next, the stewardess complained when Sarah asked her to fill up a water bottle instead of accepting just a cupful. Sarah explained she was pregnant, but the stewardess informed her that there were other passengers and only “so much water on board”. Ridiculous.

The icing on the cake had been saved for last, however, Upon arrival in Providence, we discovered that our checked-in bag had not made it onto our flight. We had to hang around to file a lost luggage (sorry, luggage irregularity) report with a woman who was as friendly as she was dimwitted, a familiar combination here.

With that out of the way, we finally got to come back to Sarah’s folks’ house and relax.

The next day consisted of multiple frustrating phone calls to US Airways’ lost luggage centre, trying to ascertain the whereabouts of our bag and why it had not simply been put on the next flight to Providence after ours.

As you might expect, each such phone call provided bizarre new information that contradicted at least one statement made during a previous call. After a while, you seriously start to wonder whether someone might just be fucking with you, but at times like that, I remember the old adage and truism about not attributing to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. This was never more apt than in the case of US Airways’ staff.

Tempering hopefulness with realism, I went to a shopping mall and bought some fresh underwear. I’m buggered if I’m going to stew on my own skid marks whilst waiting for US Airways to pull their bloody finger out.

The bag was finally delivered to the house this morning, which was a great relief, because we fly out of Boston again Sunday afternoon. If it had been delivered 36 hours later, we would no longer have been here to receive it and it would have had to be sent on to Amsterdam. Thankfully, that little logistical exercise has been spared us.

And there you have it: the imperfect end to a perfect trip. Never underestimate the power of glacially slow US immigration, improbably dim-witted airline staff and Monty Pythonesque inefficient airport procedures to throw a spanner in the works of your travel plans.

And so, as I mentioned, we will fly from Boston to Amsterdam tomorrow afternoon, arriving back home early Monday morning. That will be our sixth flight in just over three weeks, but also our last for the time being, as Sarah’s pregnancy is about to enter the final third of its duration.

It’s been a good trip. Christmas was fun, New Year was very low-key and Mexico was the definite highpoint. Right now, I’m just looking forward to getting back home and sleeping in my own bed.

The day began early today at 06:55. The sky is overcast and it’s raining lightly. The emerald waves are rolling in on the beach, where Eloïse’s wide, flat snowman has survived another night of being battered by the oceanic winds.

In the last few days, our girl has started to talk more and more of home. She mentions some of her cuddly toys and refers to her look-house, her name for our house, so-called because that’s how we would refer to it when we went to look at it during our prolonged period of purchasing ponderance.

Today, she made her thoughts about home very clear, when she said, “I’m looking forward to looking at my baby”, referring to the baby doll that Auntie Fenella sent her a couple of months ago.

Given the frequency of such statements, it’s undeniable that our little one is becoming more attached to places and objects. By the time we make it back to Amsterdam, we’ll have been away for three weeks, which isn’t long by our standards, but it’s long enough for this trip. Eloïse is ready to go back to her life on the other side of the ocean. I imagine that she’ll become even more attached to home over the coming years.

We were on the beach by 07:30 again, rebuilding Eloïse’s snowman, paddling in the water and beachcombing. A white crab scurried sideways over the sand, perfectly camouflaged against the background. Overhead, pelicans made their way toward some unknown destination. It’s always a pleasure to see these birds, as such sightings are a rare occurrence for me.

After another desayuno Azteca at Don Cafeto, we drove a couple of kilometres north to the site of the Tulum ruins.

Of the Mayan sites we’ve visited — Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, Cobá and Tulum — Tulum was definitely the least impressive. Ironically, it was also by far the most commercialised, with everything from upside-down Mexicans spinning on unwinding ropes around a maypole, a man with a gigantic iguana charging tourists for posing for photos next to his lizard, a string of market stalls selling naff tourist tat, a branch of Subway, stands selling tickets to theme parks and other cheap or not so cheap thrills, etc. Parking was also more expensive than at any of the other sites.

We made our way around the ruins, none of which awed us, but the boards along the route explained the history and purpose of each building very well, as well as the significance of the site in general. It seems that Tulum survived as a Mayan city, long after the other nearby civilisations had fallen.

The Tulum ruins are perched right on the coast and the green sea provides a scenic backdrop to these dramatic buildings. Iguanas cling to the rocks of the cliff face, high above the pristine beaches and rocks.

It was quite a bit cooler today than over the last few days, for which we were thankful. A sudden downpour provided brief respite from the humidity, but such relief really is short-lived in this climate, as the water soon evaporates back into the atmosphere.

Once we’d seen the ruins, we drove back into Tulum for lunch at a place called Charlie’s, which turned out to serve, amongst other things, delicious juices. We’ve done very well on the juice front this trip. We downed several of them and I picked up my e-mail via my phone.

Speaking of which, I must say that my Nokia E90 has proven its worth in the couple of months I’ve had it. In that time, it’s travelled from the Netherlands to Belgium, Germany, Iceland, the US and Mexico and performed very well at all times. Having a functional, fast Web browser and decent e-mail client at hand is very convenient, especially when combined with the generosity of an open WLAN for free access to the Net.

Speaking of which, I still haven’t found a single location with Internet access that allows SIP. VoIP from here seems to be nigh on impossible, unless you use Skype or similar. Port 25 is blocked, too, which makes relaying e-mail through our mail server back home a non-starter.

So, all we’ve used the Internet for in Mexico is to read our e-mail and send SMS messages to the home front via a Web to SMS gateway. Net access has rarely been available from our lodgings and, when we’re elsewhere, blogging from my phone is just too painful. Yes, the E90’s UI and full qwerty keyboard are good, but it’s still only a phone. Besides, when we’re not at our lodgings, we’ve got better things to be doing than trying to get on-line.

Anyway, after our late lunch, we came back to the beach bungalow and Eloïse and I played in the sand on the beach, whilst Sarah lay in the hammock and relaxed. She’s been very tired today. We skipped dinner, except for a couple of limeades and dessert, as lunch had been eaten so late and been so filling.

And that pretty much rounds off this trip. Tomorrow, we have to make a fairly early start for the drive back to Cancún, where we’ll return our hire car and begin the long haul northwards back to Providence. We should arrive around 22:00.

It’s been a relaxing and inspirational first trip to Mexico (my two previous jaunts across the Californian border to Tijuana really don’t count). It’s a huge country and one couldn’t realistically hope to gain much more than a few impressions from an eight day encounter in a relatively small geographic area. I hope we’ll come back and I can say that the last week has certainly left us wanting more.

With just a couple of extra days in Providence slotted in before returning to Amsterdam, I must say I’m looking forward to getting back to our own home, although I daresay the weather will come as a shock to the system. And, as eager as I am to be back in our own domain, this trip has certainly reawakened my appetite for travel and I can’t wait to start planning our next trip, which should hopefully be at school half-term at the end of February.