Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
end of the conversation, as we said goodbye, she said she felt as if I were disappearing into a black
hole.
∗
The taxi arrived at four and Roger struggled out of bed to say goodbye. It had rained in the night
and the tarmac glistened in the deserted roads, the only trace of life a cat rubbing its ear in a pool
of light from a sodium streetlamp. At the airport I found my orange bags in the changing room,
layered up in my new cold-weather garments and slipped the dog tags round my neck so that in the
event of a crash my charred remains could be airmailed to my parents. Then I joined thirty other
dim-eyed people in the lobby, and we all shifted from foot to foot while the pilot of our LC-130
turbo-prop, a ski-equipped Hercules, barked out the drill for the eight-hour flight.
'The toilet facilities on board', he said, 'are primitive at best. They consist of a urinal and a
honey-bucket. I advise y'all to go for the major purge before departure, to avoid the honey-buck-
et.'
So that was another American achievement. They could turn their bowels on and off.
As the first creeping glow of dawn hesitated above the eastern skyline we carried our gear
through to the customs building observed by a handful of saturnine U.S. Navy personnel. Then we
eddied around a machine which dispensed plastic cups and squirted out an inch or two of weak
Nescafe until we were marshalled into line in front of our baggage by short-haired men in combat
fatigues while a sniffer dog idled among us.
At this point we were despatched into the watery dawn light and across the grass to have break-
fast in the mess canteen. I was desperate for real coffee, but the shadowy form of a honey-bucket
loomed between me and the pot. In the strip-lit dining room, an American football game screaming
from the television, we sweated in our thermals and ate eggs and hash browns while a biochemistry
graduate from North Dakota who had recently learnt the rules of cricket discoursed upon them at
length. It took the rest of the table some time to grasp the basic principles involved. I dealt confid-
ently with all appeals to me as custodian of this British secret; it didn't matter that I too had never
understood the rules. Those elysian Sunday afternoons on the edge of sunlit village pitches never
seemed to have anything to do with cricket.
Two hours later we boarded the plane, a crocodile of bulky vermilion parkas differentiated only
by velcro strips on the breast pocket emblazoned with our names. As I stepped inside the belly of
the plane someone handed me a brown paper lunch bag and pointed to the end of a row. I strapped
myself into a red webbing seat, wedged up against a stack of cargo crates, and looked around, like
Jonah.
The man next to me was an astrophysicist involved in the study of supernova explosions. He
planned to send a balloon up over Antarctica to record the spectral properties of gamma rays. We
pushed in our earplugs and the plane rushed down the runway and into the morning sky, and then
it was too noisy to hear any more about his balloon. I couldn't see a window either, so I hurtled
towards Antarctica in my own private capsule. I slept fitfully, squashed between the astrophysicist
and the cargo. None of us could find space for our enormous feet, and our legs crossed in the aisles
at our ankles like upside-down guards of honour.
