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Cockpit Confidential—Reflections

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Art Deco Doors at LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal

Art Deco Doors at LaGuardia’s Marine Air Terminal

A little more than a month ago, I wrote a posting about Patrick Smith, whose Ask the Pilot website has inspired me to read his excellent new book, Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel, Questions, Answers & Reflections. If you want to read my original post, you can find it here. I thought I would like write about his book and why I think that anyone who is even remotely interested in travel should read it.

Most of the text is arranged in Question & Answer format, but the things I liked most about the book are the essays interspersed between the chapters. One of the things that has most irritated me about American airports is their swift decline from classy places to visit and soak oneself in the whole culture of flying to something that barely competes with inner city Greyhound bus terminals. In fact, I have never been to a bus terminal in Mexico or Argentina that wasn’t more comfortable than the best American airports I’ve seen. In one essay, Patrick produces a list entitled “Fifteen Things No Terminal Should Be Without,” which includes are such items as:

  • A fast, low-cost public transportation link to downtown. Only Cleveland and Portland, to my knowledge, can boast of this.
  • In-transit capabilities for passengers just transferring to another flight.
  • Complimentary wireless Internet.
  • Convenience stores.
  • Power ports for re-charging your portable electronics.
  • Showers and a short-stay hotel, instead of sleeping on a filthy floor in the terminal.
  • Play areas for children.
  • Better dining options, most especially fewer chain restaurants.
  • An information kiosk.
  • A bookstore.
  • Sufficient gate-side seating to accommodate all the passengers on a flight.
  • Finally, some aesthetic flair, such as the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia (departure exit pictured above).

We tend to think of flying as an experience fraught with massive inconvenience (to wit: the TSA, incomprehensible airport public address systems, and grubby terminals) and white-knuckle experiences (like air turbulence, bouncy landings, and ominous announcements from the cockpit). One of the things that Cockpit Confidential accomplishes in its 300 pages is to give you a good feeling for the amazing safety record of airlines around the world. When Malaysian Flight MH370 goes astray, it not only hits the news but stays there for weeks at a time until most TV viewers get a sick feeling in the pit of their stomach about flying in general.

Just to show that he doesn’t sugar-coat the airlines’ safety records, Smith provides a summary of the ten deadliest air disasters of all time (nine of which occurred in the 1970s and 1980s), with a survey of the special circumstances that led to them. He even provides an essay on the events of September 11, 2001 and why it is now totally unlikely that a similar event would ever happen again.

“Exuberant, Profuse, May Rot Your Teeth. Overall Grade: F”

“Exuberant, Profuse, May Rot Your Teeth. Overall Grade: F”

A special area of interest to the author is the subject of airline liveries (i.e. plane decorations), logos, and names. Above, for instance, is his evaluation of Southwest Airlines’ new livery, which he regards as the worst-designed of the top ten U.S. airlines. I was particularly amused by the names of some airlines that I never heard of, and would be especially wary of flying. They include such beauties as Kazanskoe Motorostroitel’noe Proizvodstevennoe Ob’yedinenie (“which is the sound a person makes when gargling aquarium gravel”); Zhezkazan Zhez Air (good for catching a few Z’s); Wizz Air; Kras Air (imagine an h after the s), and U-Land Airlines (now defunct).

In my previous post, I mentioned adding Cockpit Confidential to my TBR pile. Good thing, too, because Patrick’s book is definitely a keeper.

 

 

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Iceland

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Land of Fire, Ice—and Sagas

Land of Fire, Ice—and Sagas

I was so very impressed by Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him. Because his origins were so far away (Lithuania and Poland) and so long ago (1920s and 1930s), there were relatively few entries that resonated personally with me. Except it was sad to see so many fascinating people who, unknown today, died during the war under unknown circumstances.

This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the next few months, you will see a number of postings under the heading “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. Today, we’re at the letter “I”:

I have been to Iceland twice, first in 2001 and then in 2013, both times by myself. (The first time, Martine didn’t want to go; the second time, she couldn’t.) During the two trips, I traveled around almost the entire circumference of the island, and through the interior on the Kjölur route, where we traveled on a long dirt road and forded several rivers between Geysir and Akureyri. Would I go again? Yes, in a heartbeat, but I’d like to go with someone so that we could rent a car and see some of the lush countryside off the main routes.

What led me to Iceland was, not surprisingly for a bookworm like me, was reading the Icelandic sagas. In the 13th century AD, there was no better literature being written anywhere in Europe. Other than a handful of Arthurian legends and a few devotional books, there just was no competition to the “Big Five” Sagas of Icelanders, namely: Njals Saga, Grettir’s Saga, Egils Saga, the Laxdaela Saga, and the Eyrbyggja Saga. I have read all five at least twice; the Njals Saga, the greatest of them all, at least three or four times. The last time I went, I visited two museums dedicated to individual sagas, in Hvõlsvollur (Njals Saga) and in Borgarnes (Egils Saga).

Both times, I did all my traveling by bus. Occasionally I took tours when I had to. Otherwise, I used the public Stræto and Sterna buses. It isn’t terribly difficult, as all bus drivers and just about everyone else under the age of 70 in Iceland speaks English. This is a function not only of education, but of the prevalence of English and American television programming.

At least once a day, I would have delicious fish dinners. At the majority of restaurants where I dined, I was no farther than a couple hundred feet from the fishing boats that had just brought in their catch. Until I went to Iceland, I had no idea of what fresh fish really tasted like. Now I do. I would just order the fish special of the day, even if I never heard of that fish species before. It was always scrumptious, whether it was arctic char, salt water catfish, and most especially my favorite—cod. In Southern California, I am allergic to shrimp and lobster. In the cold waters off Iceland, I had no allergy problems.

Until global warming becomes more prevalent, the tourist season in Iceland is a necessarily short one, lasting only from June to August. Already, at the end of August, many tourist facilities are converted back to school facilities and visiting hours are slashed. People start thinking about the darkness of winter. Toward the end of June, the sun never entirely sets. It is up when you go to bed, and up when you awake. I thought I would not be able to sleep under those conditions: If I tire myself out, which I frequently did, there was no problem.

I would love to fly back to Reykjavík with a Kindle loaded with Icelandic sagas.

 

 

Killing Batteries

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Leif Pettersen

Leif Pettersen

There are some bloggers I have been following for several years. One of them is Leif Pettersen, whose Killing Batteries blog is the best blog I’ve read by a professional travel writer. He has written extensively for Lonely Planet (I believe his is their top writer on Romania and Moldova) as well as other places. According to his personal website:

Leif Pettersen is a freelance writer, humorist, world traveler, polyglot, “slightly caustic” blogger and wino from Minneapolis, Minn. He has traveled through 51 countries and lived in Spain, Romania and Italy.

Pettersen has been a juggler since he was 12 years old, loves chocolate, hates pickles, types with exactly four fingers, and can escape from a straitjacket. He has not vomited since 1993, making him a consummate travel journalist and excellent party guest.

Take a look at his travelogue and tell me if you know anyone who is as well traveled as he is.

As for his Killing Batteries blog site, it’s best to skip some of the “syndicated” material up top and look at the references under “All Time Popular Posts.” From these, you can find links to some of the postings that turned me into an avid follower of his work.

 

 

Dreams at High Altitude

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A City Surrounded by Mountains

A City Surrounded by Mountains

The other night I dreamed of Bolivia. I was in La Paz, one of the country’s two capitals—the other is Sucré in the South. I was trying to navigate between two locations within the city, but all I had was a two-dimensional street map that didn’t give me any idea whether I had to go uphill or downhill. The Lonely Planet guide to Bolivia lists the altitude of La Paz at 12,007 feet (3,660 meters), but isn’t that just an average? Even higher than La Paz is the erstwhile suburb of El Alto, which is, at 13, 620 feet, not only the highest major metropolis in the world with a million people, most of them Aymara, but also is home to the La Paz’s international airport,the world’s highest.

I am obsessing about La Paz: It is a city that pops up in my dreams because it is set in a huge bowl under several conical volcanoes, the most spectacular of which is Illimani at 16,350 feet. I keep thinking of traveling up and down the city by taxi and on foot, gasping all the while because of the high altitude.

Currently, I am thinking of starting my vacation in Lima and traveling through southern Peru to Lake Titicaca and then on to La Paz. From there, I plan to fly “open jaws” back to Los Angeles. That saves me time and money from having to deadhead back to Lima.

The big question is my susceptibility to Soroche, or altitude sickness. If, upon arriving in Cusco, I appear to have the beginnings of either HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema) or HACE (high altitude cerebral edema), I will turn around and return to Arequipa, going on to Tacna (in Peru) and Arica (in Chile), possibly as far as Antofagasta. In that case, I would deadhead back to Lima and fly home from there.

So if that alternate scenario takes place, I would have to have a flight from La Paz to Los Angeles that I can cancel if necessary. Is that possible? It remains to be seen.

Addendum: These two quotes from Christopher Isherwood’s South American diary, The Condor and the Cows, add an eyewitness’s observations to the city :

Sixty miles from the lake [Titicaca] the plain suddenly ends. You look over its edge into a deep horse-shoe valley and there is La Paz, fourteen hundred feet below. The view makes you gasp, for it is backed by the enormous snow-peak of Illimani, which fills the sky to the south. Illimani is rather higher than Mount Pelion would be if it were piled not on Ossa but upon Mont Blanc.

Believe it or not, I actually had the following scene in my dream:

Many of the side streets are so steep that you could scarcely hold your footing on the worn pavement. The Paceños have learned to slither down it in long strides, like skaters. What with the altitude, the gradients, the scarcity of elevators and the shortage of taxis, you spend most of the day painfully out of breath, and envy the Indians, whose enormous lungs enable them to trot uphill without the least sign of strain.

 

I Run Into Charles Keating

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S & L Fraud Meister Charles Keating (1923-2014)

S & L Fraud Meister Charles Keating (1923-2014)

When Charles Keating died in Phoenix last week, I thought of my meeting with him in Iceland (of all places) in August 2001. I was staying at the Foss Hotel Skaftafell in Svinafell (see photograph below), about two kilometers south of what was then the Skaftafell National Park, and is now merely part of the giant Vatnajökull National Park that occupies most of the country’s southwestern quadrant. Since I was traveling alone and without camping gear, it was the only place I could stay in walking distance of the park without roughing it.

I was sitting in the hotel dining room, close to a large center table where there was a large, noisy group who were swilling large amounts of imported wine. (What other kind is there in Iceland?) The oldest member of the group excused himself for a rest room visit, while his friends talked about him behind his back. It was then I learned the man was the infamous Charles Keating, whose leadership of the American Continental Corporation and the Lincoln Savings & Loan Association led him afoul of the law, more so because he had tried to suborn five legislators (the so-called “Keating Five”) into letting him off scot free. It didn’t work, as in December 1991, he was convicted on seventeen counts of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy and given the maximum sentence of ten years by Judge Lance Ito. At the time, Ito is said to have remarked, “More people have suffered from the point of a fountain pen than from a gun.”

When Keating returned to the table, he noticed my sour looks (I don’t much cotton to strangers, especially when they’re drunk ratbags) and invited me over to his table. I politely refused and finished up my meal to return to my room and read Viking sagas about even more thoroughgoing ratbags.

The Foss Hotel Skaftafell

The Foss Hotel Skaftafell

The next morning, as I was hiking to the national park headquarters, I saw the Keating party leave in a small chartered tour bus and sighed with relief. I knew two people who had invested in his S&L and nothing good to say for or to the man. It was rather pitiful that he found it necessary to travel with a bunch of yes-men who had nothing particularly good to say about him while he was out of earshot.

So it goes.

 

 

 

 

 

I Would Like to Have Been Him, Part 2

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Patrick Lee Fermor (1915-2011)

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

A long time ago—certainly before I moved my blog to WordPress—I wrote about Sir Richard Francis Burton, how I would like to have lived his life.(I’ll look it up for you and re-post it sometime in the next week or two.) The other person whom I admire so much that I would like to have been him is Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor. Both were knighted; both were world travelers; both had superb intellects; and both were superb writers.

At the age of eighteen, Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, starting from Holland and ending up in Constantinople. Most of his trip was covered by two volumes he wrote years after the fact: A Time of Gifts (1977), covering from Holland to the Hungarian Border, and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), covering Hungary and Romania. When he died in 2011 at the ripe old age of 96, he will still working on the third volume. I was heartbroken at the loss, feeling I would never find out how his trip ended.

Thanks to his good friends Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron—himself no mean travel writer—the third volume has finally come out. It bears the title The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (2013). Fortunately, enough of the text is pure Fermor, which is quite a complement. Take this passage, for example, describing Romanian Orthodox art:

I was fascinated, and slightly obsessed, by these voivodes and boyars as they appeared in frescoes on the walls of the monasteries they were always piously founding — crowned and bearded figures holding up a miniature painted facsimile of the church itself, with their princesses upholding its other corner, each with a line of brocaded, kneeling sons and daughters receding in hierarchical pyramids behind them. Still more fascinating, later portraits,hanging in the houses of their descendants—some by unknown local artists who travelled through the principalities early in the nineteenth century—showed great boyars of the princely divans, men who bore phenomenal titles, most of them of Byzantine origin, some of them Slav: Great Bans of Craiova, Domnitzas, Bayzadeas, Grant Logothetes, hospodars, swordbearers and cupbearers, all dressed in amazing robes with enormous globular headdresses or high fur hats with diamond-clasped plumes, festooned with necklaces, and jewel-crusted dagger hilts.

What a whiff of Eastern Christianity is in this passage from pages 183-184! It is typical of Fermor’s obscurely beautiful lists that can pop up anywhere in the text.

As if his travel and writing were not enough, Paddy Fermor was a legitimate war hero. During the Nazi occupation of Crete, as a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), he helped organize the Greek resistance and carried off the German commandant, General Heinrich Kreipe, over several mountain ranges to a waiting British submarine. At one point, the captive Kreipe was so impressed by the scenery, that he quoted some lines by Horace in Latin. Fermor finished the quote, also in Latin, at which the astonished Kreipe could only mutter, “Ah, so!” Fermor commented that both he and Kreipe had “drunk at the same fountains” of learning.

Other books by Fermor include the following titles which I have read:

  • The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953)
  • A Time to Keep Silence (1957)
  • Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958)
  • Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966)
  • Three Letters from the Andes (1991)

All are travel books except the first, which is a novel. The only book of his I have not yet read is The Traveller’s Tree (1950), about his sojourn in the Caribbean. Also well worth reading is his wartime colleague W. Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1950). Most of Fermor’s books are available in attractive paperback editions from the New York Review of Books.

“The Enigma of Arrival”

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One of My Favorite Paintings by Giorgio de Chirico

One of My Favorite Paintings by Giorgio de Chirico

I remember the first time I landed at the Manuel Crescencio Rejón Aeropuerto in Mérida, Yucatán, in November 1975. It was my first real trip out of the country (I don’t include Niagara Falls and Tijuana as being quite outside the U.S.), and it was a real eye-opener. It was night, and the vibe was tropical. In the cab to the Hotel Mérida, I passed a huge Coca Cola bottling plant before we took the turn to the right toward Calle 60. So many businesses were open to the street, and families were seated at card tables with beers and sodas. The local men were all dressed in white; and the women wore colorfully embroidered huipiles.

What was different between this and all my previous travels was that I was alone in a strange land and feeling an unusual sense of the remoteness of all my previous experience to what I was experiencing in the moment. I felt like the two huddled figures in Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, “The Enigma of Arrival” (shown above)—except that the streets of Mérida were crowded. I didn’t get much sleep that night, much of which was spent leaning out of my sixth floor window onto Calle 60. All night long, figures walked up and down the street, occasionally stopping in mid-stride to stare right at me. (How did they do that?)

The next morning, I had breakfast at the Restaurant Express, which was right across the street from a 17th century Franciscan church and the old Gran Hotel, which used to be the only one in town around the turn of the century. Eventually, I grew used to the crowds, the food, the warm, humid, floral air. I loved Yucatán and went back there four or five times.

In 1987, V. S. Naipaul wrote a novel entitled The Enigma of Arrival, which discussed the strangeness of his life (he was born in Trinidad) in the English countryside.

I have grown to love the actual enigma of arrival in a different country. I am more alive to everything around me. It is a good feeling.

 

Disaster Days?

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What Fresh Hell Is This?

What Fresh Hell Is This?

Hólmavík in the Strandir region of Iceland’s West Fjords is a strange place. Its main claim to fame is the presence of the Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft. Now it seems there is a second reason to feel apprehensive about a visit to Hólmavík, especially this time of year when many of the roads are closed.

The reason? In a word, Hörmungardagar, or “Disaster Days.” According to Páll Stefánsson of The Iceland Review:

On Friday’s program, among other activities, is a course in self-pity, a complaint service and an ugly dance performance.

On Saturday, head to the library to find bad books and later listen to the worst Eurovision songs [this could the most dreadful event of all] and the worst poem competition, where very bad coffee will be served. In the local church, sad (and bad) songs will be performed.

On Sunday, an anger management game will be held and a program about what has happened in the region.

The festival is directed by Ester Ösp Valdimarsdóttir, the so-called [huh?] spare time manager of the Strandir region.

I would like to have stayed in Hólmavík for a day or two, but I just couldn’t book a room; so I didn’t want to risk getting stuck there. I did change buses there, however. Toward the end of my trip, I had an all-day bus ride from Isafjorður to Borgarnes, during which I changed buses in Hólmavík in the local supermarket parking lot. The long bus ride from Isafjorður was uncomfortable because the bus was full of backpackers and all their gear, so there was barely room for my feet. Fortunately, the second leg of the trip on on a large and comfy Stræto bus.

I’m sure that if you can find your way to Hólmavík this weekend—fat chance, that!—you’ll find that, after all, you don’t have all that much about which to complain.

By the way, if you’d like to see a sampling of truly dreadful Eurovision songs, click here. And please don’t hold me responsible! You will find that there are musical acts that are far worse than anything even Lawrence Welk could have imagined.

Italy West

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Tourists Wandering the Caminito

Tourists Wandering the Caminito

I was thinking today of Buenos Aires, especially that colorful—but fetching—tourist trap known as La Boca with its short Caminito, a diagonal street about a block long. La Boca (“The Mouth”) was literally the mouth of the now polluted Ria Chuelo. It was also the center of life for the thousands of Italian immigrants who found their way to Argentina between the 1870s and the early 1900s. At one point, the residents declared their independence of their new homeland and raised the flag of Genoa. But President Julio Argentino Roca personally ripped it down.

The bright colors originally were marine paints left over from the shipping that docked here. The neighborhood has an edgy blue collar vibe that finds its center in the soccer football stadium known as La Bombonera (“The Chocolate Box”), home of the Boca Juniors, one of Buenos Aires’s premier football teams.

In 2011, Martine and I took a hop-on, hop-off bus tour of BA that included La Boca, where we stopped for a couple of hours to take pictures and take in all the tacky souvenirs.

Art on the Caminito

Art on the Caminito

Because it is so far distant from the United States, not many Americans find their way 6,000 miles south to Argentina. In our case, we went even farther south, all the way to Tierra Del Fuego and the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia.

I would dearly love to go back there some time and see some of the places we missed. And I’d even like to hang around La Boca some more.

 

Cellphone Hell Is … Other People

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Another Technical Innovation That Has Overstayed Its Welcome

Another Technical Innovation That Has Overstayed Its Welcome

We’ve all seen it. That shit-eating grin and the walkie-talkie walk that says, “I have somebody with whom to carry on a meaningless conversation—and you don’t!” And now the FAA and FCC have okayed the use of mobile phones on planes. Is this a good thing? For every call that actually has to be made, there will be half a thousand stating “We’re in the air over Kansas right now” and “We’ve just landed at ORD and are taxiing to our gate.”

Then there will be the fake business calls just to make the caller look important. I can just imagine the guy at the other end, “What are you saying, Jason? You don’t own any stock, and last I heard you were in bankruptcy proceedings.” Of course, we never hear the tired, slighty pissed off voice at the other end of the line, just the mock triumphalism of the caller.

There are several ways of fighting these self-important a-holes who force you to listed to their bloviating:

  1. Sneeze all over them without covering your mouth.
  2. Spill part of your drink on them and offer to pay their dry-cleaning bill, giving them a false name, address, and telephone number.
  3. Read out loud from your book, making occasional significant gestures in their direction, as if it were all for their benefit.

In the end, I suspect this will not become a major problem, if only because most people are virulently against it. In today’s news, two airlines have come out against allowing cell calls on flights: Delta and JetBlue. If any other airlines join them, I may well vote with my feet, choosing only airlines that place restrictions on the nefarious habit.

It would be nice we could do something about that other noise-making nuisance on long flights: crying babies and whining small children. But on humanitarian grounds, I think I’ll just shut up for now.