Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [6]
Near the end of the planning, we added Singapore to the itinerary and scratched the Seychelles. Both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur caused us to dither from the beginning. Modern cities in an international mode, they had little personal appeal to us beyond the eating possibilities. Singapore got the nod eventually because of its extraordinary wealth of street food. The Seychelles, a high priority at first, posed too many problems coming and going. Airline connections from Mumbai, the closest city on our trip, are wretched, much worse than from Paris, where we find ourselves often enough to travel to the islands at another time.
Ready finally by the fall of 2004 with ample AAdvantage miles and a preferred list of stops, we waited impatiently for the January 12 booking date, wondering what was going to fall through the cracks, convinced something would with so many destinations and flights. When everything goes great with Rebecca, and Sam’s changes turn out to be minor, relief and elation overwhelm us. For a whole day.
Now out of the dreaming and scheming stage, we’ve got to move on immediately to the hundreds of details that need attention before our mid-September departure. As soon as our frets about the booking process fade from our minds, a more urgent question arises: What can go wrong on the trip? The answer comes from a little demon who hovers above our pillows each night, saying in a giddy Robin Williams voice, “You dummies! Everyone in the world who didn’t already hate Americans certainly does at this point after the Iraq fiasco. They also think all Americans are rich, so thieves will target you. If you escape vitriolic ridicule and robbery, you’ll probably catch an exotic tropical disease never seen before in the United States. At the very least, an airline will lose your luggage in an Asian country where the largest clothes on the market wouldn’t fit a normal American child, much less overindulgent eaters like you.”
An omen of the potential pitfalls arises ominously even before our departure. Only a few nations on our itinerary require visas in advance of arrival, a formality we expect to be simple and straightforward. It isn’t in the case of Brazil, our last stop, because the consulate in Houston won’t begin work on a visa until ninety days before your plane ticket (copy necessary) indicates you will land. Our British Airways flight gets into Rio de Janeiro on the seventy-eighth day of our journey, giving us a dozen days in our window of opportunity immediately before our departure from the United States—during which time our passports have to vacation with the Brazilian bureaucrats in Texas.
The consulate insists on at least five working days for its toil, and five more get lost to the weekend between working days, the Labor Day holiday, the anniversary celebrating Brazilian independence from Portugal, and the day between these two holidays, since no one wants to work then. Bill calls frequently to monitor progress and we start to fear that one of us will need to fly to Houston to retrieve our passports in person, with or without the visas. Finally, FedEx delivers all the official documents to our door just forty-eight hours ahead of our first flight. If we’ve got a maze like this to stumble through before leaving home, what obstacles lurk ahead in the wide, wide world out yonder?
It’s imperative first of all, according to our nighttime demon, to look un-American, something war enthusiasts have called us at times but nothing we’ve ever felt or tried deliberately to appear. Our hometown travel store in Santa Fe—the founding owners of which referred to themselves as “the bag ladies”—helps right away by selling us luggage tags featuring an image of the Canadian flag; obviously from the copious supply of these