A Day at the Beach - Part 1
We had found some dinner at what would be called a “food court” in the U.S., but much more upscale than our typical version of it. Looking for something healthy, light and hopefully a boost to my immune system, I ordered a bowl of beef phở, with noodles, peppers, cilantro and lime in a spicy broth. It had exactly the fortifying effect I was hoping for.
It was 1 a.m. local time and the terminal was now filled with people waiting to board planes to all parts of the world. In spite of all the activity, the atmosphere was still calm and quiet. No garbled messages about boarding groups or gate changes, no security announcements, no “Paging passenger Bob Flibber, paging passenger Bob Flibber, this is the final call for your flight to Sheboygan.” When we arrived at Gate B6, all of the Emirates employees were dressed in smart tan suits. The women wore red caps with ivory chiffon scarfs, either wrapped around their faces or elegantly draped around their necks. It made the American flying experience feel shabby.
We walked down some stairs and through a large seating area filled with people to get the walkway onto the plane. I marveled that all the forward sections of the plane were completely empty, but as I settled in to my seat in the second-to-last row of the plane, I realized that they were loading the plane from the rear, and that all those people we’d passed by would board after the back of the plane was mostly full. Gone was the annoyance of waiting in the aisle while someone struggled to get a huge bag into the overhead compartment that they had no business bringing as a carryon in the first place. It was brilliant, and why other airlines haven’t adopted a similar approach is mind-boggling.
The plane pulled away from the gate at 2:15 a.m. It was 3:15 p.m. of the previous afternoon in San Francisco by my internal clock and I felt wide awake, so I watched a couple documentaries on the seat-back screen, one on the war camerawoman Margaret Moth, the other about The Sonics, a band from Tacoma that languished in total obscurity for 40 years before becoming a global cult phenomenon. Sometime around 4 a.m. the flight attendants served a hearty breakfast, and by the time I was finished eating, fiery oranges and purples of an Indian Ocean sunrise were visible through the port-side windows.
The map is not the territory, as they say, and the land masses that appeared below as the plane began its descent were much larger than I had envisioned while studying maps back home. The Boeing 777 we had boarded in Dubai seemed impossibly huge to be landing on a little speck in the middle of the ocean. It seemed disproptionately large compared the one-story airport building when we walked acroos the tarmac in Victoria, but the tall, steep hills covered in riotous greens and striking rock features dominating the landscape put everything back to its proper scale.
The line at customs moved along pleasantly, and it wasn’t long before we’d retrieved Colleen’s checked bag from the baggage carousel. We had the slightly unusual experience of having our bags scanned on our way out of the airport. They wanted to have a look at the rigging knife that I’d packed in the checked bag, but waved us on after satisfying themselves at its relative uselessness as a weapon. I exchanged $100 in cash for the local currency (14.60 Rupees to the Dollar), then we went off to find a taxi to take us to the north end of Mahé Island where I had reserved a two-bedroom apartment.