Airtime

Well, we got here.

I’m not sure how interesting anyone finds travel recollections, which for me often seem like lists of hours – you know, fourteen hours flying, eight waiting, five yawning, none sleeping – and which are as bright with personality and story as a vehicle manual. Or they can be catalogs of complaints, and be perhaps more interesting and certainly more histrionic.

To be fair to travel recollections – and here I am speaking of transit through airports and planes – travel is a strange purgatory. At six-hundred m.p.h. and six vertical miles, the landscape seen from a plane shrinks away into wallpaper. The cabin – traditionally kept a desiccating 4% humidity to prevent corrosion and “plane rain,” which is exactly what it sounds like – becomes a strange climate that can be dark and cold when passing through a desert or bright and chatty at midnight over the Atlantic.

"If I drive at even thirty m.p.h., the details of my journey blur and broaden. If, upon arrival, I couldn't see my new place, I'm sure I would insist I'd never left home." 

The strangeness of flying brings to mind the ancient, familiar forms I’m not using. Walking down a street, for instance, I notice the flowers, the birds, the laundry in the wind, the ditch off the edge, and I have no doubt that I leave some things behind while knowing clearly that I am advancing into others. But if I drive at even thirty m.p.h., the details of my journey are blurred and broadened. If, upon arrival, I could not see my new place, I’m sure I would insist I’d never left home.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m pro-travel, pro-airline, pro-airports, pro-etc., and that I am in Nepal after only two days of travel is, quite simply, a miracle. But I also believe that travel can both deliver you to somewhere incredible and be stale and bureaucratic on the way there. Dull travel accounts commit only the sin of photorealism; whiny ones reflect how minor irritations become the only forceful feeling, since the wonder of travel has been largely wrung out by that travel’s medium.

So travel’s boring, thus writing about it is boring, thus this post is boring? Well, OK, here are a few things I can think of that might make this writing more interesting:

Including impressions or cerebral experiences, rather than just rote motion. Some of my favorite travel writing comes from Karl Ove Knausgaard, who essentially whines his away across the American Northeast (and he’s not even writing about airports).

Or,

Write about the strange, idiosyncratic moments that inevitably crop up when confining thousands of people from very different places into one place that demands standardization.

Or,

Don’t write about it at all.

So here’s what I’ve got.

We flew out of O’Hare around 6:30 on Monday, boarded an enormous airplane, and found ourselves in the warm lap of Qatar Airways—which , for a battered Spirit Airline-r like me, was like leaving of the humid fields for air conditioning and a glass of ice water. Two meals (Miranda got braised lamb with cheesy potatoes—braised lamb!—and I got chicken biryani with almonds—almonds!), a snack in between, and free booze. I had a cognac, for free, on a plane! Sure, it was cheap cognac and thus tasted a little of gasoline—but it was free! Free! Have I mentioned that it was free!

Not everything about Qatar Airways was so perfect. Serving me my cognac was a young, slender, fetching flight attendant, which is the sole demographic Qatar Airways seems to be willing to hire. Operating deep in some corporate hindbrain must be the assumption that pretty young women make flights better; they make the aisles prettier, or break up the tedium more exciting-ly, or something. Whatever the assumption, it seems bound to be fairly creepy, and despite the spotless new plane, it gave the airline a whiff of the antique.  

As, maybe, did the seatback consoles, which offered among ample movies and television the full text of the Qur’an. I think the case that objectifying women is bad is more clearly airtight than the case that corporate religious affiliation is bad, but I still listen sympathetically to arguments towards the second point; one argument might go that principles that are very good at guiding a religion (rigorous attention to doctrine, for instance) could be very bad at guiding a corporation (or state, for that matter). I also take issue with the requirement that I have to think about religion if I want to fly. The things aren’t related; forcing them to be, as Qatar Airways has done, assigns an uncomfortable and perplexing psychic burden.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be progressive to manage an airline. We arrived without a hitch in Doha for an eleven-hour layover and immediately decamped from Hamad Airport to explore.

Doha is a fledgling city growing vertically out of the desert, watered by a rich flow of oil wealth. It is easily separated into two sedimentary layers of city: old (dusty, low, brown, winding) and dazzling new (tall, gleaming, LED-colored, straight-lined). Back in Chicago, Miranda and I lived in an apartment in a three-story building. As far as I can tell, no such building exists in Doha: the city leaps immediately from one story to forty. As a result, Doha’s downtown—where all construction is new—is composed of skyscrapers skirted with empty space: parking lots, driveways, bare desert. They poke out like huge, lost thumbs, and give the city the feeling of a theme park, or a pop-up carnival, something new but fake.

It didn’t help that there didn’t seem to be anyone living in Doha, at least not during the day. From a terrace shisha lounge (I ordered a $15 Jack Daniels-- their cheapest whiskey), Miranda and I had a great view of empty sidewalks and central roads with quiet, spare traffic. It had even been quiet in the hotel lobby we passed through to get to the terrace, just the porters and doormen trading jokes and scrolling on their phones.

But when we came back down around 11:30, the lobby was transformed: teeming with couples in dramatic formalwear, phones calling cabs and Ubers, a crowd by the taxicab pickup zone, a real carnival atmosphere now. And to think it was a Tuesday—not a traditionally high-amperage night, except it was.

So of course I misjudged Doha by judging it too early, working from the essentially non-sequitur standard of my own culture and history. But I have no culture besides my own and thus have no choice but to sort of guess, get things wrong, look for a pattern, trust locals more than myself, travel travel travel, and gradually get less wrong.

Anyway. We returned to the airport, breezed through security, breezed through security  to board the plane (a new one for me), and got, surprise, upgraded to business class! Which, on the already cushy Qatar Airways, is sort of like moving from the 1% to the 0.1. You’re greeted with a choice of brut or rose champagne and hot or cold towel; meals are served on real china; your seat reclines straight back into a bed; you have an ample selection of wines (the four I tried were delicious) and liquors.

As it turns out, free, bottomless drinks is a great marketing play. By midflight, I was dizzy with affection for Qatar Airways, that empress so generous with her empty seats, her dishes of bread carefully warmed!—if not a little jealous, as she also found a white wine that Miranda enjoyed, a task which many (me) have undertaken unsuccessfully, and precious few (Qatar Airways) have accomplished.

As it happened, our flight to Kathmandu was cancelled halfway through due to equipment failure. No matter. I was tipsy and felt exuberantly pampered; a longer stay in business class sounded like a treat, not an imposition. We returned to Doha, boarded another plane, and did the whole excellent thing again.

And then we were in Nepal, and shuffled silently through customs, got crooked 90-day visas in our passports, waited nearly an hour for luggage in an airport that was a far cry from glitzy Qatari planes, but again, no matter, this is what we signed up for, indeed this was much the point of the trip, this is the point, this is the point, it’s alright if it’s scary, perhaps even good—these were the thoughts we repeated to one another and in our own heads, and it still was scary, and it still is, and that’s still the point.

Up next: food? What we’ve seen? Monkeys? Stay tuned, fair reader. More approaches. 

-Ivan