The way things change... and stay the same.
From The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (pp. 147-148) by Peter Matthiessen:
"...[O]r why, in order to catch a plane leaving for Santa Cruz at eight in the morning, from an airfield less than four minutes from town, one must be picked up at the hotel at six. Though I should have known better by this time, I questioned the logic of the latter, and immediately the whole airline office became extremely excited and upset, as if I were some sort of anarchist. "Aduana, aduana!" they all shouted, rushing forward to the counter. But in fact the customs, outward bound, is never more than a five-minute affair. The taxi drivers know this perfectly well, of course, and will appear at six forty-five if they decide to appear at all. Nevertheless, for fear of being stranded another four days in Corumba - the same fear which permits the Bolivian consul to pocket my cruzeiros - I will rise on the day of departure at five-thirty and be waiting at the hotel door at six a.m., in need of coffee. By seven a.m. my bag will have been checked through customs, and then I will wait from two to twenty-four hours for the departure of the plane. (The departure depends less on the machine's state of repair than on the number of passengers: flights on this continent are off for hours and at times canceled altogether, with the most absurd excuses, when the manager considers the number of passengers insufficient.) This protocol is invariable and inflexible throughout South America, where the punishment of airline passengers is, if possible, even more cruel and unusual than that inflicted in the United States - except that after a while the senselessness of it all is no longer infuriating. One becomes stolid and resigned as any dray horse, aware that an infusion of logic, honesty, and efficiency into this world would create a chaos impossible to imagine."
I understand where this guy is coming from. Flying out of or into Augusta can be the same way. The only difference is, he wrote this description of air travel in South America 45 years ago.
"...[O]r why, in order to catch a plane leaving for Santa Cruz at eight in the morning, from an airfield less than four minutes from town, one must be picked up at the hotel at six. Though I should have known better by this time, I questioned the logic of the latter, and immediately the whole airline office became extremely excited and upset, as if I were some sort of anarchist. "Aduana, aduana!" they all shouted, rushing forward to the counter. But in fact the customs, outward bound, is never more than a five-minute affair. The taxi drivers know this perfectly well, of course, and will appear at six forty-five if they decide to appear at all. Nevertheless, for fear of being stranded another four days in Corumba - the same fear which permits the Bolivian consul to pocket my cruzeiros - I will rise on the day of departure at five-thirty and be waiting at the hotel door at six a.m., in need of coffee. By seven a.m. my bag will have been checked through customs, and then I will wait from two to twenty-four hours for the departure of the plane. (The departure depends less on the machine's state of repair than on the number of passengers: flights on this continent are off for hours and at times canceled altogether, with the most absurd excuses, when the manager considers the number of passengers insufficient.) This protocol is invariable and inflexible throughout South America, where the punishment of airline passengers is, if possible, even more cruel and unusual than that inflicted in the United States - except that after a while the senselessness of it all is no longer infuriating. One becomes stolid and resigned as any dray horse, aware that an infusion of logic, honesty, and efficiency into this world would create a chaos impossible to imagine."
I understand where this guy is coming from. Flying out of or into Augusta can be the same way. The only difference is, he wrote this description of air travel in South America 45 years ago.
posted by outpostbabu at 9:25 PM
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