Travelblog part 2

I’ve not written a travelblog for some days as I was actually quite busy in the Caribbean with work, but particularly with travel. In summary form, here are some stories and things I learned over the last week. Sorry this is really long, but there’s a lot to catch up on.

• Trinidad is a rather charming place with smiley people the norm. It’s also sporadically dangerous but overall quite fun. Don’t walk around carrying anything you’d be tempted to fight to keep from a mugger and you’ll be fine.
• “To lime” is Trinidad and Tobago dialect for any sort of social interaction with others.
• Trinidad carnival is an enormous “lime” that is more than traditional fun costumes and steel bands. When I arrived at my hotel at 2am, the very structure of the building was shaking from a carnival event at the nearby stadium. The “music” was hip hop, which (being far from ABBA) doesn’t do it for me the best of times but particularly unwelcome after a long journey that had been made very long indeed by American Airlines.
• American Airlines are OK (but no more) internationally but domestically they make Ryanair look good. You get $25 compensation for a five hour delay due to aircraft technical problems and your bag not turning up when you eventually get there, I now know. This is if you’re in first class. I suspect that you get nothing in “coach” class, which is more like a school bus than a coach. Also if you find yourself sitting on an aircraft for four hours while people try to fix the starboard engine, in first class you get a couple of glasses of orange juice. In coach, you get to drink from the toilet if you become truly desperate.
• Seemingly every aircraft flying domestically in the States was bought 15 years ago and has never been refitted. Each flight crew seems to have some yin and yan balance in that half of them are lovely and the other half gratuitously rude.
• If you’re flying through the USA in transit you have to complete immigration as if you’re going there for 3 months, pick up your bag and re-check it at a rather chaotic drop-off point that provides an unwelcome sight into the workings of baggage handling. You will also have to go through security time and time again, which is a tawdry affair with much shouting of weird instructions about having to have your boarding pass in your hand at all times. This is despite you not actually leaving the terminal building. I’m always intrigued by having to declare that I’m not seeking entry to the USA for “immoral purposes” and have been tempted to ask for clarification. IS taking opportunities for casual sex immoral? If on the borderline, how far can I go? I’ve also had my fingerprints taken repeatedly, presumably in case I changed them from the week before when I last entered the country. The staff doing this seem to recognise that it’s all a bit of a nonsense and they’re pleasant enough. How would fingerprints have helped on 9/11?
• If you forget to take your US to UK adapter for your laptop, American Airlines front desks at the enormous business lounges at either Miami or Boston will not be able to loan you any sort of adapter. The fact that the world doesn’t all use US style plugs will genuinely be news to the very cordial but clueless person on the front desk.
• If you pay to fly first class within the US or Caribbean, you will not get access to the business class lounge unless you also buy a day pass for $45, payable only in Dollars. This means that you can leave Jamaica in first class at 0750 in transit to the UK (so with no US Dollars expected to be needed), not be given breakfast and be denied access to the lounge and its weak coffee during your four hour stopover. A certain amount of stink making becomes necessary upon the discovery that only one ATM is actually working and that one maddeningly refuses to accept the validity of any non-US issued bank card. You may mention in passing that your onward flight is to Europe, upon which the staff will scold you for not mentioning this previously as this “obviously” is different. Apparently if you’re a connecting long haul passenger on business class ticket, you can use the lounge. This key piece of information will not have been asked of you, despite handing them a British passport when you first met. You will be told this policy is the same as for domestic flights in Europe for all European airlines. You will not want to waste time informing them that this is total crap as you will then be in sight of a glass of water, a cup of coffee and a chair that’s not made of PVC and steel.
• The people who are on the governing council of the Institutes of Chartered Accountants in Trinidad and Tobago and in Jamaica are lovely people. I want to do a good job for them.
• Exchanging horror stories of taking connecting flights through Miami is a common way to bond with strangers in the Caribbean. Colleagues whose middle name is “Mohammed” will have the best (ie worst) stories to share. These stories will make it abundantly clear that the Department of Homeland Security has only one response to perceived terrorist threat: Muslims are threats, everybody else is probably OK but best hassle all foreigners a bit for the sake of appearances.
• Taking a flight from Trinidad to Jamaica is a pleasing experience indeed. Barbados looked to really be rather a paradise from my very brief flight in and out of there. For flying geeks such as myself it’s also real fun to be on a 737 that they fly on low level approaches as if it were a four seater aircraft, complete with kids waving at you as you pass alarmingly close above their heads. Caribbean Airlines is curiously referred to by one and all as “Bee wee” and it’s an altogether more pleasant experience than American Airlines.
• There are some very nice people in Kingston, Jamaica but it’s clear that one would not have to go far to get mugged. A five minute walk outside the hotel one evening to the neighbouring branch of KFC in supposedly safe New Kingston is not an experience I’m going to repeat. The advice is generally to take taxis everywhere, but I was ripped off even then on the way back to the airport.
• Prince William was staying at the neighbouring hotel to mine in Kingston when we were there. I’m pretty certain that I saw him mingling at an evening business do but one of my colleagues disputes this. He certainly was there though and this means that he doesn’t mind roughing it as it wasn’t a great hotel.
• £50 buys you a rather faded but enormous suite in New Kingston. Presumably the fact that it doesn’t feel safe to leave the hotel has something to do with this bargain.

I promise that I’m not anti-American, although I realise this sounds it. The USA enthrals and appals me in approximately equal measure. Weirdly, there’s almost never a moment of indifference. As a country, it just feels like a teenager; thinking it has all the answers but actually laughably naïve. Misplaced efforts at preventing “terror” can make travel to or through the USA simply more trouble than it’s worth. If they didn’t act like an imperial power with all the arrogance and error that implies, it would be a nice enough place to visit. It would also be good if they could get a perspective on how the damage being done by global warming is greater than Islamist terrorism.

So the Caribbean is fine, but frankly most of it doesn’t seem to be as pleasant as much of Spain or Greece. If you’re going to fly long haul on holiday, go to Asia. If you want class, go to Italy. If you’re going to go anywhere at all, avoid American Airlines. I think we imagine it’s so exotic because of the inadvertent US influence over us, given that it’s their equivalent of the Costa del Sol.