Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. You might not know where that is, but once upon a time, it was the crossroads of the world. Samarkand was the epicenter of globalization, one of the main stopovers for travelers going east to west on the Silk Road routes, and vice versa. Samarkand is where Christianity and Islam and Buddhism met and mingled; it’s where languages developed and trade prospered and knowledge was preserved.
You Can’t Get There From Here
People like to joke that ‘you can’t get there from here,’ but in today’s connected world, I always think that’s just silliness. Of course you can get there from here.
Lee and I have very few truly bad travel days, mainly because Lee is a) ordinarily very zen about snafus, and b) very careful to keep Princess fed and watered. When you think about it, a bad travel day mostly just boils down to not getting where you need to be, and since we rarely ‘need’ to be anywhere in particular, failure just isn’t a thing.
But what we do have, on the regular, are unfun travel days. We had one of those last weekend.
In hindsight, of course, the whole day went perfectly smoothly, without any of the four hundred sixty-three glitches that could’ve made things more complicated. Everything went precisely as planned—it was just very, very tiring.
Our flight out of the Seychelles was at 8:15 in the morning. To get to the airport two hours ahead of time, we’d have to drive our rental car 45 minutes in the pitch-black on steep, narrow, twisty roads. The gutter at the edge of the road is difficult to describe—it’s a narrow trench, basically the width of a car tire, and all the edges are right angles. Slip off the road into that, and you’re stuck. Lee spent our entire time in the Seychelles dreading the drive back to the airport. I spent it dreading the 4:30 wake-up.
But wake up we did, and went through our finely honed butt-crack-of-dawn routine. The hotel failed to send the scheduled golf cart to take our bags to the lobby (our hotel was a string of buildings nestled up the side of a steep hill—beautiful, but I didn’t want to drag my bag down a bunch of stairs in the heat). So now Lee was tense about the time, but I was pleased to have an extra moment to make myself a second cup of strong tea, this one for the road.
The golf cart finally showed up, I held my tea carefully, and we got to our car and got on the road. I was navigating and slowly sipping my cup of caffeinated bliss. It was dark. There were occasionally people walking on the road in the dark, which was mildly disconcerting. The road twisted and turned up the mountain, then we crested the top and picked up a bit of speed going down the far side. We were both hyper-vigilant, watching for pedestrians, cars, chickens, dogs, or any other unexpected obstacles.
Eventually, the very strong cup of tea began to irritate my stomach, so Lee slowed down enough for me to regretfully dump it out. I turned my head to the window on my left, then down to the map in my lap, then up to the front windshield, and…
Lee slammed on the brakes and I threw open the car door just in time to vomit up all that tea. That was only the second time in my life I’ve ever thrown up from motion sickness. Note to self: stop drinking tea on an empty stomach, especially in a moving car.
I slammed the door closed and on we went. The man who rented us the car was in the parking lot at six sharp, as promised. The gate agent approved our bags for carry-on, like we wanted. The flight left on time, and even landed a few minutes early in Dubai. We found the luggage storage service at the airport and left our bags there for the duration of our nine hour layover.
We got a taxi to our favorite restaurant in the city, and the staff remembered us from our multiple visits in February, welcoming us back with warmth. We went to a mall and got a bunch of steps and I bought some chocolate and a bottle of deodorant. Then we took the metro back to the airport to retrieve our bags and wait for the final leg of our flight.
Here is the thing that I don’t understand about flying through any of the big Persian Gulf cities: they schedule so many flights to depart in the middle of the night. I just don’t get it—it’s excruciating. This particular flight wasn’t as bad as some we’ve had—I once had a layover in Qatar from two until four in the morning. It was torture. People say it’s because of the heat—the planes can’t take off when it’s 120+ degrees—but I’m calling bullshit on that. We’ve had plenty of daytime flights all around the region.
Our 10:15 flight got delayed a couple of times, but eventually we took off a little after eleven. I tried to knit and listen to a book on my phone, but the book was too boring to keep me awake, and I was afraid I’d screw up the knitting. I watched a show on my iPad and read for a while and basically did everything short of pinching myself to stay awake. I knew if I fell asleep on the plane, I’d be wide awake when we got to the hotel.
The timings run together after that. We landed at some unspeakable hour when sensible people are sleeping, the transport the hotel had supposedly arranged for us didn’t show up so we had to take the airport taxi (which was perfectly fine and fraction of the price).
From bed to bed, it was twenty-three and a half hours (we only changed time zones by one hour). My head hit the pillow a little before sunrise.
I try to convince myself that it’s all part of the game—I like moving from place to place! Transitions are fun! Travel days are the whole point of travel! Being rootless and untethered is what I wanted!
But no. Some days I’m just hanging on by my fingernails until I can crawl into a bed.
Because it turns out you can’t actually get there from here.
Take care,
Lisa
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