January 25, 2002
to mauritius
Mauritius Air is a small company that provides the majority of service into Mauritius and out; bribery between local politicians and the owner of Mauritius Air limits competition, not that there's necessarily a great deal of it into the country which is, after all, only a few miles wide.
The flight from London to Mauritius is twelve hours. The plane, when we boarded, was an old remodeled Airbus with wingtipped seats and footrests for shorter people such as myself. The passenger compartment was mostly empty, with the exception of a few Americans seated squarely across from us; first-class was dedicated to the stewards and stewardesses themselves, who lounged at the leisure behind the curtain and emerged to offer a minimum of sullen service to the customers insistent enough to have used their bells.
The flight crew were unenthused at the prospect of returning to Mauritius. There was a three hour delay while they replaced bits and pieces of the engine, stealing parts from another Mauritius Air airplane -- the other Mauritius Air airplane -- and then a hasty getaway before the flight crew of the other plane found out that their plane couldn't fly anymore.
"Fucking amateurs," the Guy grumbled during the first hour, after which a depressed pilot informed us that we weren't going to be taking off anytime soon. "I hate Mauritius Air."
With half the passenger list, I disembarked to wander the airport, riding up and down the motorized walkways singing snatches of Christmas carols in Japanese to baffle the security guards.
I would like to take this opportunity to make a comment here about motorized walkways in airports.
Airplanes are mysterious, noisy, and frightening contraptions to me; there is nothing quite so disorienting as getting into a box, being forced into inactivity for a period of time, then walking out to discover one's self in a brand new place completely alien to the place one started out. I did some investigating online and, with the assistance of phobialist, I have come up with a name for my problem. I have, if you can fathom it, what can only be described as a mild case of claustrohodothanatophobia: fear of travel in vehicles which involve closed spaces that could result in dying. Elevators are a problem for me. So are cars. To a lesser extent, so are airplanes.
This is why the motorized walkway is, for me, the ultimate achievement in mankind's ongoing quest to find faster, safer forms of travel.
There is nothing quite so satisfying as hopping onto the rubberized treadmill and being whisked along at a brisk pace of four miles an hour, the breeze whiffling through your cowlicks. Even better is when one starts walking, the rubber bouncing one up and ahead as gravity loosens its bond with one's fat, jiggling ass. The world whips by: five miles an hour, six miles an hour. The rest of the pedestrians crawl to a standstill by comparison. On empty stretches, one can stretch out one's arms and flap them, and maybe pretend to fly for just a little bit. On completely empty walkways, one can start jogging, flapping those arms, and bounce really, really hard, and maybe sing Japanese Christmas carols at the top of one's lungs under the bemused stares of security guards who really have no grounds to make you stop. And on late nights on completely empty walkways, one going one way, one going another, maybe one can do this for half an hour or even longer, going around and around in a motorized circle while angry Mauritians steal engine parts from incompatible airplanes to stick into the airplane that is about to fly one five thousand miles to the other side of the world.
If all the airplanes in the world broke down and airline travel ground to a halt, it would still be worthwhile to go the airports, just to play on the motorized walkways.
It was only when several more security guards started to congregate in the halls, all with one eye fixed dubiously on my activities, that I stopped playing on the rubber. It occurred to me that as a foreigner in a strange land, I was a representative of my country and the British alreay had a low enough opinion of the intelligence of Americans. Being arrested for the molestation of machinery in Her Majesty's Airport would hardly boost trans-Atlantic relations between the common people of America and the UK.
"American Embassy. How may I help you?"
"Uh, yes. I was given one phone call, you see, and I'm an American and I thought you guys could come get me out of jail."
"I see. May I know what the charge was?"
"I swear I didn't realize they belonged to the Queen. And why put them out there if she didn't want us to ride them? Lots?"
The Guy came of the plane a few minutes after I'd settled down with a book in the lobby, carrying every single piece of luggage we'd boarded the plane with. "Fucking amateurs," he greeted me, irritably. "I brought your passport. They weren't sure if I needed it to get back on again, so they made me take everything off with me. I hate Mauritius Air."
"They didn't tell us we needed our passports," I protested. "They said we just needed our boarding passes."
"They changed their minds," he said, sourly, and filled a chair to wait with his Gameboy.
A few minutes later, the attendents began herding us back towards the plane again. "We're all set to go," they assured us, and checked our passports. "We found the parts, and we'll take off in just a few minutes . . . "
It took another hour for them to finish testing the part and find the runway. By the time we hit airspace, I was sound asleep.
"Fucking amateurs," the Guy was muttering next to me. "I hate Mauritius Air."
These days on flights across Europe, airplanes feature personalized movie service, an in-seat monitor the size of a Danielle Steele paperback, matched with a remote control embedded in the seat arm. An assortment of movies begins every two hours, out of which the passenger can select the viewing choice using the remote control to flip back and forth between movies or even television channels if so desired.
Mauritius Air offered six movies, two of which were Hindi. Of the others, which included Planet of the Apes, the only one that interested me was The Blues Brothers, a classic that I've never actually watched all the way through.
All films were being offered on one channel dubbed in French, in addition to the original language on a different channel. I pointed this out to the drowsy Guy, who stirred out of his stupor long enough to point out that, after all, Mauritians all spoke French. I checked the in-flight magazine for the English Blues Brothers channel, and flipped to it expectantly.
Y'all, it was in French.
"Strange," I thought, and flipped through the in-flight magazine to verify the channel. I was, in fact, listening to the English version of the Blues Brothers. The next channel was dedicated to the French version of the Blues Brothers.
I changed the channel to verify that the French channel was, in fact, playing the French version of the Blues Brothers, then flipped back to the previous channel to test the waters again. There, I discovered that the Blues Brothers was not, in fact, in French; it was in a French interpretation of an English version of the movie that sounded remarkably like a French dub. On another channel, Marky Mark was fluting something through his nasal passages to a large gorilla-like creature that was sounding surprisingly sophisticated in an emasculated Gerard Depardieu way.
I woke the Guy up to point this out.
"Fucking amateurs," the Guy mumbled. "I hate Mauritius Air."
He fell asleep.
In English, the Blues Brothers Jake and Elwood are a smooth-talking, humorous, dryly droll pair with some fantastic musical backups. In French, I discovered that the Blues Brothers are actually a pair of very angry Parisian Taxicab drivers, embittered by childhoods spent next to electric substations that have rendered them infertile and caused assorted cancerous polyps to spring into being all over their vocal cords. It's all in the interpretation of the roles; it's amazing the artistic turmoil that a small voiceover cast can do to a movie.
I woke the Guy up once more to point this out.
The flight crew, most frowning a little to discourage questions or requests for assistance, came around with offers of salted snack foods in foil bags and trays of lukewarm water to tide us over until the first meal. In a rather pointed jab towards the Americans on the plane, the snack food consisted of pretzels, all creatively shaped in Presidentially lethal folds. In point of fact, not once during my travels did I eat a single airline-distributed peanut. All of Europe and Africa appears to have abruptly become enamoured of the pretzel.
Not that this is a sign or anything, but it does bear some notice. I nudged the Guy to show him. He was uninterested; his were already eaten, without incident. But then, he's British.
It was another eight hours before we spotted land, mid-morning in Mauritian time even three hours late as we were. The Guy, finally awake of his own volition, leaned over me to peer out the window as we circled overhead. The sea was a brilliant blue, an assortment of shades taken out of a box of crayolas and spilled across the horizon. The island itself was volcanic, lush and green, vibrantly tropical; from overhead, we could see reefs and the roll of white breakers curling towards spotless sand.
"Wow," I said, and craned my neck to look.
"Oh," said the Guy, breathing into my ear. "I forgot. They just had a hurricane a couple of days ago. I wonder if they got the electricity and the water up and going yet?"