Travel karma

I am quite stoical about travelling – I seem to have the best and worst of luck. I frequently have delayed planes, lost luggage, missed connections and other issues, but everything works out eventually. I have pretty equal good luck too: waived extra baggage charges, connections delayed just long enough so I can catch them and best of all, upgrades. Whenever something goes wrong, I just try to keep calm because it probably means that on my next flight I’ll be sipping champagne in first class for free. My worst experiences were probably when my plane was taking off (in the Philippines) and an engine burst into flames. The plane suddenly thumped back onto the tarmac, and we had to sit around for a whole day waiting. But on the good karma side we were told that had the explosion happened much higher in altitude, the plane would have crashed and we probably would all have died. The second incident was after I had scored a free week’s holiday on the island of Saba (I did have to give a lecture to a community group, but a week’s paid excursion to a Caribbean in exchange for an hour talk was a pretty sweet deal). On the way back however, a hurricane hit and I took the last plane out of the airport. The flight was pretty bumpy, the worst turbulence I had ever experienced, and although I was having palpitations I assumed everything was OK as the pilot had said nothing. As we landed and taxied in, and the pilot had announced that we were there he accidentally left the intercom on and we heard him swear and said “I thought we weren’t going to make that one”.

So why am I talking about travel karma? Well, my friend Mel told us last night about her attempt to come to Panama. She was flying from northern Norway her ticket had her stopping in Oslo. She assumed that the plane in and out of Oslo would of course be in the same airport, but when she checked it turned out, that she had to hustle 100km to a different airport (anyone who has flown into the deceptively named “London” Stanstead will appreciate, not expecting a trip across a quarter of the country to get to Heathrow). When she got to airport number two, she was only in it briefly when they announced they were closing for the night and she had to wait outside – bearing in mind this was in Norway, the temperatures outside dropped to 8oC and she was dressed ready for tropical Panama. She then had to go through the US on the way to Panama (this was just a connecting flight I emphasize) and on presenting her Italian passport to immigration she was asked if she spoke Italian –  she said no. That led to her being pulled out of line and interrogated. The fact that she was an Italian national, who now lived in Norway, but who had a UK visa (she was doing her master’s degree in Scotland), was born and raised in Argentina, and was now heading to Panama to be a member of the Luxembourg delegation, well it was more than US immigration could deal with. They kept her for several hours asking for all sorts of documentation that no one in their right mind would be carrying (again, remember she was only in the US to pick up her connecting flight to Panama). In the end she was passed to a female immigration official and ended up showing her pictures of whales in Norway, either that convinced immigration that she wasn’t a terrorist or spy, or pictures of orcas and whales softened even the hardest hearted immigration official, and they finally let her through. This was not the worst immigration story that came out, however - one of my friends from Chile, was not only detained for a day when she tried to pick up a connecting flight from Europe to Chile, but US immigration wouldn’t let her through (she to this day does not know why) and sent her back to Europe; she had to buy a new flight from Europe to Chile (via Brazil) avoiding the US.

So if you thought that your flight was bad because you got delayed in Chicago for a couple of hours, think again.