June 19, 2017 – Long Day’s Journey Into Night

June 19, 2017 – Long Day’s Journey Into Night

This day has sucked.

I’ve got a close to 2000 word piece on today but a lot of it I’ve chosen to hold back and use as contemporaneous notes for a followup discussion with Marathon Tours.  It’s enough to post here that I am very disappointed in them but want to give them a full opportunity to respond without airing it all on the internet.

***

I woke up … well, I’m not sure I ever really was asleep for cumulatively more than a couple of hours… so let’s say “I got up with my alarm.”  I was at a massive, improbable sleep deficit — zero hours and change the night before the race, two hours last night.  On top of that, I had come down with a nasty head cold. It’s a long travel day today and I’m feeling mighty low.

Breakfast was at 5 am so we could load and be on the road by 7.

A five hour drive back to the airport was ahead of us and our Air Madagascar flight is scheduled for 2-ish. Someone said it’s not a direct flight to Tana and requires a stop along the way, making what should have been the 1 hour flight time route into a three hour trip. The last I heard, we were looking to get back to the hotel around 7 pm. A twelve hour travel day on this tour of Madagascar, the second in a week.  Yeesh.

***

During the long bus ride, I snapped a few photos of life along Road Number 7.

For some reason I thought the speed bumps were hilarious… the road I felt had naturally developed a number of “speed bumps” which we might call “potholes” or “sinkholes.”

***

Our guide Rolland told us this charming story about his days with BBC Wildlife.  He was taking them around shooting footage and the biggest challenge was in tracking down the ring tailed lemurs sleeping quarters.  They’re very secretive about where they sleep… maybe that’s why they’re a conspiracy of lemurs… and because of their cat-like fossa predators, they tend to sleep on the rocks somewhere.  The fossa can climb trees but not rocks, thus there’s safety in them thar rocks.  So night after night, they’d try and follow the lemurs home only to lose them in the dark.  They, after all, like to move it, move it.  Anyway, one day they decide to get up super early and stake out a spot hoping to catch them waking up and leaving a lemur home.  Three AM comes and goes… 4 am… 5… the sun starts to rise… and then finally success.  The dominant female emerged with the baby on her back followed by the dominant male who was watching from behind.  They got to the bottom of the rock and the mother takes the baby, kisses it and hands it to the male.  He kisses it and then hands the baby back to the mother and the lemur family jumps to the trees together.

That night they took the footage back and quickly cut it together.  They set up a portable screen and projector and showed the local villagers what they had captured and the women and men were crying… Rolland was crying.  The BBC guys are crying.  It’s a sweet story and explains why Rolland likes the ring tailed lemurs best of all the species.

***

More photos from the road:

 

***

At one point we got stuck behind a slow moving mini-bus that we just couldn’t seem to pass.  Their luggage was stacked on its roof doubling its size.  I’m not sure this photo quit captures it… and certainly doesn’t depict the wobbling shift in center of gravity for the vehicle.  I swear it should’ve tipped over but I’m not great with the physics… still, common sense says it didn’t look like a manufacturer’s recommended load:

***

A few more photos while we drove:

***

Somewhere along the way we were to stop and see a local village’s rum factory… but our bus was swarmed by the locals and there was a bit of unease about the whole thing.  We opted not to get off the bus and I felt uncomfortable snapping any photos as it all felt so… socio-economically gauche.  Who was I to take photos of these people?  I feel that way a lot when traveling but this was one of those moments when it felt like I’d be veering into poverty porn and I don’t know… smugly self-satisfied, like, “Look at these people!  Don’t they seem so poor?  Oh, let’s go grab a crumpet and carry on.”  I felt… wrong.  There’s a lot of privileged guilt and who-can-say luck about where I was born, how I was raised, and how incredibly fortunate I think I am.

***

We had arrived in Tulare at 11:15 and passed the airport to drive to the restaurant for lunch. But as we approached the turn-off, our bus pulled over, as did the one behind us. The drivers and guides chatted through their open windows, passing a mobile phone around.

After a brief confab, our guide Rolland got back in the bus saying there had been a change in plans and we were going to the airport to check in. When we arrived, all the other buses that had been behind us due to various roadside bathroom stops along the way while we soldiered on, everyone else was unloaded and grabbing their bags to check in.

As we disembarked the bus and our luggage was unloaded from the roofs of the buses, people grabbed their bags and joined the queue. A few of us waited. I had my bag but mom’s hadn’t turned up yet. As the crew waved us away from the buses saying “that was it,” five or six people had no luggage at all. We assumed the worst, that a block hadn’t been loaded back in Isalo. We quickly found a Marathon Tours rep and told her our bags were missing; a guide hurried from the terminal saying they had already taken some inside and we should check there.

Communications continued to be garbled and poorly handled today. We did find mom’s bag eventually and joined the back of the queue. We were last in line.

As minutes stretched on into an hour or more, there still were no gate agents to check us in. I flagged an tour guide down and voiced my concerns about lunch, as doing the math, even if the gate agents showed up right then and were speedy, we would be lucky to get finished checking in by 1 pm… and our flight was scheduled to depart at 2:45. Even with a nearby restaurant, to load, drive, unload, eat, reload, drive, and unload nigh on 100 people and then get them all through security and passport control for a boarding at 2:15 seemed dubious to me.

Here’s where we’ll go into redacted, ellipses, and summarizing of points with details and such shared with Marathon Tours for followup.

Gate agents finally turned up at 12:30 and the line slowly… glacially slowly, moved on. With 80+ people ahead of us, I again started doing the math. By 12:45, a group of ten or so folks were checked in and were motioned out of the terminal to a waiting bus. Where were they going I asked? They were going to lunch.  This did not seem fair to me.  Everybody should eat, or nobody should eat. All for one, and one for all.

As the line continued ever so slowly to be processed, more buses would get dispatched. Someone bet we’d be done by 1. By one o’clock, twenty people were still ahead of me.  We raised some legitimate concerns and offered suggestions for alteratives to ensure we got something to eat before what I presumed would be out return to the hotel at 7 PM.

I’ll leave it here and say simply that there was a moment wherein I felt like things were getting out of hand and personified the worst ugly American stereotypes imaginable… I won’t name names but I’m not immune to the charges either.

We finally checked in at 1:25 pm, the last of the group.  We had to be back at the airport no later than 2 pm.

We were hustled out toward a waiting bus our guide told us it was normally a 10 minute ride but they’d rush… so we should be there in 10 minutes. I don’t know if that was a poor attempt at a joke or a mistranslation or mora mora. But it only further incensed me that such poor planning was continuing to make things worse.

Arriving at the restaurant, the various buses were lined up and those who had enjoyed a nice leisurely lunch were laughing and enjoying multiple desserts. There were no seats per se, and empty spaces were piled with dirty plates and used silverware. Mom was able to score us two relatively clean spots though only a desert spoon was there. It looked relatively clean. I asked at the counter for silverware. They didn’t know that term. Place setting. Nope. Knives and forks. No. Things to eat with. Nothing. I gave up, figuring we’d try for the spoon and hope for the best.

One of the charming couples we met in the trip did their best to calm me down and flag down a waiter. They had the same problems conveying we needed utensils. Finally the realization dropped and the waiter turned around to the next table and picked up a knife and fork that may or may not have been dirty. I waved it off as, honestly, using dirty silverware seemed like an option I didn’t want to take. We approached the picked over buffet table. Most items were gone. Some quiche remained, rice, a few stray veggies. I didn’t even stop to take a picture as I frankly didn’t have time. Three minutes had already been wasted on the silverware hunt. Seven minutes to eat.

I tried to think of how I could describe the unappetizing food. You know how Cookie Monster shoves cookies in his mouth only mostly it turns to crumbs? Or when the Tasmanian Devil barrels through an area? Or how Garfield eats lasagna? It was like all three of those things happened in the last hour and we had just arrived for the cleanup.

I shoveled food into my mouth. Literally shoveled as all I had was a spoon to try and get things into my stomach. A bit of quiche, some rice, a scrap of stale bread. I knew as soon as I began this was a mistake to rush food into me but I thought going without wasn’t a good option if as we had heard we were on a connecting flight to Tana, which meant our hour flight now was going to be three hours plus with layovers but no disembarking of the plane.

I tried to find mom a cream puff that “looked like a bird.” I apparently brought her one that wasn’t shaped like a bird and was dispatched back to try again. I saw one of our docs loading up a styrofoam to go container. Would that we latecomers had been offered that option…

By 1:40, my stomach riled by the tumultuous “dining,” we reboarded the buses and headed back to the terminal.

We arrived at the airport at 1:55 and headed for passport control and the human security inspection. No metal detectors, no scans, but carry on bags were manhandled and opened for visual inspection. We lined up then for opening seating boarding.

There’s a bit more to the story here involving Marathon Tours and my discussions over the day but I’ll leave that for the time being.   I’ll only say that once people aren’t treated the same despite having paid for the same service, well, that’s where I draw the line. All for one, one for all.  Equal treatment for equal costs.

It all comes down to communication and treating everybody fairly. Another runner who was on the last bus responded to my comments that life wasn’t fair. I said while that’s true we should be trying to make it fair. That we should be treating people fairly. Maybe that’s the true Pollyanna versus the “life isn’t fair… so make lemonade!” We should strive to be better for all, and leave none behind. This is especially true when everyone paid the same price – there’s an expectation then that we all get treated the same.

***

Winging our way back to Tana with a brief layover in Tolanaro on the southeastern coast of Madagascar, I tried to type up my contemporaneous notes.  As I was doing it I find myself wondering if I was “pulling a Comey.”  I don’t know if that’s a thing but it should be.

We finally arrived in Tana around 5:15-ish and by the time we all got our luggage and got loaded onto the various buses (some heading out on an excursion had another 3 hour bus ride ahead of them to the rainforest) it was 6 pm.  Traffic in Tana is notoriously bad, like Chicago bad, if Chicago had super narrow streets and a lot more close calls but surprisingly few collisions.  Though our hotel was 6.8 miles away, it would take us about an hour to get there.

All in, it was a 12 hour-plus travel day.  I was feeling defeated.  By my cold, by the travel, by the tour.  I tried to accentuate the positives and de-centuate the negatives.  A glass of wine helped:

I met some great people on the trip.  I’m therefore going to focus on that.

But still.  This day sucked.