Sic Transit Glorious Walkabout

March 31, 2007

In the waning hours of Walkabout 2007 I pen this post from the premium transit lounge of Hong Kong airport. I flew in last evening and am overnighting here until my penultimate AM flight takes me over the pole 15 hours to JFK. It is perhaps fitting that after my wanderings of the past months through many countries I spend my last evening decompressing –a safety stop, as divers say – in no country at all. I didn’t pass through immigration and China doesn’t know I’m here, or care for that matter, since I will fly out as unannounced as I arrived. I am in that peculiar twilight zone known as “In Transit”.

Back in grade school I recall reading some patriotic pablum called “The Man Without a Country”. If memory serves, a dude who dissed the US is condemned to spend his remaining days on shipboard, and realizes how barren life is separated from his native soil. Well sure, it is a nausea inducing prospect, but mostly because of the separation from dry land of any species. Had he been condemned to the transit lounges of the international aviation system it wouldn’t have been half bad.

Here in Hong Kong’s Premium Travelers’ Lounge I’ve got a comfy leather chair, a convenient plug for my laptop, unlimited free coffee and snacks, periodicals of the world at my elbow, showers and TVs, plus a complementary 15 minute chair massage (which, it turns out, is in no way related to a lap dance, but is nice anyhow). Plus -- get this – my package entitles me to 8 hours of nap time in these little curtained rooms they have upstairs. None of this may be a surprise to those of you accustomed to first class travel, members of hoity toity airline clubs, to the manner born. But Dave is a Walkabout of the people and unaccustomed to such luxury. It is rather nice, and a chance to catch up on my blogging, of which I am woefully behind. Perhaps I’ll push my flight back a day or two…

It turns out the fly in the ointment, the worm in the apple, the Bush in the White House, if you will, is that those little Asian nap rooms aren’t sized to the Olympian proportions of the Walkabout. The beds (cots really) are rather short and Walkabout is rather tall. And – here’s the key point – he sleeps on his stomach. “If I don’t sleep on my stomach,” he maintains, “whose stomach should I sleep on!” Well said, Walkabout! There is no use debating the merits of stomach sleeping – it is one of those things that you are or aren’t, like being right handed or left, Jewish or Christian, Democrat or Republican. One is just right and the other just wrong, but you’ll never convince those who err so don’t bother trying.

The singular drawback of being a stomach sleeper is that you have to add several horizontal inches of clearance for toes, and several more for arms. Normally this can be accomplished through overhang. I cantilever nicely. But the nap cots were encircled by a guard rail so this wasn’t an option. I was left to curl uncomfortably like a pretzel. Why put guard rails on perfectly good beds? Are bed plummets really such a hazard? I raise the same existential question about footboards and, to a lesser extent, headboards. Why would a kind and merciful god inflict them upon us?

There is much more I could productively add on Walkabout’s theory of beds and bedding. But time is short, and I must stay on task. Still, I cannot leave this topic without passing on what may be my most valuable tip for would-be adventurers. This requires me to reveal perhaps my deepest, darkest secret, but I can hold nothing back from you, my faithful readers. I travel with a pillow. I will pause briefly while you finish snickering.

OK, I know what you are thinking. This doesn’t fit the dashing, debonair image we expect of Walkabout Dave. Bringing along his favorite pillow is something you would expect a nerdy little boy to do on a sleepover. Not so. I left my pillow home on many childhood sleepovers with unfortunate results. Only as an adult have I mastered the confidence not to leave it behind as well as the theoretical foundation in pillow theory to support my position. The facts speak for themselves: in nearly 90 nights travel I have had nearly 90 decent nights sleep. For the mathematically inclined, that is a success rate of 100%, nearly. Hotel pillows vary greatly in height and density. Many have feathers that can trigger allergies. Some smell. And think of all the heads that have lain on that hotel pillow! And all of the dread diseases of the hair, scalp and/or cheeks those heads may have harbored! And all the other parade of horribles that might merit exclamation points! You get the idea.

My own pillow, I call him Boris (no I don’t, really), is a half size foam pillow that compresses to virtually nothing in my suitcase and makes a useful protection for my laptop while on the move. I keep it in a pink pillow case to make it more conspicuous, the better to be mocked by a world that would keep me in the closet (the linen closet, that is). It also keeps me from forgetting it in hotel rooms, and hotel maids from walking off with it.

There. I’ve made my embarrassing personal admission, it’s your turn. Make it good, I could use a laugh.

Your faithful correspondent,

Walkabout Dave