MAY-A-3

A LONG WAY SOUTH TO GET NORTH,

THEN A LONG WAIT NORTH TO GET SOUTH,

AS I FILL IN THE GPS MAP FOR THIS VERY INTRIGUING

EQUATORIAL RAINFOREST TRIP ALONG THE WORLD’S

MIGHTIEST RIVER AND ITS TROPICS

May 2, 2004

I have arrived back in the USA—by a route anyone would consider circuitous—and have struggled in this “adventure travel” with the greatest exertion so far involving the arbitrary and contrived efforts of transferring bags and terminals for check0in in the name of the international security shibboleth. I started my travel in Belem, one degree from the Equator. We took off on the Boeing 737 run by VASP (the Sao Paulo domestic flight aircraft) overflying the jungle town olf San Francisco (SANF 6* 57.30S, 48* 30.34W) at 492 mph on bearing 158*--meaning just a bit east of due south. This is a three and a half hour flight to go to Brasilia the capital of the nation carved out of the Amazon jungle. Brasilia is at 16* 51.36 S, and 47* 55.16 W, which makes it 4,220 miles away from DCAA at 353*, or 4,251 miles away from NYNY at 356* This does not seem like much difference between the DC or NY destinations but that will take the remainder of a long day.

Brasilia is the “designed capital" of the Kubicec era built in the fifties, as a sterile town for government where few people would like to live. It is laid out in the shape of an airplane, since it was built on air travel. It had egalitarian social ideas built into to the architecture, for example, the accused and the judge must be sitting at the same level in the house of justice. It is a bit of an aberration in the middle of the green carpet below. Another hour and a half by air will get us to Sao Paulo which is one continuous concrete jungle of skyscraper canyons.

SaoPaul is 23* 25. 52 S, and 46* 28.21 W, which tells you that I am already about two thousand miles south of where I started trying to get to the other direction. I said goodbye to a number of folk there and checked my bags in. First they had been sent to DCA, but then they re-tagged them to go only to JFK, where I would have to claim them and transfer to another carrier—American in this case, after flying VARIG all day and night from Belem through Brasilia to Sao Paulo and then the long trip to JFK in NYC.

TRANSFER HASSLES AT JFK,

AND A STRUGGLE THROUGH THE RAIN,

TO CATCH A DELAYED AMERICAN EAGLE COMMUTER

TO ARRIVE IN LATER AFTERNOON IN DCA AND GWU

The bags were checked through to DCA when I first put them into the check-in at Belem, but they took the tags off and replaced them with the through-checked bags tagged to JFK “for security reasons.” I presume this means I was flying the Varig “Star Alliance” all through Brazil and then for the long haul back to JFK—the ironic situation of flying out the get north and then overflying my destination and coming back south from New York’s JFK by a “foreign Airline” American Airline—the one that is part of the one World rather than Star Alliance. This meant that on arrival after the all night flight by DC-10 up from Sao Paulo to JFK, I had to claim my bags, which I could not open to stuff anything inside since it has cable locks on it that keep me from doing that, and, of course, being in an airport, I nor anyone else has any cutting implements. Then I had to take off through security (to repeat that hassle later again) and get to terminal 9 on the far side of the airport. There is a new Air Train that makes this possible, but not easy, if I am overloaded with just carryons since I must now carry all exposed and organized film in mailers (it cannot be checked through since it would be3 fried by the high intensity X-Rays they use to check check-in bags. As if by a comic intervention, every up stair was blocked and the up escalators, were, of course, not working. Even the moving sidewalks were disabled as I tried to carry five objects along. I staggered out in the rain now to a construction site around Terminal 9 loaded with impediments, to get to A/A Eagle check in. Again, there were no functioning escalators. When I got checked in and ran to the distant gate, I saw on the monitor the signal that this was not a day to make these “minor course corrections” after the long flight—the flight would be delayed at least two hours since the plane had not yet arrived and it was raining heavily all along the East Coast.

I picked up my cell pho0ne and made the only call I could to say I am back, but not all the way. It was hard to get on the flight, which finally I did, and arrived in DCA where the weather was threatening but at least not raining. I got the bags and this time wrenched off the security cable and stuffed the film and laptop into the one with wheels and trucked on over to Metro (again, the moving sidewalk, wasn’t.) As OI boarded Metro, at last, I was on my way to the parked Audi and GW for the film drop and the pick up of the calls and letters and maybe even a clearance of the emails.

I moved out to the point of the Pentagon Metro station. The conductor came on the PA and announced, “No one board the first car, and everyone get off the car and move back to one of the others. Abruptly we heard lots of commotion and an outside “Ebonic English” PA system telling everyone that the train was out of service and that we should disembark the train and now. A big guy with a refle3ctive vest came along the cars and turned over some of the seats in the car I was riding in, as I stood on the platform. They had to get the train out of there since there was a “chemical smell” according to the conductor who had first made the announcement, but that was then only in the first car. Now it permeated the train and they were worried about some form of chemical or biologic weapons attack. I was stranded on the platform as they tried to get the train we should have been rescued by to push the disabled train out of the way. We waited as several contradictory announcements were made, each ending with apologies for inconvenience. Hey, I am already five inconvenient hours behind my anticipated schedule, so it does not matter now. So, at last, a blue line train came along the opposite track and backed up the contrary direction after a very long wait. I got out thankfully at Foggy Bottom, and –you guessed it—the escalators were out of service. But, I remember from coming here with Joe Aukward that there is an elevator. There is also a sign that announces the long series of “elevator outages” through out the Metro system—so, you guessed it again. Climbing up the stalled escalator as a staircase, I staggered into GWU.

I quickly dropped off the organized film collection and the outgoing mail took others in pre-paid mailers. I then turned on the computer and saw about 4,000 messages. Calling them up as 100-per-page, I deleted all of them picking out only the few that seemed to be addressed to me by someone who already knew me. That was a rapid way to dispense with the otherwise nonsense density of emails generated by someone’s program without being directed to me.

I had only 14 voice mail messages, and most of those were from the same man urgently asking me to call him at the next number in an hour since he had failed to reach me on the two previous calls that day, to make an appointment to evaluate his sister who needs a thyroid operation that someone had referred to me. So, it seems about like the usual re-entry, with an early morning plan to get the mails in the two or three plastic mail bins, as the laundry gets done tonight and the re-stocking for the next trip will be moving along as planned. I will tell you what Derwood looks like, if anything has been done in the absence of the squeaky wheel. But, with no more than the usual scramble—I’m baaack!

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