Last year a friend called Mark Reynold’s called me. Mark owns a hiking company called Into the West adventures. He wanted me to accompany two men on a 10 day trip on the Inca trail on behalf of his company. How could I refuse? I wouldn’t be able to justify the expense of such a trip myself until the girls had been put through college and I felt sure that by then, the nursing home wouldn’t release me. So in April 2018 I abandoned hearth and home and two bemused teenagers and headed for the Americas.

April 12th 2018.

Modern air travel

I left Dublin early today after putting the head down in the Travelodge for a few hours. A dawn was breaking over Dublin that wasn’t dawn at all, just another grey pall hanging low over the shoulders of a waking up city. It s been a shit winter.

It was only 6am but already cars were feeding onto the motorway from all directions. The early bus to the airport snorted to a stop and spewed out its passengers, myself and a very elderly couple. They got rather comically tangled up in their luggage so I helped to pull them and their suitcases out of the bus. The suitcases were huge and seemed to be in charge. When the two tiny figures set off dragging the luggage behind them, it looked as if they were bringing their houses on holiday. I smiled after them. So did the Polish bus driver. Then he shook his head, pushed his button thing and the door closed with a wheeze and the bus trundled off.

As did I, moving into the already crowded airport to start the business of modern air travel. Getting my boarding card, being vetted along with my hand luggage to ensure that I wasn’t going to blow up my fellow passengers and the cabin crew with some explosives cleverly concealed in the lining of my knickers.

I went towards security following the line that went back and forth in that rather efficient queuing system where you keep ending up beside the same people who were ahead of you, in a parallel lane and facing in the opposite way. It’s a great opportunity to examine people in more detail I always think. For example on my first pass I noticed from behind a lithe young blonde woman dressed very glamorously in skinny jeans and high heels. On my next pass I realised that the young  woman was about 65 years old with tanned leathery skin from too many sun holidays. I probably look better from the back also.

Then to the conveyer xray machine and I waited for my turn while practised fellow travellers hauled off boots and belts and bras (okay not the bras) and sent their bits of baggage ahead, waiting for the nod from security personnel to walk through the detector.

I always enjoy people’s expressions here as they walk this little gauntlet. Trying not to feel self conscious under the keen gaze of the uniformed security staff, in this case a man and a woman who were clearly gossiping.

When it came to my turn I resisted hitching up my trousers or holding my breath. I think even my gait changed as I strolled through with a Charlie Chaplin-like cheeriness, wearing a wry smile to notify them of my innocence. Of course I was merely eyed and scanned with expressions as impersonal as if I were a canned item on a shelf in a super market.

After clearing security I was now captive with my fellow travellers in the ‘holding zone’. The glitter of the airport shops help to distract us from the fact that we are like so many sheep, safely corralled and nudged down corridors and into the waiting areas at the gates. At my gate everybody sat in an almost gloomy introspection waiting to board although people became strangely galvanised whenever there was the merest hint of action at the boarding gate. An employee scratching their backside for example.

A wave from a stewardess to another colleague across the way almost caused a stampede. Then everyone sat down again. False alarm.

I took out my book, PD James, looking forward to hours of reading. At one point I looked up and gazed around me. Almost everyone was sitting with crumpled bags between their legs while they gazed blankly into the screens of their phones as if therein lay the secrets of the universe.

One well dressed guy with ear buds pressed firmtly into his ears was walking up and down making impatient gestures as he spoke urgently to someone at the other end. The business day had started. Sell sell sell! Buy buy buy!  (For all I know he was telling his wife to take his jocks off the clothes line.)

He had a swit swoo suit on and very pointy shiny shoes and wore a serious expression that bespoke of multi-national deals of a financial nature. But what do I know?

I wanted to gently prise the phone out of his pinched white hand and invite him to Maccu Piccu. Tell him that the clean mountain air would do him good. Allow his nerve endings to unfurl and his hair to unclench.

I would have liked to invite everybody. Shout out to throw the fucking phones in the bin. ‘Let’s go to the Andes people!’

And then we’d do some version of a flash mob dance and live happily ever after without electronics. But I did no such a thing and before too long I was sitting on a tiny plane bound for Amsterdam where I would get my connecting flight to Lima.

The air craft was like a children’s toy, two seats abreast on each side divided by a strip of carpet down the middle. A very hefty person would be a clear and very present danger to passengers on this plane. A big bum waved around injudiciously would almost certainly topple passengers into a domino heap against the cockpit, disturb the equilibrium of the entire aircraft and send the plane plummeting earthwards.

As it happened, no one measured the width of our bums and we shoe horned ourselves into our seats and sat crammed together for a pleasant hour or so where we were well looked after by friendly, impossibly tall Dutch women who had to kneel awkwardly in the aisle to make eye contact with the passengers. I reflected that every one of these poor women would have a dowagers hump by the end of their careers from all the hunching and stooping. At five foot and damn all and set very close to the ground, I myself have no such problems.

Later I sat on the loo and the cubicle was so small I could have kissed the wall in front of me. If I were a person who took to kissing walls in toilets. Which I amn’t, as they would say in my country…

As the plane ascended I pressed my forehead to the window and marvelled that it was actually possible to rise above the oppressive ceiling of cloud that had been squatting over Ireland for what seemed like weeks. It was early April but spring hadn’t really sprung and we were all fed up with the protracted winter.

Suddenly the sky was a bright crayon blue and the sun gleamed through the windows of the plane settling warmly on my knees like a blanket. Now the clouds were below us. Cartoon clouds, impossibly white and cottony, stretching as far as the eye could see, their edges ruffled and frilly.

The second flight from Amsterdam to Lima went much faster than one could have hoped for. This was over 12 hours duration.

I watched 4 movies no less. One was the Shape of water. What a unique and wonderful love story. By the end of the movie I almost fancied the water creature myself, scales notwithstanding. Something about his limpid gaze.  And his abs’ of course. Well show me the woman who can resist a look of blistering devotion and a six pack…….

Long haul flights are rather unique in that passengers suddenly behave as if they are at home in their sitting room. They pad around sleepily in their socks fetching night caps. They stop worrying about the state of their hair which sticks up at odd angles from trying to sleep sitting up. People become more dishevelled as the hours go by, stretching out on the seats in all directions or curling up with lap tops and books.

I was very content with the quiet and a good book and watching movies that were touted at the Oscars which I hadn’t got around to seeing yet.

The only major disadvantage of long haul air travel aside from arriving at the other end with a stale gusset, is intestinal upheaval. You sit obediently for 12 plus hours eating every morsel that’s put in front of you out of sheer boredom. The Lilliputian portions of chicken curry, a white roll, a little plastic carton of fruit, a lump of cheese. And that’s just the first meal. Three meals later, and that food is cramped up in an abdomen that’s doubled over itself for all that time, everything moving sluggishly if at all. I mean how would you feel if you were a bowel motion?

All that darkness and painstakingly slow forward motion and then suddenly you erupt in exultation into the light of day only to plop unceremoniously into the depths of a toilet bowl at the end of that brave and epic journey. (I must have suffered an hour or two of boredom to be personifying my bowel motions.) Anyway the interminable always ends. We were finally in Lima.