If it’s Tuesday, it can’t be LA
The International Date Line waits for no man, as one intrepid traveller finds
CALL me old-fashioned, but when trotting the globe I try not to come across as stark raving mad. I also put special effort into not appearing unhinged in the presence of airport security officials in the US of A, where lunatic long-haul travellers invariably end up in a very small room for a very long time.
But my damn passport just wouldn’t scan. Swipe. Bleep. “Try again,” suggested the screen of the automated check-in terminal at LAX, the sprawling airport outside Los Angeles.
Swipe. Bleep. Still no joy. “You can only check in for your flight within 24 hours of departure,” the screen admonished me. “But my connecting flight is in three hours!” I wailed inwardly. Fresh off the plane from Hong Kong I had a same-day connecting flight from LA to New York. See? It says so right there on my itinerary, I ranted (quietly) at the terminal.
It had all started three days earlier when I left my Cape Town house with a rather odd plan: fly around the world, west to east, in the space of a week, eating in the world’s airports. But that’s another story. Suffice to say it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Right then, the problem was my flight. Or, more precisely, the lack of it. And then the penny dropped, chuckling to itself, and for the first time in my life I found myself standing in front of an airport security official asking: “Excuse me. Um, what day is it today?”
“Monday,” she drawled in that laconic LA accent, eyeing me somewhat warily.
“You’re sure it’s not Tuesday,” I asked. “It must be Tuesday? Tell me it’s Tuesday.” Tuesday, of course, was when my flight was booked for.
At that point she may have started backing away and calling for backup, I forget, but that penny was now bent double with laughter. My mind flipped back over the Pacific: to the udon noodles for dinner after take-off, the flight in the comfortable Cathay Pacific seats, and the dim sum for breakfast. Ah yes, there it was, hanging out with its buddy, the line of longitude at 180°E. My arch-nemesis, the International Date Line.
I’ve always had a pretty good handle on jetlag, but nothing prepares the uninitiated for the rip in the space-time continuum that is the IDL. Having left Hong Kong at 4pm on a Monday afternoon and flown for 13 hours overnight across seven time zones I’d landed . . . an hour before I took off. It had become the longest Monday of my life.
For us South Africans used to shuttling back and forth over the Equator, not across the zipper line dividing one day from the next, it’s hard to get your head around. So what’s a traveller to do with 27 hours to kill? That’s no hardship in LA so I forked out $100 for a hotel, badgered them into sending a shuttle to pick me up, and slept off three days of planes, planes and more planes. The next day rose as glittering as a Californian’s smile.
Stepping off the bus in Santa Monica, fate delivered me to the doorstep of a Segway rental shop and soon I was freewheeling along Route 66 on Santa Monica Pier. Then it was down to Venice Beach to grab a corn dog, slide past the “medicinal marijuana consultants” and avoid eye contact with the iron-pumpers on the beachfront.
Sitting with my toes in the Pacific, it seemed every cloud does have a silver lining. Next time I’ll make sure it’s not the International Date Line though. — ©
‘You’re sure it’s not Tuesday,’ I asked. ‘It must be Tuesday? Tell
me it’s Tuesday’