Shite, pure shite

I arrive at Heathrow at just after 10 am local time, expecting to be able to leave the airport for at least a few hours. My connecting flight doesn't depart until 2000. Ten hours. But first, I must go get a boarding pass. I cannot leave the airport until I get a boarding pass.

This means changing terminals, from 3 to 4. Terminal 4 is a 20-minute bus ride away, and when I arrive I have to go through security again, then take a ten minute walk to the KLM Service Desk to get a boarding pass for my paper ticket. Frankly I think a paper ticket ought to be what it says it is—a ticket to get on the damn airplane. But clearly I don't think like an airline.

Trouble is, because my connecting flight isn't for nine hours (it's taken an hour to get to the service desk), they can't print me a boarding pass yet. I'm reminded that I'm not to leave the airport, even if I have a boarding pass, for security reasons. Of course, says the woman at the KLM desk, she can't stop me leaving the airport. But I do have to get a boarding pass first or I can't get back in. It will be at least three hours before they can print a boarding pass for my flight—2 pm.

Of course, even if they do print me a boarding pass spot on at 2 pm, it will be an hour before I can get out of this terminal, lock up my luggage, get through customs, get a train, and make it to Paddington Station, which is still a fifteen minute ride on the tube from where I actually want to be. Perhaps if I'm lucky I could be waiting on the queue at the London Eye by, say, 3:15. And I'd have to turn round by 4:30 and head right back to the airport to go through customs and security again, retrieve my luggage, and get back to the terminal in time to get something to eat and make my flight.

Not for the first time, I consider simply going out through customs and fleeing into the English countryside. They don't need me that badly in Africa, surely.
I'm hungry. I stop at Garfunkel's and pay the equivalent of fourteen dollars for breakfast. I have a beer. I need a beer.

There's no free wireless access. Tampa International Airport has free wireless access. Here it costs one pound per ten minutes. That's $1.80 for ten minutes of internet access—and it must be purchased in one hour blocks. (That you're reading this at all is testament that the airport is a VERY boring place and after long enough wandering around W.H. Smith's most anyone, no matter how cheap, will eventually pay the $11 and get an hour of internet access.)

I've been traveling for 12 hours and I already want to go home.

Actually, though, I never wanted to leave. And the worst bit of it is that I didn't let myself cry at the terminal when I was leaving. So instead, after being frustrated by the late arrival into Dulles (I know my luggage didn't make the connection there, but sometime in the last few hours I'm quite sure it's arrived at Heathrow and will make it's way to my jet for Nairobi. Why I have this hope I don't know as it wouldn't make sense, given how lousy the trip has gone so far, for my luggage to arrive in country with me), frustrated again by the KLM ticket agent (who was only doing her job), distressed by the high cost of everything, and caught in this horrible catch-22, I sit in Garfunkel's and cry into my napkins. Terrible, really.

The beer isn't enough, so I also order a double screwdriver, and when the bill comes I think this is actually reasonably priced—three pounds thirty, which seems cheap except that it's actually seven dollars. I don't order another one.

I go back to the KLM desk. It's only just after one. A short black man in a three-piece suit with an Anglican priest's collar is asleep on his carry-on luggage across from me. How he has managed this I do not know, as I spend the next hour trying to get comfortable enough of these molded formica seats with their metal arms to take a nap. Failing at this, I finally go to the KLM desk just after 2:00 to pick up my boarding pass. At least, with that, I can reconsider the idea of going downtown, right?

No dice. New girl at the desk, she gets the boarding pass printed but needs to see my visa.

Visa? Not the credit card, mind you, the visa to allow me entry into the coutry of my ultimate destination. Um. I don't have one of those. I give her a copy of my orders, she looks at my ID, and finally decides I can probably board the aircraft but she needs to check with someone at Kenya Airways to make sure. Come back in a half hour or so.

Time to wander this glorious expanse of duty-free shopping and look for… well, look for a nice easy chair to curl up in for a while. Which it will come as no surprise I do not manage to find. I do find a caviar bar, and a toy shop with dozens of barking and chirping little stuffed animals all trying to walk off a platform in the center of the store. There's even a giraffe, which bobs its head up and down. No rubber chickens, though, which I find disappointing. I should have brought a rubber chicken with me.

Heathrow Terminal Four is clearly designed to look very nice and fine, and it probably managed that a couple of decades ago. The floor tiles are the sort you choose to disguise filth, and they work quite well as I discover when I come upon some actual filth blending in quite nicely with the random quartzite blobs in the tile and nearly step in it. One disadvantage of this filth-hiding feature is that the airport maintenance staff doesn't notice filth right away.

I've always thought the best way to give the impression of cleanliness was to actually, you know, be clean. This is why nurses wear white. Heathrow wishes to give us the impression of cleanliness by hiding dirt, which nearly always fails eventually.

Around three or so I wander back to the KLM desk, where I spy someone I've not seen in three years, not since pilot training. We'll call him Bob Booker, which is not his real name, and we graduated from T-1 training in 2003. He's been off flying C-5s since then.

Of course the odds of running in to someone like this at the KLM desk at Heathrow Terminal 4 are so slim that we both immediately knew where the other was going, and why we were at the KLM desk. As of four thirty we are still at the KLM desk awaiting some sort of final blessing, possibly from Archbishop Tutu himself, before we can go off to board our plane. Our flight boards in two and a half hours and we haven't eaten anything. I'm beginning to wonder exactly when we might actually get our passes.

What strikes me as odd is this can't be the only time the military has processed people on commercial flights to this location through Heathrow. If we needed visas, we'd have them. We don't have them, and at the risk of making a logical fallacy it's quite plain to me we don't need them, either.

Oh well.

Another few hours of waiting, and then we'll be off on our next adventure—Kenya Airways, and the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. For now, farewell.