that was a nice flight

Time to crash and get ready for class in Cairo tomorrow, but I have a couple of minutes while the week’s email is downloading.

This was one of the two or three easiest flights back to Cairo I’ve ever had. For one thing, total flying time from London to Cairo was only 4 hours, due to the prevailing tailwind from the west. From Egypt to the UK is normally more like 5:15. The difference is easily felt.

Next, the flight was almost empty, so there was plenty of room to stretch out. I hadn’t thought of it, but I suppose early September really isn’t a good travel period for most people anymore, is it?

Next, the Cairo airport itself was almost empty. The passport line was probably the fastest I have ever seen it, and nonetheless, my luggage was already waiting when I got through. The customs guy didn’t hassle me (they almost never do, though; their purpose is to hassle real Egyptians who are bringing in too many foreign shirts, as well as to catch outright smugglers of the sort who do come to Cairo more than you might think, smuggling things like exotic animals and not just drugs).

And next, I found a really nice, fast cabdriver who knew his job well.

But I’m saving the best part for last… We flew over three of my favorite places, all of them lucidly visible from my right-side window seat: Venice, Santorini, and Alexandria.

Santorini looked the nicest of the three, though. The whole island was all lit up, and it has such a distinctive shape that I didn’t even need to consult the in-flight map to be sure. I’ve been there only once, too long ago: April 2001. I don’t know if it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly a finalist. (Rio de Janeiro, Palolem beach in Goa, and my sleeper pick Valdez, Alaska are some of the other finalists that come immediately to mind in the “natural beauty” category. But I feel like I’m forgetting some other obvious options. And of course I’m speaking of geography here, not of architectural or urban beauty.)

Alaska, incidentally, is one of the great underappreciated treasures of the United States. I can’t emphasize enough what a wonderful trip I had there. It was 1998, and I had a frequent flyer ticket good for anywhere in the “continental United States,” which only excludes Hawaii. So I flew to Anchorage, rented a car, and spent a week or two driving around… Waterfalls, glaciers, bison, icy inlets, and finally I booked a seat on a private plane and had the guy fly me over Denali. The interior of Denali is one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen, about as close to Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” as I’ve ever experienced. Normally the plane will land you in there on one of the glaciers, but there was light fog that day and it was too dangerous to descend.

And towards the end of the trip I spent a number of days in Valdez, most famous for the terrible Exxon oil spill in 1989, though even worse was the earthquake/tsunami in the 1960’s which destroyed the whole town. Despite the tragic history, it is a place of disarming beauty: a narrow inlet with shark’s tooth mountains on both sides, covered with frozen waterfalls that daring people like to climb. Valdez is so beautiful, in fact, that I became a bit deranged by the beauty for a few days and seriously convinced myself I was going to move there. Problem is, I don’t have any of the skills that would be useful there. I wouldn’t be a good oilworker, and of course I wouldn’t work on one of those industrial fishing ships. So it was unrealistic. But it was a nice three-day daydream to think that Valdez had my name written all over it. And I would still love to return.