The Day That Never Happened

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DAY IN LIMBO: Remember this conversation in India from Day 386: Trinidad. Erik Trinidad.?:

“Which way are you going?” [Bea from the Miami Ski Club] asked me [en route to Udaipur’s Lake Palace].

“The way that you earn a day.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how when you cross the International Date Line [across the Pacific from the west] and you lose a day but then you gain it back?” I said.  “I’m only gaining a day.”

Yes, I had found a way to cheat the rotation of the world, play God, and teleport instantaneously like they do in Star Trek—without having to lose a day either.  According to the calculations of my booking on Zuji.com, the transit time going from Singapore to Vancouver—factoring in a layover in Taiwan, time zones, and crossing over the International Date Line—I’d depart on Friday morning at 8:10 a.m. and arrive at the very same time on the very same Friday morning.  My entire journey from Asia back to North America would happen all on a day that never happened.

FOR A DAY THAT NEVER HAPPENED, it was a pretty eventful one.  The Singapore Mass Rapid Transit train didn’t take me directly to the terminal of China Airlines like I thought it would, so I had to hop on the inter-terminal SkyTrain to transfer.  On the way, I saw that my flight bound for my layover city of Taipei would leave on time at 0810 (picture above). 

Check-in with my e-ticket should have been easy, but Sun Liu Xu, the friendly woman at the China Airlines desk asked for the printed e-ticket receipt. 

“I don’t have one.  It’s an e-ticket.”

“That’s okay.” She processed my check-in, tagged my bag, and printed me a boarding pass—but couldn’t exactly give it to me just yet.  The Canadian government had posted a flag on their computer system insisting that any passenger entering the country had to have proof of onward travel.

“Do you have an onward ticket?” asked Sun Liu Xu’s supervisor.

“Yeah, it’s an e-ticket,” I said.  “Air Canada.”

“Where is the receipt?”

“I didn’t print it out.”

“[You need a printed receipt.]”

“I got an e-ticket so I wouldn’t have to deal with paper.” I argued and pleaded and told them I could just show them my confirmation on my laptop if there was a wi-fi connection in the building—there was, only I didn’t have a subscription to it—but no matter, they let me slide anyway provided that I find internet access to get it printed before my connecting flight in Taipei.

IT WAS A SHORT FOUR-HOUR FLIGHT to Taipei Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport—Ha, I remember when four hours in transit seemed long; that’s nothing now— which I spent furiously working with my clamped iBook on Blog duties until my battery was near dead.  I was days behind as usual and wanted to get at least one up before the long remainder of flight time; I hoped that in my hour-long layover in the airport there would be a fast internet connection to get it uploaded, and to hopefully print out that proof of onward travel for Canadian immigration as requested.

The hour allotted for the flight connection was just enough time to get from one terminal to the other and check-in with just a little time to spare—or to check-in and rush through an internet session.  “Is there an internet point around here somewhere?” I asked the English-understanding woman at the transfer desk. 

“No.”

“Aw...”

“If you have a laptop...”

“Oh, is there wi-fi?”

“Yes.” She told me it was available in the terminal I needed to go to, which was a good thing.  However, when I picked up the signal, nothing was connecting.  I tried over and over for a good amount of time with no avail, and it was no help that I had no juice left in the battery—plus attaching and removing the clamp on and off to keep the screen lit was sort of annoying since I kept moving from place to place seeing if it’d make a difference.

“Is there wi-fi here?” I asked the cafe near Gate D6, soon boarding the on-time flight bound for Vancouver in five minutes.

It caught me off guard, but the Taiwanese employees barely knew any English, and the conversation was a lot of smiles and nods and hand gestures.  Eventually they got it and showed me the wi-fi server behind the counter.

“Oh, okay,” I acknowledged.  Suddenly I was up and running, but ran out of juice and had to go running for an outlet in the other direction from my plane.  C’mon you bastard.  Time’s running out. Plug, plug, clamp.  Then the connection went out.  What the fuck? I fiddled with the whole thing again with no luck and frantically ran back to the gate.

“Vancouver?” asked the guy at Gate D6 when I rushed back not to board, but to find out what the point-of-no-return was. 

“What’s the last time I can board?  I need to get to the internet!” I was getting pretty frantic for no real good reason—I had completely forgotten about the “requirement” that I had to print out an e-ticket receipt for Canadian immigration—and was only thinking about The Blog. 

“Ten minutes before the flight, so 1:50,” the guy said at 1:41.

Nine minutes.  Get the entry up. I flipped open the iBook to see if I could connect.  Nothing.  I ran over to the Taiwanese coffee counter.  “Uh, can you reset the server?”

Blank stare.

“Uh… off, then on,” I said with flicking hand gestures, one down, one up. 

“Ah,” the confused guy said, smiling.

“Off, on,” I repeated with the hand gestures.

“Oh,” he giggled.  He motioned me to look behind the counter; he had accidentally unplugged the internet connection temporarily to make a credit card authorization.  He did the old switcheroo—How do you say that in Taiwanese?—and soon I was back online—until my battery died and my screen went out. 

Run, plug, plug, clamp.  Three minutes.  Go go go!  Okay.  Copy.  Paste.  Save. The photos were already on the server, which saved me lots of time.  I posted a quick comment, unclamped, unplugged, and dashed for the gate.  “Just go!” the gate guy said, recognizing me without checking out my boarding pass.  I was the last one to arrive on board, and without a printed proof of onward travel.  Luckily I had it handwritten somewhere, and later on I discovered that the Canadians didn’t even care to check.

IT WAS A NINE-HOUR FLIGHT from Taipei to Vancouver, across the International Date Line and back in time to the exact time that I left.  I spent most of that day in limbo handwriting entries, but was distracted too many times by China Airlines’ kick ass entertainment system; each individual seat (in coach) had an electronic touch-screen with a controller in front of it for video games, on demand movies, and TV shows you could start, play, fast forward, and rewind at your leisure.  There was also a fairly big music library of about fifty select CDs of every genre, where you could select tracks and put them in a playlist of your choosing, like in iTunes.  Amazing.  This isn’t my father’s airline!  (Wait, he never had an airline.) Even better than that was that for take-off and landing, you could tune in and watch the feed from the camera mounted in front of the plane and see what the pilot sees. 

In those respects, the flight was pretty exciting, but otherwise it wasn’t.  I worked, I ate, I watched, I played, I slept, repeat.  I could make up tall tales of screaming children or barfing passengers, or even talk about a near miss collision, but none of that would be believable on a day that never happened anyway.

SAVE THE DATE; DAY 503 IS COMING.  MARCH 5, 2005, NYC.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE TRAILER. 
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This blog entry was originally posted on March 01, 2005 on the blog, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World (Or Until Money Runs Out, Whichever Comes First)," hosted by BootsnAll.com. It is one of over 500 entries that chronicled a trip around the world from October 2003 to March 2005, encompassing travel through thirty-seven countries in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. It was this blog that "started it all," where Erik evolved and honed his style of travel blogging. (It starts to come into focus around the time he arrives in Africa.)

Praised and recommended by USA Today, RickSteves.com, and readers of BootsnAll and Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree, The Global Trip blog was selected by the editors of PC Magazine for the "Top 100 Sites You Didn't Know You Couldn't Live Without" (in the travel category) in 2005.





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