I've mentioned before about how Hunter Thompson is my major non-fiction/blog-writing influece. The concepts that inspired his Fear and Loathing descriptive titles are ones that I've never really felt; being full of fear or anxiety and self loathing while on various adventures isn't part of the ticket.
But part of our return trip had me flasing back to an HST moment, if only briefly.
Last time I was recounting our Southeast Asian travels, we were heading back to our beachy resort in Da Nang after our last massage. (That aside post worked out nicely.) We got back near dusk and headed to the ocean to watch the day leave us.
After dinner at one of the "fancy" western-style restaurants at the resort ("Room 215, thank you," is how you pay), we trudged back to the room and started packing. Dirty clothes, having been washed once in Cambodia, were quite prevalent. Corrie's backpack--the dirty clothes repository--was full and had pushed her rare clean-ish stuff into the original space designated for the dirties. We laid our cleanest stuff out, showered, and went to weary sleep, passing out watching the silly "Machine Gun Preacher" (in English with Vietnamese subtitles).
The next day we awoke, had some runny eggs at the restaurant, and caught a car to the tiny and provincial Da Nang International Airport. From there we flew to Ho Chi Minh City, entered the international flights terminal, passed through the exit Visa control, and waited for our flight. We didn't have to wait too long.
We flew to Taipei, found our new gate, and waited. By dark we started boarding our plane--near 7pm.
I wanted to sleep--for certain--on the plane. At one point in Laos we got Corrie some medicine, and while at the pharmacy we picked up some sleepy pills for the return flights. At least that's what the pharmacist told us. Later on, while at one of the rare computers I was able to commandeer, and still holding the pills, I pulled them out to do a quick internet search. As I read the name before typing it into the search engine I was pretty sure what I was getting: generic Dramamine. The motion-sickness aid wasn't what I would have ever called a "sleeping pill", but I looked up some info on it anyway, just to see what the word on the street was.
Turns out, a dosage in the 500-1000 mg range could produce a psychedelic-like experience.
Hmm...I wasn't so sure I'd heard of that before. Chances are had I known, I would have experimented with that back in the day. But really, who wants to trip inside a hurtling fuselage over the ocean for literally over half-a-day?
After some quick calculations I realized that even if I gulped down all that we had, it was still under 500 mg.
Instead, I split the remains in half, and after the first meal a half hour after we left, I went to the tiny bathroom and knocked off my portion. Hopefully I could get some sleep.
Sleeping on planes for me, while not quite easy, isn't the impossible task it can seem to Corrie and other unfortunate folks. But this time around I wanted to get some actual shut-eye.
Just under an hour after dinner and the Dramamine experiment, I was trying to catch those zzz's, my head trying to balance against the seat back. It was about then that my arms started feeling it.
It began slightly, like they were falling forward. Only they weren't, of course. The unsettling feeling intensified until I felt like I had no control over my arms. It was impossible to get comfortable. I tried propping my arms up against my chest; I tried wedging them under my armpits; I tried pivoting unnaturally in my chair...all for not.
I'm not sure how long this distraction lasted, this odd Dramamine dosing, because I passed out somewhere in the middle. Like the "Maintaining on the Queen Mary" moment, it surely felt longer that it transpired in real time.
Like any good time-warp trip, we caught up with our past when we landed at LAX, hours before we left Taipei. We'd gone up into the air from Taiwan at night, flown through the darkness and into the sun, passing dusk again and landing back in the nighttime, only the calendar didn't change.
Time warp in reverse.
Not much of an epilogue section. The last time we went on a multiple country voyage I had more day time to compose the posts in a timely fashion, when everything was very fresh. My epilogue then truthfully conveyed that the trip itself was still too fresh to gain proper perspective.
Now it seems like the forty-eight days that have passed since we landed have contained so much life that I'm barely sure what's real and what was fanciful about our Angkor Wat adventure.
I was, I suppose, starting to get into the HST loathing with letting this drag...
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