Honolulu, Tuesday, 1995-06-13(2) 16:30 local (Z-10)
Well, I had mentally set myself up for disappointment, and that's exactly what happened. We cleared U.S. Customs here at Honolulu, and I immediately called crew scheduling. Instead of releasing me as I had hoped, they assigned me a trip on the 16th. I did some quick calculating and decided that if I could get a jumpseat in the next couple of hours, I would at least be able to get a day at home. However, about 15 other guys had the same idea, and they all are senior to me. It turned out I wouldn't stand a prayer of getting on until tomorrow morning. The only logical decision was to get back on the airplane and head for New York. So it's operate New York to Amsterdam (cool weather and my uniform coat is sitting at home) on the 16th, then commercial to Athens, then operate back to New York. Hopefully THEN I'll get to go home. It does make me feel better that, since I have now exceeded my 50 hour guarantee, I get paid for every extra hour I fly. At Evergreen I wouldn't have gotten paid.
While we were in the air, we went from Wednesday to Thursday, but then we crossed the international date line and went back to Wednesday. We should reach New York some time between 8 and 9 tomorrow morning. That will have been 2 nights on the airplane, and the “grease factor” will have reached critical proportions. They have mini-rooms with showers here at Honolulu which I have used before. I considered a quick shower, but I didn't have time after checking out the jumpseating possibilities. At least I'm not alone. Everybody's beginning to drench themselves in cologne to cover the lack of a shower.
Most of us changed from our grubbies to more formal clothes for the stop here. It seems to help clearing Customs, and for those trying for jumpseats, the formal clothing is a necessity. We're all back to grubbies now. Nobody wants to rumple the uniforms by sleeping in them.
The airplane looks like hell from the outside. The whitewash paint they used to cover the Tower Air identification had already begun to come off just from flying, and as we arrived at the airplane in Jakarta, they were just finishing removing the Garuda Indonesia decals. This left the outline of those letters clean against the surrounding dirt.
I found out a little more, possibly, about the nude woman on the street in Jakarta. One of the mechanics said he had seen this kind of thing a couple of times and had enquired as to why it happened. He was told that women sometimes do this as a protest against maltreatment by their husbands. I wonder if it is in any way connected with the fact that in Indonesia, four wives are legal since it's a Muslim country.
I wasn't the only guy that didn't get to go home. One guy got sent to Tokyo and another got sent to Tel Aviv to layover there four days. Now that's a bummer, because Tel Aviv is not considered a nice place and because you don't get paid if you don't fly. Layovers in nice places are okay to some (like me) but are a definite no-no to everyone when it's a bad place. I haven't been to Tel Aviv yet, but I've heard it referred to by several as the arm pit of the world.
From my standpoint, I was misinformed as Tel Aviv became one of my favorite layovers. It's a sophisticated, vibrant city in spite of the religious constraints. We always stayed right on the beach, usually at the Sheraton Hotel, and I almost always ran on the beach. If we had a full day's layover, I'd take a taxi or walk to Tel Baruch beach, the northern part of which was a nude beach.
We're about to take off on the reef runway at Honolulu. The Pacific is off to our right and the surf is up, even occasionally cascading over the rock wall that protects the runway. While we were in the terminal clearing customs, I noticed a headline on a local paper saying that people were being advised to stay away from the water due to the extremely high surf.
Terry