First Class At Last

First Class At Last!

An Antidote to Past Travel Horrors - More Than 1,200 Miles in Extreme Luxury

By Patrick Forsyth

© Patrick Forsyth 2007, 2014

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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without prior written permission of the copyright owner

The right of Patrick Forsyth to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

First Edition published 2007

This Edition Published by Stanhope Books 2014

www.stanhopebooks.com

Cover design and format by Stanhope Books © 2014

Front cover photography courtesy of Orient-Express Hotels Ltd.

ISBN-13: 978-1-909893-18-4

Smashwords Edition

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"The great and recurrent question about abroad is,

is it worth getting there?"

Rose Macauley

Dedication

To my great friends Jack and Silvia; and the charming Siripan.

And, of course, in memory of Sue … and that first visit to Thailand.

Prelude

"A journey is like a marriage.

The certain way to be wrong is to think

you control it."

John Steinbeck

Enough. Something completely different

Be warned. We are all subject to a vast confidence trick. It originated long ago and it still goes on today. The perpetrator is the airline industry in all its many forms, and they are aided and abetted by a plethora of others ranging from hotels to car hire companies. And we seem to either believe them or certainly not be upset by what they fob us off with. Which is? It’s the fantasy that air travel is not just easy and convenient, but that it is glamorous. Really! How can anyone who has caught a plane at one of London’s airports, particularly early in the morning, who has suffered the uncertain journey there, the seemingly endless queues on arrival at check-in, passport control and security and all the general angst and weariness that goes with it, never mind the severe discomfort, stress and tedium of the actual flight, think for a single moment that it is glamorous? It not only is not, it is not in a very big way. Comfort and air travel go together like cleanliness and pigsties. That clever film Babe conned us too; pigs are truly disgusting, though even they might refuse many an airline meal.

Put the horror stories on one side for a moment. Forget the years of business and holiday trips during which everything unpleasant that can happen to you while travelling has happened to me at least once. Once! Well, more than that for some things; and regularly for others. Everything from delays, my record is 49 hours and that’s more than two days of my life wasted and gone forever, to sitting next to a terrified undertaker on his first flight, unable to stop talking about his grizzly profession and the air crash bodies that had passed through his premises—I charged the full whack even when much of them was missing he said—as I wondered where this would lead by the time the eleven hour flight ended. It is a wonder that, in a society that now seems to provide counselling even for life’s smallest hiccups, there is not a service focused on post-horrific-flight-trauma; maybe there is. If so then perhaps it’s a number to note. Anyway forget these horrors for the moment—forget it all right now—even the lost luggage, the delays and the legion of discomforts.

This time I am having none of it. This time I am fixing a special trip and going first class. This time it will be different. It will be better. It will be wonderful. That, at least, is the firm promise of the travel industry, and of course I believe it; well, almost. Make no mistake; I have travelled a good deal. I have been to places I have loved and to which I would love or long to return. I have had business trips on which good business was done and holidays that were satisfactory in every way. But budget has always been a consideration and thus the travel itself has, on occasion, well, let’s say it’s left something to be desired. Now everything about this trip will be arranged to act as a well-earned compensation for the endless privations inflicted on me over the years during previous unforgettably horrendous journeys. Just thinking about this first-class trip is an antidote to my normal feelings of pre-travel foreboding.

I set out optimistic, but also impoverished. This journey may be going to be better than others have been, but the first difference is the cost. Leave aside the budget airlines who will fly you from London to an airport two hours’ drive from the European city you actually want to get to for the price of a pint of beer, provided that you book the one seat available at that price six months in advance by logging onto and battling with their website for the odd hour or two between midnight and 4am and when there is an ‘r’ in the name of the month. Real international travel is expensive. There seem to be a hundred and one different fares for flights from London to Hong Kong, Honolulu or anywhere else for that matter. Many of them offer different prices for the same flight depending upon which method you use to book; but trust me, none of them equate to the cost of a pint of beer. We are talking hundreds of pounds here. And if that seems a lot, just ask what business class costs, then make sure you are sitting down before you ask what the damage is for first class.

Never mind, I tell myself—I have earned this. I have done my time, served my sentence and suffered for long enough. I deserve to go first class, really I do—and this time I really will. Thus resolved, I set about making the arrangements.

Chapter One

Cunning plans

Life is what happens when you are making other plans.

John Lennon

London

Life goes on. The decision was made. I would make this trip, and it would be special. But somehow, within the daily round, I had to decide what to do and, most importantly, where to go. First I went up to London for a day. This is a matter of a 45 minutes train journey from where I live. No problem. I drove to the station, arrived there in good time, but half the ticket counters were closed and it took forever to get a ticket. I missed the train I was aiming for and the next one was running late. I struggled into a carriage once it arrived, the delay having swelled the numbers of people waiting to an even greater number than usual. I sat down—squeezed in is a better way of putting it—and was surrounded by people standing, clutching their bags, newspapers and magazines and holding on to hand holds to try and keep their balance as the train clattered along. It arrived into London 20 minutes late. As those most inconvenienced by this pushed resolutely past their fellow passengers and leapt off, the loudspeakers remained silent with not a word of apology to be heard. Have a nice day.

I got through all this with more calm than usual—I had a special journey to think about and it was going to make this kind of thing look so far down the scale of travel horrors, it would be unbelievable. I braved London’s Underground—The Tube—and hardly noticed the crowds, except for one teenager listening to an iPod tuned so loudly that the carriage was abuzz with the beat of some unidentifiable piece of music. He was subject to many withering looks, though no one had the courage to actually say anything. I consoled myself with the thought that he would probably rue the day and find himself deaf at some time in the future. Twenty minutes later, I walked down Marylebone High Street, one of London’s village streets, and into Daunts Bookshop. This shop has become something of an institution. When it opened some 25 years ago it did so to some degree of mockery. Why? Unlike any other shop I know, its books are arranged by country. It has some general sections to be sure, but the main layout is geographic. So under France or Hong Kong or wherever you will find everything about that place: guide books, travel writing, but also: local cookbooks, novels set in the place, books written by people who are nationals or who live there. It is fascinating and just the place to plan a trip or, in my case, stimulate the imagination of a traveller as yet uncertain where to go.

Furthermore, the shop inhabits a wonderful old Edwardian building. The shop front is smart but traditional. Inside, there are two floors packed with shelves and, in addition, there are long oak galleries forming a balcony all around the lower floor. Daylight floods in from high above through skylights. It feels rather like a library. One can readily understand why The Daily Telegraph called it the most beautiful bookshop in London. Originally its layout—what its founder and owner James Daunt calls its soul—was widely believed to be too different, unlikely to appeal to people and book-trade traditionalists forecasted its rapid demise. Wrong. It has thrived and now has three other branches around London. I adore it and so do many other booklovers and travellers.

Initially, I wandered amongst its shelves looking only at geography. Should I go to Albania, Australia or Argentina? As I moved round the shelves, potential destinations danced before my eyes, here doing so, of course, in alphabetical order. Even when I reached Zambia, however, I was as undecided as ever. The stock of books looked helpful. There was a plethora of guides and other titles, some lavish in their production, singing the praises of places and everything about them. I spent a few minutes with a number of volumes. One series I loved was Thames & Hudson’s Hip Hotels. These lavishly produced books, some specific to particular parts of the world, showcase the world’s smartest hotels: what the cover calls some of the most extraordinary and inspiring Highly Individual Places yet, sprinkling in a few extra capital letters for increased effect. Dipping in at random, I found myself looking at the entries for Sri Lanka. It featured the likes of the Doornberg and Taru Villas. Both the pictures and the description oozed class, style and exclusivity; I want to visit both of these and, as I turned more pages, I felt the same about every other establishment featured there too. These are wonderful books, guaranteed to feed your fantasies and fuel your travel lust. I could have browsed for hours, but as yet, it was not helping me towards a decision by even the smallest distance. Another book that consumed me for a while was The Lonely Planet Bluelist, which is subtitled 681 Things to do and Places to go, and is a veritable goldmine of travel ideas. Although the individual entries are comparatively short, there are plenty of photographs and the places listed span the world. You could plan 10 years of travel with such a book, but what I needed was something to reduce the options and focus my mind constructively on a trip that met my new brief.

I checked their second hand stock, looked at some novels—for me, at least, no holiday or trip is surely complete without some good reading matter—and wondered what else I could do to assist me in making my choice. I was not indecisive, I told myself, I was discriminating, and quite right too for the trip in prospect.

It was wholly impossible that day to stop thinking about travel, including the routine travel of getting around the city. I took a bus and what should have been a short run just added to the day’s travel misery and my longing for better things to come. To be fair, since the congestion charge was imposed on London, traffic is easier. Well, a little. But this bus repeatedly stopped and started and I decided to walk the last bit of the journey, leaving the bus marooned in traffic and with more and more of its passengers abandoning it for something quicker. The demise of the traditional old open decked Routemaster is, I suspect most people would agree, a sad sign of relentless and inappropriate progress. Not only did they somehow characterise London—the classic big red double-decker bus—they meant that you could hop on and off in all sorts of places, making them that much more useful. It would have saved time if I could have hopped off earlier in the jam, rather than having to wait to arrive at a bus stop where the doors could open. It is called progress, and I am convinced that my attitude to such things will make me a wonderfully grumpy old man.

Next I went into a travel agency. For the most part, London travel agents are part of large chains, and some of these specialise in flights and low costs, what used to be called bucket shops. This was a general agent and one of a chain. I stood in front of one of the staff, the only one with no one in front of them. She was a young woman with head down over a bundle of papers and she was tapping figures into a calculator. She did not look up. I coughed in that embarrassed way that people do, especially in England, when they really want to say, You’ve a customer here, you dozy mare, what about some service or at least an acknowledgement that I am here. After some moments, she looked up and as she did so, the customer at the next desk walked away, business presumably complete. She tossed her head in a way that indicated I would do better with her colleague and went back to her figures. I contemplated lunging forward, stabbing at her switches and turning off the calculator, but instead I sat down in front of her colleague. What I thought of as a simple, and surely from their point of view, an interesting enquiry—I want to make a really special trip—first class all the way, something memorable to make up for years of travel misery. What do you suggest?—prompted a deep frown. Clearly she was used to more specific questions: how much for two weeks in Majorca in April? Or can I drink the water in Spain? She smiled weakly and suggested a cruise. I said definitely not and she got up and walked over to a rack of brochures, returning with half a dozen. She began to flick through one, telling me what she saw, You could go on a safari in Kenya or tour Sri Lanka or how about going down the Nile? I could have just flipped the pages and read this myself. I had imagined being welcomed with open arms, being blinded with incredible sounding suggestions and personal experience—I will never forget that sunset, memorable hardly begins to describe it—and just possibly being asked a few questions to ascertain a better picture of what might appeal to me. But she asked me nothing and even her list of suggestions quickly ran out when her flicking through the brochure reached its end.

Dealing with someone who was clearly a fully paid up member of the Institute of Sales Prevention did not seem to be a good route towards inspiration and decision. So, curtailing the conversation with a thank you—though why for goodness sake?—I took a few brochures, glared impotently at the first assistant, still banging away at her calculator and oblivious to all this, and returned to the street. I completed some other jobs, survived the return journey home and left further consideration until the morning.

*

Back home the following day, I continued my investigation. I got out my jumbo-sized world atlas. The index, I discovered, runs to one 119 large, packed pages of tiny type. No quick way of whittling down the possibilities seemed likely there. I switched on the computer—surely the Internet is the way to discover anything these days, I thought. Putting First Class Travel into Google’s search engine produced one hundred and thirty six million listings. Putting in First class hotels produced two hundred and seven thousand listings. Even sites that sounded spot on tended to disappoint: www.treatmelikeanindividual.com sounded interesting, but the name had been grabbed by a small cruise company rather than an outfit offering special treatment on everything to do with travel. The more I thought about it all, the more I became overwhelmed by the profusion of possibilities.

Maybe I should go to China, I thought. I would love to walk on the Great Wall and see the Terracotta Army, but China is not renown for the quality of its hotels and the song tells us that there are nine million bicycles in Beijing alone; this makes it sound a bit overpowering and I mentally deleted it. Maybe I should … This was posing some problems; I had had no idea that simply deciding to undertake a first class trip would put me in such a quandary. The way forward, I decided, was first to rule out some obvious no-nos and drastically reduce the possibilities. A few places came immediately to mind. Lagos, for example, prompted not a single first class thought. The only person I have ever known that went there told me that as he left the chaotic airport and set off towards his hotel in a taxi, it almost immediately stopped in a traffic jam. Horns sounded, flies swarmed around and ancient engines disgorged clouds of environmentally harmful fumes. Nothing moved. After a while, he realised that he was not far back from whatever was causing the jam. He got out of the cab and walked past a dozen or so vehicles to the front of the queue. The first vehicle in the line was an aged truck, ahead of which the road was empty. The driver was alone in the cab, slumped over the wheel. He had been shot in the head. After that, said my friend, the trip just got worse and worse. I did not ask why; certainly it was clear that it was not a destination he would return to in a hurry—and not one that he would recommend to anyone but his worst enemy. So, Lagos was not first choice then. I remembered the extent of the atlas index and rapidly decided that I could not consider each and every country one by one, some more serious wholesale thinning out was necessary.

If I listed some characteristics that would rule a place out, then that would be a start. I began to make a list:

Not a war zone—not even a place with trouble in the air. This ruled out large parts of the middle east, most of the London Borough of Brixton and the surrounds of the Dog and Duck pub on a Saturday night.

No high likelihood of being ill—This ruled out Egypt; I have always heard that more people become ill visiting Egypt than any other country in the world. I have never seen the pyramids and I would like to. Egypt has some wonderful hotels by all accounts and the cruises along the Nile sound idyllic, but no to that country too for the moment. There seemed to be plenty of countries with worse to offer than an upset stomach, and some with so many unique infection opportunities that you might even end up with a disease medical science names after you. Even a dose of say, dengue fever, would stop any trip from feeling first class, so a few more potential destinations were ruled out.

Not too high up—I did not want vertigo or to struggle for oxygen, so Mexico City and the Himalayas were added to the no way list, also precluding the need to eat Mexican food or hire a Sherpa.

Not too complicated to get into—this ruled out a number of places, including some doubling up with the war zone category. I added Australia to the list too—how dare a former British colony demand that people from the home country get a visa to visit them? Linked to this are the places where, once visited, would jeopardise future travel plans. For example, if you have a Cuban stamp in your passport, it may make entry to the United States something of a problem, especially if you arrive at passport control wearing an iconic Che Guevara t-shirt.

No fierce animals—I did not want to be eaten by a lion (delete Africa) or an alligator (delete Florida). Nor did I want to be eaten by a shark, not even chewed up a little. The International Shark Attack File records attacks all across the world (the United States has the most), though, perhaps surprisingly, a comparatively small proportion of attacks are fatal. You would surely think one good chomp and it