Blog from the Road: Part I – Sleepless in Tbilisi

Tbilisi, Georgia: 2am

Jet lag is a form of gentle torture. It isn't painful, so to speak. Nor in occasional doses is it all that threatening to long-term health. But when you are headed into your third day of no sleep there isn't any great pleasure either.

I am once again on the road. And the thing about Cochabamba is, unless you are headed to Sucre, Santa Cruz or Lake Titicaca, everywhere else in the world is really far. Cochabamba to Tbilisi – really, really far. Five airplanes worth, plus a change of eight hours and two seasons.

The ritual of leaving Bolivia for some project or another has become sort of a ritual. It begins always with a short hop to Santa Cruz to connect to the venerable American Airlines flight #922, which apparently has flown with the very same airliner for a decade and cleaned it maybe two or three times in that decade. I leave notes for myself in the bathroom just to check.

But before I boarded that flying bus of Bolivian businessmen, U.S. missionaries, and a scattering of little babies headed north to see family in Arlington for the first time, I was witness to something new in the Santa Cruz airport. "Starlight Coffee," a small café bordered by Subway sandwiches that has gone to great lengths to fool the unsuspecting into thinking that Starbucks has made its first foray into the Bolivia of Evo Morales. It has replicated everything from the style of the letters on the sign to the overpriced menu of coffee drinks blended with ice cubes. I can't say that I tried any of them. I didn't want to risk jetlag.

American Airlines still puts you up in the Hotel Yotau for free for the night so you can make your connection the next morning. They seem to put me in the same room every time. The rooms are bigger than a lot of the houses in Tiquipaya. I am not sure what people do with that extra room. I just used it to sleep, back when I still slept that is.

Arriving in Miami, another ritual. I still can't pass through immigration without pausing for a lingering look at the glass-walled office of the U.S. immigration service. It is here that both my older children once became, for a moment, the nation's newest immigrants. In 1992 officials here kindly still let my daughter in to the U.S.A. even though we had accidentally soaked her legal documents in spilled Coca Cola on the plane. I am pretty sure the stain is still in row 26 on the right side. Have a look.

But this trip I did the unusual. I actually stayed in Miami for a pair of days, meeting up with that very same oldest daughter who now goes to college five hours north. We started doing these father/daughter trips together when she was a teenager. Our most adventurous episode was when she coerced her terrified-of-heights father to jump off a 1,500-foot cliff in Rio to try out hang gliding. I lived and right now I'd do it again -- if it meant I could fall asleep. Not an option.

In Miami we observed the cultural phenomena of South Beach at the start of summer. We also drove to Little Havana to feast on moro and plantains, a neighborhood still awash in McCain signs and monuments to those who have tried vainly to oust Castro over half a century. I picked up a cigar.

Then in a South Florida thunderstorm I and the young woman who taught me how to become a Dad said our goodbyes and I returned to the skies. En route to Heathrow I watched 17 movies on a little screen near my knees, all of them bad. In London, almost three hours late, I dashed through the shopping mall disguised as an airport (or visa versa) to madly make my connection. Another flight all day and a soft landing in Istanbul.

The airport there has rooms for Islamic prayer – separate ones for men and women – and a bathroom stall set aside for those who prefer to squat over a hole rather than sit on a toilet. I opted for…never mind.

Istanbul's airport also has fine Turkish food and a real Starbucks. I avoided that one as well. I had two Starbucks visits under my belt from Miami. My daughter works at a Starbucks and has the menu memorized. She also knows the secret handshake for getting free refills out of the underpaid 'baristas'. Maybe that's where the jetlag began.

Then at 11:30 pm, 24 hours after leaving Miami, I boarded another flight, to Georgia, that outpost of the ex-USSR that has become a nervous volleyball between a resurgent Russia and 'the west'. Thanks to some strange misfortune of airline scheduling every flight arrives at around 3am and every departure leaves at 4am. A British ex-pat I know here refers to these fight times as "Oh-my-God-o'clock."

On my last visit here in December my ride from the airport didn't show up and I found myself in a strange cab darting around the frozen and deserted capital in the wee hours, escorted by a random taxi driver who was badly lost and spoke no English (and my Georgian is, well, non-existent). So this time I was just happy just to arrive at the hotel without incident.

Sleep, I do miss sleep. At home at 2:30 am I could at least wake up my wife and see if she wants to have another conversation about where our youngest daughter should go to school next year. I am not sure if I would get brownie points for being willing to take up the topic yet again or lose them for choosing to do so at four hours before dawn. Never mind, I know the answer.

On Sunday I wandered around Tbilisi, eventually stumbling on a very Bolivian scene, a blocked thoroughfare and a loud protest demanding the President's resignation. My friends here say the protests have made the President politically stronger. In Georgia people get ticked about not being able to drive unhindered and so, develop sympathies for the embattled President.

Even the skies seemed to be against them, as the blue gave way to dark gray and a downpour that made Miami look calm. The protesters scattered. Under a crowded concrete overhang at a museum that I can't name I sat on the concrete floor, fought back a wet chill, and finished off a book I'd picked up in South Beach.

I think that is where I picked up the cold that goes so nicely with my inability to sleep.

So I am Bill Murray in the movie "Lost in Translation." It is by far the best of all the jetlag movies ever made, a limited genre. They should show that instead of Bride Wars on my AA flight, no? Of course there is no wild Tokyo to explore outside my door here at 2:45am. Nor am I likely to have a chance encounter and hang out with Scarlett Johansson in a bar, if I could find one. Alas.

Okay, believe it or not I have a workshop to lead here in a matter of a few hours. I am going to give sleep one more futile attempt, knowing that, if it does come, it will come be only just a few moments before my morning alarm rings me awake.

Now I may be asleep and just dreaming that I wrote and posted this strange Blog. If you are reading it, well, I suppose I really did.

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