Frankly I’d rather be asleep, but circumstances (in the corporeal form of a jovial Chilean gentleman who WILL NOT SHUT UP) are not on my side.
It’s almost dawn, central Brazil lurking vaguely beneath the thin clouds below. Senor Jovial is lurking vaguely in the aisle, having found a Spanish-speaking victim in the row behind. He’s been talking, amiably but loudly, from the moment (10 hours ago) that we boarded; on the ground he’s probably the kind of lovely bloke who is the life and soul of the tapas bar and for all I know he’s declaiming a very interesting overview of Pre-Columbian history. In current circumstances, however (he’s surrounded by an Airbus 340 full of people who wish they were asleep) I’m stricken with a highly uncharacteristic but unmistakable urge to punch him. I suspect, however, that this is not so much to do with his activity as an agent of sleep-deprivation, and more a function of his uncanny resemblance to Diego Maradona.
Remarkable. In the 10 seconds since I finished typing that sentence he has sat down, said a polite “good morning” to me, stopped talking and is now engrossed in a word-search puzzle book. If he’s been reading this over my shoulder, the putative punch may be coming the other way, but I suspect that his English is as absent as his Spanish has hitherto been omnipresent.
Two hours later, and the Andes are just plain showing off between all visible horizons. Snow on the peaks, greeny-grey elsewhere; all mottled by a fast-passing camouflage pattern, courtesy of high fractured cloud cover.
After half an hour of “that’s enough Andes”, we’re descending over Chilean territory – possibly the silliest shape of any country (2500 miles long, 100 miles wide)- the glide-slope weaving between hills and glacial valleys with vineyards tucked like orderly armpit-hair (what?) into their upper extremities. Then suddenly it’s a wide-open plain, and the wheels are down, and who’s that idiot who hasn’t turned off all electrical devices and stowed his bag under the seat in front of him?...
On the ground: so, having spent the past week grumbling that Chilean import restrictions dictated that I couldn’t bring a big jar of Marmite with me, it turns out that the ground-handling company whose vans are sarcastically driving about the tarmac while I reclaim Too Much Hand Baggage from all corners of the plane is called La Marmite. Hmm...
