Heading Home
It wasn’t easy leaving Riga. I had done a brief side trip to Lithuania and briefly decided while there that Vilnius, the capital, was the pick of the Baltic nations yet the moment I stepped off the bus on my return the charm of Riga overwhelmed me. An emotion blended with the sounds of trams running down metal tracks, of boulevards and parks, of renewal and optimism, colour and vitality.
I was expecting to head further east into Estonia but was now on my way back to Oz yet I did have a return ticket the following year and reassured myself that I would reacquaint myself with this region before heading further east.
The bus stop to Riga airport is a short walk from my hostel and as I stepped aboard I briefly looked back towards the city with a quite thought of ‘here we go’ and a realisation that this step into the bus was the beginning of a chain of events; boarding, alighting, transferring, disembarking and generally moving from one vehicle to another until arriving in Australia in less than 48hours time. I did have some concern about passing through London Heathrow airport still in critical alert just two weeks after bomb threats but as I had almost 16 hours to get from London Stan stead airport to Heathrow I imagined I had plenty of buffer there.
It is a fairly short run by bus through fairly unremarkable suburbs to Riga International airport a new and, as with much in Latvia, almost certainly foreign financed. Any new economy needs a welcoming and new gateway right? Riga, like Tallinn, Vilnius, Warsaw, Prague, and in fact almost all destinations in Europe are now serviced by the so called discount airways such a Ryan Air, Easy Jet, Wizz Air and others. Unfortunately these new carriers bring a new breed of tourist to many eastern European locations, the most readily identifiable being the English lager louts. I say they are fairly readily identifiable as they tend to travel in groups of around eight to twelve and follow a fairly standard itinerary; drink lots of beer (lager), be loud and obnoxious, drink more beer, look for sex (or pay for it), drink more beer, sing predominantly football songs, drink more beer, drink more beer, get on the plane and go home (then probably tell everyone what a shit place …. is, but the beer is cheap and I got a root!). I had to share my dorm with such a group on my first two nights in Riga but fortunately they never got home until late in the morning and I was happy to take off soon after they did. I didn’t get too much of an opportunity to talk with these guys but sensed there was an unwritten humour law that required others in the group to laugh out loud when someone attempted to tell a joke. It is an interesting phenomena to observe this form of mutual appreciation. One guy decided that as I was an Australian then humour dictated that I should be called Bruce and I responded at one point by turning and saying, ‘oh Charles your so funny, I think (empathises on think) that was funny about twenty years ago. A response of laughs all round made me think for a moment that I’d gained honour membership to the humour club. Despite this prospect and a number of offers to come out for drinks the prospect of going half a block away to sit in an English style pub called Dickens with a group of boozed up louts seemed a little desperate to me and moved to a different hostel on day three. I did however bump into them as I walked pasted the Dickens and had a brief exchange and found an opportune moment to drop the comment that they were just worried that Australia would soon be playing better football than England and then they would have nowhere to run and hide. Funnily, no one laughed at this joke. I think I’d found a raw nerve. For the English that would signal the real end of empire. They can overlook hardly making it onto the medal count in the Olympics, and being beaten resoundly by the colonies in cricket and rugby but the prospect of being beaten by Australia in football was something they found unnerving. I walked away from the Dickens with a sense of satisfaction of perhaps putting them off their lager if only briefly.
Sitting at Riga airport waiting for my flight to London it was interesting to watch the various aircraft come and go by carriers unknown. Watching an Uzbekistan 767 arrive I felt convinced this was a re badged ex Ansett plane from Australia. I’d seen images of row upon row of aircraft from failed carriers after September 11 sitting neatly on a tarmac in the Nevada desert in the US waiting to be resold. I started to consider any similarities between used car sales and used plane sales and some fast talking sales person walking down the tarmac stating, ‘this lovely little 767 over here only did short haul flights up and down the east coast of Australia or perhaps you’d like something a little smaller, this 737 is a gem with full log book history’. Anyway, most of these second hand planes would have found there way to Eastern Europe, Africa and the discount airlines of Europe so perhaps that piece the piece of chewing gum I stuck under the armrest of seat 46b on the Ansett flight from Brisbane to Sydney in 98 might still be there on my Ryan Air flight to London?
Ryan Air advertise as a discount airline so you don’t expect too much but to find that your discount fare doesn’t include luggage is just a little too much of a stretch of that title I believe. Buy a ticket with Ryan Air and you can bring one piece of hand luggage on board yet you pay per piece of hold luggage!! To be fair to Ryan they do inform you of this when booking but only when you have almost completed the multi page online booking form. Nevertheless, I found it a little dishonest to promote a fare and then charge extra for luggage at around $30 a piece with a load limit that has been reduced to 15 kg. Who goes on holidays without taking luggage? Is this nothing more than an dishonest way to disguise the real price of your ticket in the market place? Oh course not. My first experience with this discount airline was further complemented when the aircraft landed. While other aircraft pulled along side an air bridge the Ryan Air jet parked well back on the tarmac requiring a walk out from the terminal. This didn’t really worry me but I presumed this was to avoid the fee charged for the air bridge and allowed the plane to move off forward under its own power and avoid the towing charge. I was one of the first on the plane so I took the opportunity to use the toilet and found a nappy stuffed into the toilet bowl and it was apparent that the plane had not had a rudimentary clean between flights. This is the world of discount airlines.
The flight to London Stan stead airport is around two and a half hours. While I might not know too much about the UK I gathered while looking out the window and seeing grazing land and farming plots that this airport was not particularly close to London and in fact about two hours out of London. Stan stead airport would have to rate as the worst airport I’ve been to and well below several in Africa, Asia and Central America I have been to. It reminded me of a cattle auction rather than an airport with people being directed this way and that. Most airports are purpose designed to funnel people in various directions and have a logical progression through them. Stan stead is one huge rectangular building in the middle of nowhere with lots of temporary barriers and gates yet little signage. In larger airports like Heathrow you move through the airport with people in front of you and perhaps a hundred or more behind you but you are never more than a group of say two or three hundred as you pass through. At Stan stead I found myself in a tide of somewhere around six to eight thousand in a huge hall. No wonder there where heaps of police walking around with assault rifles. If you were a terrorist this would be an ideal place to create a bit of ‘collateral damage’. (euphemism courtesy of George W )
I soon found myself at Heathrow airport after catching the last train out that evening to avoid the peak hour commuter crush and prepare me for the reported lengthy check in times post terror alert. The authorities had decided that no liquids where to be taken on the aircraft. Funny thing was the day before I passed through security at Riga with a litre of orange juice in my hand luggage and only afterwards I thought you could create a hell of a lot of problems if I’d had petrol in that container rather than orange juice. But then terrorists would only board at Heathrow wouldn’t they? Anyway the security at Heathrow wasn’t anywhere as onerous as I’d imagined although I did get taken aside for a ‘random’ search on my way through security. I wasn’t sure whether this was entirely random. Perhaps anyone over six feet tall is a potential security threat or perhaps the security had picked me up on camera moving from terminal 4 to terminal 3 by the tube on two occasions. I had gone to terminal 3 because there is better food there and to stretch my legs but to a security officer sitting in an observation room my aimless walking and movements may have raised suspicion. Anyway having already flushed 2kg of cocaine, 200 ecstasy tablets, and two blocks of hash down the toilet, ha, before boarding I had nothing to fear and agree willingly.
This was a fairly amusing experience. They have this small cubicle erected just near the standard x-ray machine. You are first asked to submit to this inspection or alternatively you would be taken for a strip search. You are then asked to take everything out of your pockets and take off your shoes and enter one end of the cubicle while an officer enters the other end behind a partition. On the floor there are six marks in the shape of the sole of a shoe. Two had the number one marked on them, two with the number two and two with the number three. I was instructed to raise my arms and first place a foot on each with the number one then move to have each foot on number two then number three. The prints where arranged in a way that your legs would be splayed apart no doubt so those x-rays would have a clean path to the anus area. I was tempted to ask the officer if he know how to play ‘strip twister’ but thought he might not share my humour. Is was handed my shoes an was soon on my way back home.
I was expecting to head further east into Estonia but was now on my way back to Oz yet I did have a return ticket the following year and reassured myself that I would reacquaint myself with this region before heading further east.
The bus stop to Riga airport is a short walk from my hostel and as I stepped aboard I briefly looked back towards the city with a quite thought of ‘here we go’ and a realisation that this step into the bus was the beginning of a chain of events; boarding, alighting, transferring, disembarking and generally moving from one vehicle to another until arriving in Australia in less than 48hours time. I did have some concern about passing through London Heathrow airport still in critical alert just two weeks after bomb threats but as I had almost 16 hours to get from London Stan stead airport to Heathrow I imagined I had plenty of buffer there.
It is a fairly short run by bus through fairly unremarkable suburbs to Riga International airport a new and, as with much in Latvia, almost certainly foreign financed. Any new economy needs a welcoming and new gateway right? Riga, like Tallinn, Vilnius, Warsaw, Prague, and in fact almost all destinations in Europe are now serviced by the so called discount airways such a Ryan Air, Easy Jet, Wizz Air and others. Unfortunately these new carriers bring a new breed of tourist to many eastern European locations, the most readily identifiable being the English lager louts. I say they are fairly readily identifiable as they tend to travel in groups of around eight to twelve and follow a fairly standard itinerary; drink lots of beer (lager), be loud and obnoxious, drink more beer, look for sex (or pay for it), drink more beer, sing predominantly football songs, drink more beer, drink more beer, get on the plane and go home (then probably tell everyone what a shit place …. is, but the beer is cheap and I got a root!). I had to share my dorm with such a group on my first two nights in Riga but fortunately they never got home until late in the morning and I was happy to take off soon after they did. I didn’t get too much of an opportunity to talk with these guys but sensed there was an unwritten humour law that required others in the group to laugh out loud when someone attempted to tell a joke. It is an interesting phenomena to observe this form of mutual appreciation. One guy decided that as I was an Australian then humour dictated that I should be called Bruce and I responded at one point by turning and saying, ‘oh Charles your so funny, I think (empathises on think) that was funny about twenty years ago. A response of laughs all round made me think for a moment that I’d gained honour membership to the humour club. Despite this prospect and a number of offers to come out for drinks the prospect of going half a block away to sit in an English style pub called Dickens with a group of boozed up louts seemed a little desperate to me and moved to a different hostel on day three. I did however bump into them as I walked pasted the Dickens and had a brief exchange and found an opportune moment to drop the comment that they were just worried that Australia would soon be playing better football than England and then they would have nowhere to run and hide. Funnily, no one laughed at this joke. I think I’d found a raw nerve. For the English that would signal the real end of empire. They can overlook hardly making it onto the medal count in the Olympics, and being beaten resoundly by the colonies in cricket and rugby but the prospect of being beaten by Australia in football was something they found unnerving. I walked away from the Dickens with a sense of satisfaction of perhaps putting them off their lager if only briefly.
Sitting at Riga airport waiting for my flight to London it was interesting to watch the various aircraft come and go by carriers unknown. Watching an Uzbekistan 767 arrive I felt convinced this was a re badged ex Ansett plane from Australia. I’d seen images of row upon row of aircraft from failed carriers after September 11 sitting neatly on a tarmac in the Nevada desert in the US waiting to be resold. I started to consider any similarities between used car sales and used plane sales and some fast talking sales person walking down the tarmac stating, ‘this lovely little 767 over here only did short haul flights up and down the east coast of Australia or perhaps you’d like something a little smaller, this 737 is a gem with full log book history’. Anyway, most of these second hand planes would have found there way to Eastern Europe, Africa and the discount airlines of Europe so perhaps that piece the piece of chewing gum I stuck under the armrest of seat 46b on the Ansett flight from Brisbane to Sydney in 98 might still be there on my Ryan Air flight to London?
Ryan Air advertise as a discount airline so you don’t expect too much but to find that your discount fare doesn’t include luggage is just a little too much of a stretch of that title I believe. Buy a ticket with Ryan Air and you can bring one piece of hand luggage on board yet you pay per piece of hold luggage!! To be fair to Ryan they do inform you of this when booking but only when you have almost completed the multi page online booking form. Nevertheless, I found it a little dishonest to promote a fare and then charge extra for luggage at around $30 a piece with a load limit that has been reduced to 15 kg. Who goes on holidays without taking luggage? Is this nothing more than an dishonest way to disguise the real price of your ticket in the market place? Oh course not. My first experience with this discount airline was further complemented when the aircraft landed. While other aircraft pulled along side an air bridge the Ryan Air jet parked well back on the tarmac requiring a walk out from the terminal. This didn’t really worry me but I presumed this was to avoid the fee charged for the air bridge and allowed the plane to move off forward under its own power and avoid the towing charge. I was one of the first on the plane so I took the opportunity to use the toilet and found a nappy stuffed into the toilet bowl and it was apparent that the plane had not had a rudimentary clean between flights. This is the world of discount airlines.
The flight to London Stan stead airport is around two and a half hours. While I might not know too much about the UK I gathered while looking out the window and seeing grazing land and farming plots that this airport was not particularly close to London and in fact about two hours out of London. Stan stead airport would have to rate as the worst airport I’ve been to and well below several in Africa, Asia and Central America I have been to. It reminded me of a cattle auction rather than an airport with people being directed this way and that. Most airports are purpose designed to funnel people in various directions and have a logical progression through them. Stan stead is one huge rectangular building in the middle of nowhere with lots of temporary barriers and gates yet little signage. In larger airports like Heathrow you move through the airport with people in front of you and perhaps a hundred or more behind you but you are never more than a group of say two or three hundred as you pass through. At Stan stead I found myself in a tide of somewhere around six to eight thousand in a huge hall. No wonder there where heaps of police walking around with assault rifles. If you were a terrorist this would be an ideal place to create a bit of ‘collateral damage’. (euphemism courtesy of George W )
I soon found myself at Heathrow airport after catching the last train out that evening to avoid the peak hour commuter crush and prepare me for the reported lengthy check in times post terror alert. The authorities had decided that no liquids where to be taken on the aircraft. Funny thing was the day before I passed through security at Riga with a litre of orange juice in my hand luggage and only afterwards I thought you could create a hell of a lot of problems if I’d had petrol in that container rather than orange juice. But then terrorists would only board at Heathrow wouldn’t they? Anyway the security at Heathrow wasn’t anywhere as onerous as I’d imagined although I did get taken aside for a ‘random’ search on my way through security. I wasn’t sure whether this was entirely random. Perhaps anyone over six feet tall is a potential security threat or perhaps the security had picked me up on camera moving from terminal 4 to terminal 3 by the tube on two occasions. I had gone to terminal 3 because there is better food there and to stretch my legs but to a security officer sitting in an observation room my aimless walking and movements may have raised suspicion. Anyway having already flushed 2kg of cocaine, 200 ecstasy tablets, and two blocks of hash down the toilet, ha, before boarding I had nothing to fear and agree willingly.
This was a fairly amusing experience. They have this small cubicle erected just near the standard x-ray machine. You are first asked to submit to this inspection or alternatively you would be taken for a strip search. You are then asked to take everything out of your pockets and take off your shoes and enter one end of the cubicle while an officer enters the other end behind a partition. On the floor there are six marks in the shape of the sole of a shoe. Two had the number one marked on them, two with the number two and two with the number three. I was instructed to raise my arms and first place a foot on each with the number one then move to have each foot on number two then number three. The prints where arranged in a way that your legs would be splayed apart no doubt so those x-rays would have a clean path to the anus area. I was tempted to ask the officer if he know how to play ‘strip twister’ but thought he might not share my humour. Is was handed my shoes an was soon on my way back home.
posted by transavante | 3:26 p.m.
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