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But the truth is just as often a flaccid burger during hours at Newark; or that humour reserved to the more modest traveller. The US passport official learns my destination:

You're going to Canada?
Yes.
(after perfectly timed pause)
Have you seen the planes they fly to Canada?


(Airport humour. My friend went to check in at Heathrow for a flight to LA. The check in clerk looked up and said, holding his ticket: "but this flight was for yesterday….. Only joking!" No doubt Branson had issued a memo that the clerks should josh their passengers.)

Inside my 747 I look gloomily, from my poor seat at the back, down the tenebrous cathedral-like aisle at the heads, so many heads, receding into the gloom; and I think of the sheer weight of their baggage beneath me and I look out at the perfunctory little engines so barely bolted on to the wing and I think to myself, almost every time, with a kind of relish, this is a bad idea, a very, very bad idea. And yet, in such a short time, after the briefest flurry along the tarmac the whole preposterous package, with an almost impromptu flourish, gets aloft! God knows how but it does.

My destinations this time incorporate, I like to think grandly, the 'littoral of the Americas, north and south.

Certainly they are all cities I haven't yet seen: Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Santiago de Chile. And already I have expectations, most specifically of "Mexico City" and "Vancouver" dreams of which I described earlier.

Of course I expected no such thing as my shimmering semi-arctic model city that was my dream of Vancouver; it was not with any great feeling of shock that I stepped off my airport bus at dusk into downtown Vancouver to find myself pretty much in skid row. Real mean streets; endless importuning, shouts, hassles, real seediness. Having all my stuff on me, passports, money etc I flag down a taxi and take it to a hotel, any hotel.

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