Paradise Incoming (SAMPLE)

Chapter 01

If you’ve never had any reason to pass through Western airport security in the midst of a terrorism scare, then you’re missing out on something as exciting as it is terrifying.

Airport officials treat every backpack as if it’s a concealed deadly explosive, every long object in a suitcase, even those shaped like innocent bottles of wine or deodorant cans become weapons of mass destruction hidden within the confines of overpriced matching luggage. Every foreigner who made the mistake of growing a beard became the target of beady eyes and strip searches.

I myself have fallen prisoner to the brainwashing of the paranoia propaganda on many occasions. If a man who I deemed too out of place for a busy airport has brushed by me and knocked into my shoulder, I would instinctively check for my wallet, or if someone loitered too closely – even if it’s the only place they could feasibly stand – I convince myself that they’re about to stab me with a HIV tipped needle or run off with my wallet.

It’s madness I tell you, utter madness.

At home, it is easy to turn off the television and ignore the woes of the world, but international airports are a special kind of animal. There is no escaping it here; everyone looks at everyone as predator and prey alike.

In November 2001 I was flying from Washington DC, the city where I was born, where I had stayed in a featureless single-serving hotel for a couple of weeks after departing from my home for the past twelve years or so, Camden in the United Kingdom. I was heading out to the noise and flashing lights of Thailand in South East Asia.

My intended destination, after taking in the sights and sounds of Bangkok and the quaint beaches of Ko Samet was the Temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, which Lonely Planet assured me was much calmer than the bustling backpacker land that Thailand had dissolved into in the last thirty years. I wasn’t sure I believed it; Lonely Planet had the habit of photographing the one corner of an old building that wasn’t cancerous with tourists (at four in the morning) and gushing about how isolated and beautiful it was.

I wasn’t counting my blessings just yet. Once tourism ruins one country, it tends to leak into the next, and then the next like a sinking ship,until every place associated with that country becomes the same myriad of counterfeit designer clothing and cocktail bars, and you can’t walk ten feet without running into someone you saw last time you were there.

As I handed my passport to the rotund security operative, who was sweating profusely despite the chill hanging in the air conditioned room, I scanned my luggage, took off my shoes and belt to show there was no C4 hidden in a belt loop or insole, and I kept one eye on the giant red LED clock on the wall.

It reminded me of a movie bomb timer going very slowly, in reverse.

My twenty or so hour flight to Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok, boarded in thirty minutes, and the queue of excited holiday goers and travellers, easily discernible by the amount of hand luggage they were carrying, was trickling through the metal detector at a snail’s pace. If it had moved any slower I may have actually started crying.

I was heading out to Asia to meet my best friend from back in Camden who headed out there a couple of weeks before me to travel around for a little while by himself.

His name was Constantinos McTavish – Con for short – and he was half Greek half Scottish, which coupled with his dark features and good looks made for a very interesting way of picking up girls. I lacked his natural tan, six pack and ability to grow a beard in a single weekend. I often had to resort to the old fashioned way of picking up girls: spending money on them and being nice to their judgmental friends.

Con had never been on an official pay roll in his thirty-one years of being alive. Sure he’d worked, he was actually quite a hard worker, and dangerously clever, but all of his jobs had been off the books and a vast majority of them in recent years had been abroad.