America Diary II

 After 7 hours of journey, the flight landed at Narita, Japan.We were supposed to wait for couple of hours on Narita airport before departing to Los Angeles.  I was again on that familiar airport after 5 years refreshing my memories of  kanji letters, those familiar Japanese words and the beautiful custom of bowing. I felt like I am missing my those wonderful days in Japan, I felt like just to go out and recall the past moments, but reality took me to the flight and I was ready for the takeoff for the third time since my departure from Mumbai. It was the longest air journey I ever had in my life, a journey of almost 11 hours to reach Los Angeles from Narita. I was tired and needed some sleep. When I woke up, I noticed the clear daylight outside the window. I started thinking, we left Narita 6:45 in the evening and were traveling since 4 hours then where this daylight came from? Suddenly I realized, yes! we had crossed the international dateline, taking us a day behind. We were going to travel on the Pacific ocean all the time, the ocean which I had experienced in the book "Kon-Tiki", but I hardly got to see it from the thousands of feet. Still couple of more hours to go to reach Los Angeles and I just finished watching a movie, now the count was 3 since I left Narita making my total count to 7 Since Mumbai. I spent the last couple of hours of my journey in utter frustration and desperation, it has been almost more than 40 hours since I left Mumbai.

    Finally it was announced that we were about land the 'Los Angeles International airport'. As the flight started coming down, I looked outside the window, to see the LA downtown. LA is 2nd largest city in US and the largest in the California. LA is not the city of skyscrapers like New York, Chicago, Tokyo. But LA and in fact the almost whole the Southern California is blessed with bright sunlight, I was delighted, climate was just like my hometown Pune, always blessed by bright sunlight and warmness.

   After the long, tiresome 11 hours we landed finally on the Los Angeles International Airport. I was lucky enough to clear the Federal Inspection and customs in half an hour and came outside of the airport, my chauffeur was waiting for me to drop me at the Riverside , around 60 miles from LA, where I was going to stay for a month.
   Left hand driving and Left hand traffic to which I was not accustomed, I am from those few countries in the world which follows the right hand drive and right hand traffic rules. America is the countries of wide roads and the cars, country of large cars and I was watching the variety of cars. There were the cars of almost every make like Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Subaru, Mercedes, Volvo, Hummer and so on. I hadn't seen such a wide variety of cars before. I was feeling like, there are just the cars on the roads in this country and people are not allowed to walk on the roads at all time.There were the hatchback cars, there were the sedans, there were the trucks, there were the limousines, there were the minivans, in short I found almost every type of every make on American roads.The cars were running with a average speed of 60-70 miles per hour on the wide roads of 5 to 6 lanes on each side. It was Monday afternoon, there was a considerable traffic on the roads, as it was the end of the long weekend due to the holiday of 'Memorial Day', now people were returning to their homes after enjoying their weekend.
   We reached Riverside in just 1 hour 20 minutes, finally I was in my apartment ending my longest journey I ever had, covering almost 9000 miles from my home and 12.5 hours behind in time difference, after all I was now on the other side of the globe.

 

 

                                                       

                                   

                                    

                                     

                                

                                 

                                  

                                   
(in continuation)