Debriefing

After three months of daily journal entries, it’s been nice to take a short break, but there are a few final details from the trip that are worth recording. Our ride home was back-to-back twelve hour flights on Airbus A380s, which are the largest passenger planes on the planet. Audrey noted afterwards “we should always fly on that one”.

Prior to the flight from London back to Los Angeles I handed my ticket to the guy at the gate, after which a red light started flashing on the ticket machine. I was taken aside for what I assumed was a random security screening, but the guy doing the screening said he was from the US embassy and spent five minutes asking some oddly-specific questions about my trip before having all of my bags thoroughly searched. Apparently with the craziness going on in Iraq and Syria right now, the fact that I had purchased a one-way ticket to Istanbul and then shown up randomly in London three months later raised red flags in whatever computer system monitors such things. I assumed the ordeal was done once the embassy guy had verified I wasn’t up to anything bad, but once back in LA the immigration guy had a red light show up on his screen, and I was taken to the little room on the side of the immigration hall to tell my story again. During the past week I had to fly to the Midwest, and the red lights reappeared while going through security on both my outgoing and return domestic flights. As a result, I was given a very thorough and intimate pat-down during which the TSA guy informed me he would run his hand up my thigh “until I encounter resistance” – I had the option to have this done in a private room, but figured I might as well provide an entertaining show for everyone waiting in the security line. Simultaneous to the genitalia examination my carry-ons were disassembled and put through the machine that sniffs out bomb juice, so it looks like flying may be extra fun until I can figure out how to clear my name.

Aside from erotic pat-downs, there hasn’t been a lot of excitement since returning home, and the return to “normal” life hasn’t been the shock that might have been expected. Since Antananarivo wasn’t as beautiful as the rest of Madagascar (*cough* sewage in the streets *cough*), having it as our final destination made it easier to leave, and coming home to a familiar bed while no longer having to live out of a backpack are both pretty nice things. There have been a few other developments worth noting since our return, but since journal entries are harder to write when the days aren’t filled with lemurs and elephants I’ll save those to recap in a future entry.