Break for the border

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

WITH TT’s national borders set to open on Saturday (if there are no last-minute political brakes for the border-opening) foreign travel becomes relevant to us again.

At least technically.

But it’s been so very long since any of us flew anywhere, most of us have forgotten how to do it.

As Trinidad’s most sensitive newspaper writer, then – excluding everything I say about politicians, priests, pastors and pundits, of course – it is my patriotic duty to provide this blow-by-blow guideline to re-entering the age of jet travel.

To be able to fly away from Trinidad, then, the first thing you have to do is remortgage your house or sell your car, to meet the price of the ticket Caribbean Airlines is offering (such a tender word, for such a savage action; this “offering” is closer to “extorting”).

After being effectively grounded since March 2020, the board apparently directed CAL to recoup the revenue lost over that period in the first weekend. A round trip from Barbados to Trinidad that used to cost US$300 now costs US$1,500-plus. One firetrucking way.

The second thing you have to do is sell or pawn the next most expensive thing you own now that you’ve lost your house or car, to defray the costs of mandatory hotel stays required in the new air travel. Accommodation costs will run you as much as or more than your overpriced ticket.

And if you’re going to England, your hotel costs are going to be higher than your ticket cost, at a ten-to-one exchange rate.

Just to remind you how good you had it under BOAC.

Regrettably, AirBnB has not yet figured out a way to get all the governments involved at every stop of your journey to consider a stranger’s couch in each destination city secure enough accommodation for covid19 transmission-reduction purposes. And hotels, reacting the way piranhas do to blood in the water, have jacked up their prices.

So, as you say hello to the flight attendant at the top of the plane stairs, say goodbye to your children’s university fees/your retirement annuity/your new car.

The third thing you have to do is sell whatever of value you have left, if anything, to pay for the covid19 tests you’re going to have to take before you leave TT
and when you land wherever you’re going. The in-person tests you take under government auspices are not extortionate, like the hotel rooms, but the ones in your destination city are a racket, something Tony Soprano might have thought up. Shop around for the cheapest and you’re still paying too much.

Private enterprise is far more important than public health to the labs that do the testing, and I suspect they don’t really give a flying firetruck how well or how badly you take your own nasal and throat swabs. If you wave the swab in the air and send it back to them with nothing on it at all, you’re likely to find that they, too, found nothing.

And put through your payment and move on to the next test subject/mark.

The last thing you have to do to fly from Trinidad is to practise mask-breathing, especially if you’re one of the moronic Trinis who feel that, once you eat yogurt, you don’t need masks, physical distancing or vaccines. Even if you don’t have to wear a mask when you land wherever you’re going, you will have to wear one for the full time you’re on the plane.

When you add up the costs, then, it’s not so much a case of “break for the borders” as “being broken by the border opening.”

But actual fiscal bankruptcy is a price worth paying to be away from the intellectually bankrupt, those legions of Trinidadian dunces who think they (and their Tantie Doris’s Facebook page) know more about the virus and the vaccines than Dr Fauci, the WHO and every medical person on the planet.

If you have to die from ignorance, it’s better that it isn’t homegrown.

BC Pires is in transit but would like to point out that he says unpleasant things about imams, too, he just didn’t want to firetruck with the alliteration of the third opening paragraph.

Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com.

Finally: Is wot: even in death, Resistance is never futile