Getting to the land of corn tortillas and agave plants via American Airlines meant 12-13 hours in the air plus a tortuous three to four hour stopover at LAX. The dragged-out 16 hour total journey, such as it was, meant that it was of little solace to me that we reached our ultimate destination, Benito Juárez International Airport, around 3 o’clock (only four hours later than we had left Sydney on the same day – courtesy of flying ‘backwards’ across the International Dateline!) The process of connecting to a flight to Mexico via the US had already proved a taxing exercise with an unexpected and costly twist even before I had left Kingsford Smith.
My frustrations began with several fruitless attempts to secure a boarding pass through AA’s Sydney electronic ticketing system. An airline official intervened at this point advising me that I needed to obtain something called an ESTA* before I could proceed with my trip. This was news to me as my travel agent hadn’t mentioned this requirement to me during the preparations for my Central American tour. Arggh, bad start! The official directed me to a nearby Flight Centre office where I obtained the ESTA (at a moderate cost of $US14 – $A18.95) only to discover the sting imposed by Flight Centre who ripped me off to the tune of an additional $45 just to photocopy the single sheet document!
Being well and truly monetarily stitched up by Flight Centre was only the first travesty or inconvenience I had to endure in order to progress through US territorial jurisdiction successfully (but no means unscathed). By the time I had hit the tarmac at Tom Bradley International Terminal in LA my mind was confused as a result of a US Customs and Borders inflight video…the guy in the video was offering me, it seemed, two choices of entry to the US. In my jumbled head I had been still trying to come to grips with the significance of ESTA, and now he was rabbiting on about something called APC…and what was this Global Entry whatsamajazz thingy he mentioned as well?).
In the arrivals terminal, feelings of bewilderment as a consequence of an overload of Customs bureaucratic jargon was exacerbated by chaotic scenes of passengers streaming this way and that way from one end of the terminal to the other…airport officials were shuffling arriving passengers through never-ending lines like rudderless cattle through shutes✥. Why was it, I pondered frustratingly, that all these people were emptying off planes at the same time?). After several false starts and blind alleys (wrong queue, wrong forms … miss-a-turn, go back to the end of the other queue, do not pass Go! etc) I eventually worked out what queue I should be in and what documents I needed or didn’t need to fill out.
Even after I had got past the electronic interrogator with its game of 20 questions, the whole boarding process continued on and on with no apparent end in sight – positively labyrinthine I concluded! Collecting and reassigning my luggage was followed by mandatory de-belting and de-shoeing at the insistence of Customs Nazis barking orders and commands with Third Reich-like zeal (OK, yes American customs officers have no monopoly on bluntness or lack of manners…but they are certainly world-class in that department if my two horror stretches through the LAX maze is anything to go by!).
Finally free of electronic conveyor belts and scanners for a second time, I took some brief respite from the airport obstacle course by momentarily stepping outside the terminal long enough to get a sighter of the LA smog together with an accompanying olfactory dose of LA air before darting off to the departure gate for my connecting flight to Mexico.
Mercifully the second leg on AA2546 – from LA to Mexico City – was a much shorter and thus more tolerable experience, one fortified by an opportunity to sample the local Mexican cervezas…the aircraft however only carried Corona (which I was already familiar with being widely available in Australia) but I was to discover more and varied brands upon arrival in Mexico. Yeah, sure!
FootNote: On the ESTA form Customs and Border Protection heralds its new program called Automated Passport Control with a boast that it “expedites the entry process for eligible Visa Waiver Program international travelers”… umm, if that was fast-tracking, then I wouldn’t want to see it in operation on a slow day when someone had thrown a gigantic spanner into the works!
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* “Electronic System for Travel Authorization” – a visa waiver necessary to travel to/through the USA in this age of world-wide terrorism vigilance
✥ I can’t help but wonder what that cinematic cynical observer of modernity Jacques Tati would have made of the LAX spectacle of countless waves of humanity in the automatonic thrall of a Dalek-like army of little machines
My frustrations began with several fruitless attempts to secure a boarding pass through AA’s Sydney electronic ticketing system. An airline official intervened at this point advising me that I needed to obtain something called an ESTA* before I could proceed with my trip. This was news to me as my travel agent hadn’t mentioned this requirement to me during the preparations for my Central American tour. Arggh, bad start! The official directed me to a nearby Flight Centre office where I obtained the ESTA (at a moderate cost of $US14 – $A18.95) only to discover the sting imposed by Flight Centre who ripped me off to the tune of an additional $45 just to photocopy the single sheet document!
Even after I had got past the electronic interrogator with its game of 20 questions, the whole boarding process continued on and on with no apparent end in sight – positively labyrinthine I concluded! Collecting and reassigning my luggage was followed by mandatory de-belting and de-shoeing at the insistence of Customs Nazis barking orders and commands with Third Reich-like zeal (OK, yes American customs officers have no monopoly on bluntness or lack of manners…but they are certainly world-class in that department if my two horror stretches through the LAX maze is anything to go by!).
