(Evergreen Air- EVA- 747 at SFO, 1996).
It was Spring of 1996 in Washington, and the first glow of sweat for the summer to come was under the collar of my Brooks Brothers shirt. The Cherry Blossoms were out. Life was good.
Isobel, Congressman Bill’s Chief of Staff called me on my flip phon. I was walking across the street from the Longworth House Office Building. She told me where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do. It was a concept almost breathtaking in scope, but I had done travel for the Member before to some strange places, and I figured I was up to the task. I began to conceptualize how we could do it.
I decided I needed a high concept, a strategic direction for the planning process. I thought the places we were going demanded a cool theme. I mused on it. Maybe “The Pariah Nations Cool Hotels World Tour with Bill.” She gave me gave me some phone numbers to contact the North Koreans in New York so I could get visas to the Hermit Kingdom.
That was going to be interesting.
Based on my impending orders back to the Fleet, this was going to be my last major trip to arrange while I was working in the Office of Legislative Affairs, and might as well go out with a bang. I determined that we were going to stay in the great hotels of the Empires that had once existed in the nooks and crannies of Asia. I took the list of countries Bill wanted to visit and arranged them geographically in my mind. Then I tried to fit the hotels into them.
Let’s see: Rangoon. That would be The Strand Hotel on Strand Boulevard downtown near the Rangoon River.
(The Strand was the original Rangoon luxury Hotel, as this original oil demonstrates. It had just completed a complete upgrade.)
Bangkok. That is a no-brainer. It had to be the fabled Oriental Hotel, arguably the best hotel in Southeast Asia.
(The original hotel is still in there somewhere at the Oriental, on the banks of the Chao Phraya River.)
Hanoi. That was a hard one. The capital was just starting to come back from the hardships of the war and the bombing. It was twenty years almost to the day since Saigon fell, the moment of the North’s greatest triumph. So in that spirit, I selected the Metropole, the old French colonial-era inn, located just down the street from the Foreign Ministry where Jane Fonda stayed when she was tormenting our captured pilots.
We were to head south to Ho Chi Minh City next, so that was a no-brainer, too. There were some new places that had opened to accommodate the European business community, but I am a sentimental slob. I picked The Rex Hotel, the main billet of the American Military Assistance Command, and the site of the wartime daily press briefings they called The Five O’clock Follies. The Rex was kitty-corner from The Caravelle, which was in between renovations and no longer a tourist hotel. It had been The Place to have a drink after the afternoon body-count briefing and before filing copy for back home.
The rooftop bar at the end of a busy day at war was just the place to watch the fiery arc of Viet Cong rockets heading for Tan San Nhut Air Base.
Hong Kong. Let’s see, the Congressman wants a couple days in Hong Kong before heading to Beijing and North Korea, so why not just stay at the flagship hotel of the Empire? So what if it was above the per diem rates for government travel. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do the right thing. I had no idea if I would ever be back, and I had some unfinished business. It would have to be The Peninsula Hotel.
Years before, Midway Maru had been dispatched to Hong Kong from our home-port in Yokosuka years before to serve as the backdrop to a Vice Presidential visit by Walter Mondale, and he (of course) stayed at the Peninsula, where the High Tea in the Empire themed lobby was legendary. We would sometimes dress up and take it in, alternating our habits with Jimmy’s Kitchen and the Bottom’s Up and Ned Kelly’s. When we found out the VIP party and Secret Service were going to be there, we stopped at an electronics shop and bought earphones, which we pointedly screwed into our ears and draped the cord down to our suit jackets. Then we held our fingers against plugs and looked into the middle distance speaking dramatically to no one.
That was before cellular communications made all of us look like we were hearing voices all the time, and I do recall we did not get arrested for impersonating the security detail. But I never got upstairs, and that was an important issue to address. Check.
On the next leg, we were not staying overnight in the PRC, only meeting the country team in transit, and Pyongyang was a mystery (in more than one regard!) We would have to rely on the tender mercies of the North Koreans. The last time Bill had been in the North they kept him sequestered in a countryside villa where he was held when not meeting Government officials. That one was out of my control.
Coming out again we had to make nice with the South Koreans. I would normally have selected the luxury Shilla Hotel. It was suitably grand, at least in the public areas, but the rooms were a little rigid and the chairs were not comfortable. I had stayed there recently and it was not convenient to the Embassy or the Foreign Ministry. The Hilton would just have to do.
From there it was drafting a concept and linking it all together to see if I could make it work. In this case it was sitting down with the Travel office, a little cubbyhole on the fifth floor of the Pentagon around the corner from the Legislative Affairs shop.
The wonderful and long-suffering woman who worked there had made a career of dispatching her officers out into the wide world, and making sure we followed the regulations while we did it. With a working list of countries and hotels in hand, we logged onto the SABRE computer system that provides on-line access to commercial airline schedules. Was it even possible to link the hotels together?
I cleared my voice, and asked her: “If one was to go to Burma, how would one do it, if one was to make a quick stop to consult on the island of Taiwan before visiting Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China and both Koreas?”
Her fingers flew on the keyboard. The SABRE computer gave us a wild grab bag of airlines to make the connections. Across the pond, heading west, it was super first class on Eva Air, a subsidiary of the Taiwanese Evergreen Company that treated us very well.
It flew all night from LA and landed in Taipei in the early morning. Royal Thai air would whisk us on from there to Rangoon, and then Myanmar Air could get us back to Bangkok.
In Bangkok, we could get the Embassy C-12 to fly up country to visit the refugees. Then, Royal Thai to Vietnam and connect us between Hanoi and Saigon. Cathay Pacific would jet us to Hong Kong from Saigon, and then again on to Beijing. From there it was dicey. You have to fly Air Koryo, North Korea’s national carrier. That was the only way in and out. From Beijing we could get a KAL down to Seoul, and leaving the capital to come home there was finally a United wide-body that would get us as far as Chicago.
I frowned, not for the first time.
There was no direct flight from Seoul to Washington. We could only justify First or Business Class when we were out of the country. Damn.
That was a heck of a note, finishing the trip in Economy. Was there no justice? But the good news was that we could pull it off. All I had to do was get the Congressman to sign off on the concept and start filling in the details.
After all, what could possibly go wrong?
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303