Week One: JET LAG

Welcome to the Mysterious Orient! The first obstacle every traveler from America must overcome is the huge dislocation of time. Generally for a week or so, particularly if this is your first trip, you should expect to fall asleep at strange times and wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning with a sense of being utterly disjointed. There is no way to completely get around jet lag, so you should simply work it into your itinerary.

I was fortunate to book my flight on JAL (Japan Airlines), which was recommended to me by a small travel agency in Boulder, Colorado. Not only does JAL offer one of the cheapest flights I was able to find from Los Angeles to Beijing -- and serve, incidentally, some of the best airline food I have tasted in years -- but they put you up at their expense overnight at a good hotel in either Osaka or Tokyo Narita, they feed you a fabulous breakfast in the morning, and then fly you on to China the following day. This overnight stay in Japan may not entirely eliminate the problem of jet lag, but it helps considerably.

My flight left Los Angeles at nearly 5 PM, four hours late due to a typhoon somewhere over Japan. I was impatient to get started; I had been dreaming about this trip ever since I was a kid digging the proverbial hole to China with a bucket and shovel on the beach in California. Finally I was on my way. Once we were in the air, we flew west in what seemed to me a mad chase after the setting sun, a chase we lost. Entering into an extended twilight that was neither night nor day, I felt like I was flying into the end of the world. Then the darkness came, the longest, strangest night I had ever known.

I thought I was prepared for the long flight to Beijing, but I was wrong. What's a little jet lag? I asked myself. After all, I had crossed the Atlantic countless times and thought of myself as quite the international traveler. But the Atlantic Ocean, I soon discovered, is hardly more than a mud puddle compared to the Pacific. It wasn't simply the length of the flight -- 11 hours on the first leg of my journey to Tokyo -- but the dislocation of crossing the International Dateline. My plane touched down at Narita Airport at 4AM Los Angeles time, but it was 8PM in Japan -- the following day. Just when I was expecting the sun to come up, I got a second night instead. The effect of these two nights in immediate succession, without the friendly intervention of day, worked havoc on my inner clock. This was jet lag with a vengeance!

I was lucky to have a window seat for the final three-hour hop to Beijing. My first glimpse of China as we crossed the Bohai Sea: an endless expanse of brown flat plains, earth that looked . . . well, like brown flat earth just about anywhere. I was joining my wife who has a job teaching English for a year at a university in Beijing, and who had gone on ahead while I closed up our house in New Mexico. I was armed with numerous guide books and advice from previous travelers -- information which turned out to be, in most cases, utterly wrong.