Airborne Sports > Articles > Around the World by Private Jet

''The slower you move, the farther you get" (old Russian Proverb)

‘For Monks Only’ ran a peremptory sign above the only row of empty seats in the Domestic terminal of Bangkok airport, where I was shifting from one foot to the other waiting for a connecting flight to Chiang Mai. I had to beat the temptation to lower my aching jet-lagged frame onto a seat: for all my debts and bank overdrafts, I could hardly pass for an impoverished over-ascetic Buddhist monk. To begin with, I was wearing shoes. Also, I was on the way to joining in one of the world’s ultimate hedonistic experiences - a 28-day-long Abercrombie & Kent ‘Around the World by Private Jet’ tour.

The ‘Private jet’ was originally meant to be Concorde, but after all Concordes were grounded, it had to be replaced with a Boeing 747, specially re-fitted to provide the clients with “ultra-First Class luxury unavailable from any commercial source”, according to an A&K brochure. There were eight stop-overs, each of two-three days duration, in this round-the-globe hop, starting and finishing in New York: Hawaii, Shanghai, Chiang Mai (Thailand), Jaipur (India), Dubai, Florence, Tunisia and Lisbon. I was supposed to join the group of 49 tourists, mostly Americans, in Chiang Mai and to fly back to London from Dubai a week later.

Yet, so far the experience was far from hedonistic. My back was sore after being repeatedly stabbed by the sharp knees of some long-legged and fidgety British teenager, who sat behind me on the economy-class flight from Heathrow.

I bought a copy of The Nation, a Thai daily. “Artificial legs are presented to disabled people at a public charity event to mark the 100th birthday of the late Princess mother,” read the caption underneath the front-page cover photo. With my legs feeling numb and almost artificial, I trudged to Departures …

On the plane to Chiang Mai, I had another read of the A&K glossy brochure with promises of “six-star tours”, which made me wonder what kind of ‘six-star’ hotels they were going to put me up at.

I would probably be at a loss if asked to name the best hotel I have stayed in. But, after many years as a travelling journalist in the former Soviet Union, I knew for sure where the world’s worst hotel was - in the Turkmenistan town of Mari on the Afghan border.

I remember a bearded Turkmen woman solemnly giving me the key to the hotel’s only ‘luxury suite’. The room was full of flies and smelt like a mortuary. It was 42 degrees of heat, but the air-conditioner did not work. Nor did the shower. The biggest surprise, however, was that I was supposed to share my room and the only medium-sized bed with a male Communist party official from Ashkhabad. He was snoring and fretting on his side of the bed all night, and when I finally managed to nod off, I dreamt of an earthquake. Also, I got severely poisoned at the hotel’s restaurant (it only had eggs and cucumbers on offer, but this was enough) and nearly died.

Regent Resort, my Chiang Mai hotel, was built in the style of a traditional peaked-roof northern Thai village. It was a cluster of luxury villas, blending effortlessly into the surrounding landscape of rice fields and tropical forest. The moment I approached the Reception, a stunning-looking and constantly bowing Thai girl put an orchid wreath around my stiffened neck. Another girl, also a stunner, was trying (in vain) to relieve me of my shoulder bag, whereas a third smiling beauty was filling in my registration form kneeling in front of me in what I thought was a rather suggestive manner.

My villa was a mere hundred yards away, but they didn’t allow me to walk: a buggy truck with a smiling and bowing male driver materialised from nowhere, and I was politely, yet firmly, offered a lift. Shedding orchid petals with every move, I climbed into the buggy.

Inside my teakwood-fitted villa, gold fish swam in circles in round water-filled flowerpots. To my relief, there was no Party apparatchik snoring on my enormous bed, the size of a medieval European town square. But the biggest surprise in the form of a thick A&K portfolio awaited me on the desk. Apart from welcoming letters and useful tips, the folder contained an envelope with some pocket money in local currency and half-a-dozen picture post-cards with stamps lovingly affixed!

They didn’t allow me to walk to the restaurant: I was picked up halfway by a buggy truck. While ordering an exquisite four-course Thai meal I had to remind myself not to worry about the prices: all food was included in the package.

It was at the dinner that I had the first glimpse of my travel companions from Abercrombie & Kent round-the-world tour. They looked ordinary and were engaged in a usual touristy babble of what-are-we-going-to-see-tomorrow type. It was hard to imagine that each of them had paid the equivalent of my two-year earnings for the trip.

Having firmly decided to walk back, I sneaked out of the restaurant unnoticed and had to hide behind the trees to avoid the ubiquitous buggies. Of course, I got lost and had to be escorted back to my villa by a white-clad security guard, who was lighting my path with a torch. On depositing me at my door, he saluted with what sounded like a New Zealand rugby team war-cry, turned about-face and goose-stepped back to his booth. Looking at his receding back from the porch, I felt like a military ruler of a small banana republic watching his troops on parade.

Next morning, I met the members of Abercrombie & Kent staff travelling with our group: a tour director, two tour managers and a luggage master - a soft-spoken Peruvian man, who went with us everywhere. There were all helpful, efficient and seemed to be enjoying what they did.

For the sightseeing, our group was split between two air-conditioned buses - ‘red’ and ‘blue’.

“What do you do?” I asked my blue-bus neighbour, a stocky ruddy-faced man in a baseball cap. “I manage money,” he said. In the following days, I noticed that most of my companions were fairly evasive when it came to their occupations. “I own a business”, or “I am a retired financier,” were the most common replies.

Each bus had its own ‘bus-boy’, obsessively plying us with cold drinks and distributing special A&K refresher towels. I thought it would be nice to have one back in London on my erratic 100 route from Wapping to Liverpool Street.

First, we went on a bicycle rickshaw ride across Chiang Mai. My rickshaw was a dried-out sinewy old man, so thin that he was almost transparent. Pressing the pedals of his rusty antediluvian bike for all he was worth, he was constantly lagging behind the rest of the procession. The members of the Thai royal family were grinning at us condescendingly from ubiquitous street posters.

Few things make you look so silly as luxuriating in a cart pulled by an elderly rickshaw in torn, worn-down slippers.

A boat ride on the Ping River was next. Snacks and fresh fruit were waiting for us on the deck. “This is your lunch, ha-ha!” joked our facetious Thai guide. She knew only too well that it wasn’t. And so did we (which didn’t stop us from emptying our plates, by the way).

We chugged along the river, its banks lined with shabby wooden huts. “Surely, in the rainy season these houses would be flooded and all the poor people’s valuables washed away,” an omniscient woman from our group commented loudly, with her mouth full.

“What valuables?!” our tour manager interjected angrily, but cut himself short.

After a huge lunch, we drove outside Chiang Mai to visit a hill tribe village, where we were quickly led through dimly-lit shacks, past knitting women and playing kids, none of whom acknowledged our presence. They must have been used to such flying visits by foreigners. The stone-age nature of the village life was somewhat undermined by satellite dishes on some of the roofs.

“Up to 14 people live in each little house here,” our guide commented. “Did she say people or chickens?” asked the same American woman. Everyone in the group laughed. The guide bit her lip.

It was scorching hot. “Three showers a day wouldn’t be enough here, especially if you only have five a year,” another American mumbled. And everyone, including the guide, had to laugh again…

My first evening with the tour was spectacular. Halfway through a sumptuous open-air dinner, somewhere between live Thai dancing and fireworks, servants started launching Kom Loy - small hot-air balloons, made of Sa (Mulberry) paper. The air inside the Kom Loy was heated from underneath by candles installed in their baskets. As the balloons were climbing higher and higher, the candles kept burning until their tiny flickering lights and the multiple pimple-like stars in the velvety tropical sky became indistinguishable from each other, and it was no longer possible to tell which stars were real and which weren’t…

“We are fulfillers of dreams!” Roger Stephenson, Managing Director of Abercrombie & Kent Thai office, who had come from Bangkok for the occasion, shouted into the night sky, where the coloured rockets suddenly took the shape of two huge fire-spitting letters - ‘A’ and ‘K’. At that moment, I was ready to believe him, although he forgot to mention that the price of a single-supplement dream was just under $70,000, whereas a twin-share dream was worth a meagre $62,000…

Prices aside, can one live in a fantasy world for more than a day or two, after which even your wildest desires tend to shrink and loose their sparkle, like a cluster of charred burnt-out fireworks?

I asked myself this question next morning, when the very thought of breakfast was unbearable after the previous day’s sophisticated gluttony. There was no time to answer it, though, for we had to go for more Thai meals, briefly interrupted by shopping, bamboo-rafting and elephant-riding.

One thing was certain, though: from day two I started slowly but surely losing the plot. And the mind-boggling luxury of the chartered Boeing 747, which we boarded the following day for a flight to Delhi, only added to my confusion.

My name was embroidered on a starched white napkin covering the headrest on one of my First Class seats. Yes, I had four seats at my disposal with enough combined legroom to accommodate a couple of basketball teams. My fifth - smoking - seat was at the back of the plane, where I would often retreat to have my dessert followed by an after-meal cigarette. Between leisurely puffs, I would get a glimpse of two youngish American women from our group jogging around the cabin’s perimeter. They calculated that one full circle constituted approximately 0.4 miles.

Strict ‘Do not throw foreign articles into the toilet’ signs were hardly visible behind bunches of fresh flowers and piles of French perfumes, with which all the plane's bathrooms were stuffed almost to the ceiling. On board this jet, I felt very much like a foreign article in constant peril of being flushed down the loo.

We had a huge ‘Hot Lunch’ on the way to Delhi. My name was duly printed on the cover of a glossy five-page menu (I was getting fed up with seeing my name everywhere, as if A&K were worried that I would somehow forget it and kept reminding me of it every two minutes). When halfway through the feast the captain announced that we were approaching Everest, I was tempted to ask whether it came with rice, vegetables or French fries.

The on-board ‘wine of the day’ was Chateaux Beaux, 1996. I asked one of the 14 cabin crew for Errazuriz - my favourite Chilean Chardonnay. His face fell, as if he had just learnt of a sudden failure of all the plane's engines. They didn't have it in stock! How outrageous! As a consolation I was given a leather-bound A&K note-pad, with a silver Parker pen thrown in, and a glass of Dom Perignon.

A survivor of hundreds of super-austere Aeroflot flights, where the only drink (and food) they served was tepid mineral water in plastic cups with fossilised imprints of previous users’ teeth, I felt like asking for a political asylum in this flying first-class restaurant.

In Jaipur (India), we stayed at Rajvillas, built to resemble a Rajastani fort. The level of luxury there was pretty much the same as at Regent Resort, only welcome wreaths were made of marigolds.

My villa, was again full of flowers, but unlike in Thailand, it had a four-poster bed (sleeping on it alone felt like a minor offence) and a white-marble bath, the size of a swimming pool. And, of course, the magic A&K portfolio, with money and stamped postcards, was also there, only this time I took it almost for granted. I was half-expecting to find some hasty "Love from India" messages scribbled for me on the postcards.

Unlike Regent Resort, discreetly hidden among the hills, the stone-walled complex of Rajvillas was across the road from a poverty-ridden Jaipur neighbourhood. The contrast was striking: the cost of an overnight stay in Rajvillas was much higher than an average annual salary of an Indian ($300).

Most of my travel companions didn’t like India, whose penury they found irritating. Their animosity could not be quite shaken off by the beauties of the Pink City and Taj Mahal, nor by yet another elephant ride - the second one within three days. They remained seemingly unimpressed by the opulent reception at the palace of the Maharajah of Jaipur, where we were met by dancing elephants with A&K banners on their backs. I thought it wouldn’t be long before, similar to a madness-faking hero of one Russian satirical novel, I started shouting at the top of my voice: “I am the Viceroy of India! Where are my trusty nabobs, my maharajahs, my abreks, my kunaks, my elephants?!”

The Americans squealed with delight when we boarded our faithful snow-white A&K jet in Delhi for a 3-hour hop to the U.A.E. Suffering from Delhi belly, I could remember very little of Dubai, except for a gleaming marble-fitted bathroom of my Ritz Carlton Hotel room.

Back in London, I was finding it hard to recall the details of the trip. I could evoke what we had for lunches and dinners, but was unable - for love or money - to recollect where exactly we had been served this or that yummy soup or curry - in Agra? In Jaipur? Or was it on the plane?

I am sure I am not alone to be suffering suffer from amnesia after this journey. “We feel as if we are in the movies,” my stoic travel companions often commented while yet another foreign scene was unveiling behind the windows of our air-conditioned bus. According to my calculations, the proportion of sightseeing to eating and moving from place to place was roughly one to ten. It was seldom that we had a chance to walk more than 200-300 yards a day. To repeat Hemingway’s famous description of Paris as a “moveable feast”, our trip was a “moveable feast” in its own right, only “feast” in its context meant not a “celebration of the soul”, but a huge hedonistic meal.

One good thing is that now I know the difference between travelling the world and “doing the world” in a luxury jet. It is like the difference between the real stars and the lit-up hot-air balloons.

Hedonism is the enemy of a traveller. It makes his eyes oily and unable to see things for what they are. Our Chiang Mai guide told us about Thai boxing - a local sport where you are allowed to use any part of your body, except for your teeth. It sounded like an antithesis of our tour, during which we were not allowed to exercise any parts of our bodies, apart from our teeth. No wonder my 30-year-old stainless-steel dental bridge, a memento of my Soviet past (one London dentist used to call it “Lenin Bridge”), broke in two and fell out of my moth during one of the lunches. I brought it back to London in my pocket as a souvenir of all the wonderful food I had eaten on this trip.

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