WE DEVELOP FOR STABILITY

This morning I didn’t get breakfast. This wasn’t by my choosing, but the result of the baker not receiving any flour. The problem wasn’t just today, but for the whole week. The other days my morning bread was replaced with donuts so I didn’t go hungry. These weren’t any donuts, but possible the worst donuts I have ever bit down upon. They tasted like they were baked a month ago in a cheap bakery in small town USA. When they had become stale they were sent to Indonesia, where a local seller tried to sell them. Once they didn’t sell in Indonesia they were sent to Timor-Leste. During this whole long ordeal, I’m certain that resuscitation of the donut was attempted with a microwave several times. The donut arrived on my plate cold, hard and stale. If this wasn’t the life that the donuts had lived, I couldn’t venture to guess what harder life they could have had to make them so bad.

Back to the baker and having no flour. The subdistrict of Passabe has just one bread baker. Bread is popular for breakfast here. The flour comes from Indonesia; I’ve heard that it is smuggled across as the tariffs are so high. The stability of the community’s breakfasts has been interrupted.

The trauma of not receiving my daily bread has sent me pondering deeply on the meaning of life and what we really strive for. We also discuss how we work hard and develop for wealth. That wealth is important for a high quality of life. I do not disagree, but I think that we strive for predictability and stability of our lives. A life where we have some semblance of control over what we are going to do and when we are going to do it contributes greatly to our quality of life. The more of the basic things that are stable in life the more we can focus are finite worrying on loftier things, like whether the curtains match the furniture or not. When we know are bread will arrive each morning, that the bus will come to take us to work at 7:10 plus or minus a few minutes, that the local copy shop will be open until 10:00 so we can make the important copies that we need, we breathe a little easier, we relax our tight muscles a bit. Sure, we use wealth to buy a lot of the stability we desire, but there are limits to the quantity of stability we can buy, some of it depends on the society we have developed.

WHAT I MISS

When you are away from home, it is surprising what you miss. Of course, I miss my family and friends dearly, but that is expected. It is the degree at which, more or less, that is usually unexpected. What is even more surprising for me are those things that are not people that I miss and what I don’t. The big thing that I miss is Los Angeles. I miss the hustle and bustle. I miss the pretentiousness, humbleness, and kindness that could be found in different areas of the city. I miss the mix of language, culture, restaurants. I miss the urban with the surrounding nature of the mountains. I miss the million things to do. I miss the midnight bike rides, riding down Los Angeles’s famous boulevards with only a few passing cars. I miss the baseball games in Dodger Stadium.

It is not abnormal for me to miss a place, but Los Angeles felt special to me. It is layered heavily. There is a new discovery every time you peel back a layer. It is one of those cities that improves with time spent there. I guess to get me through, I will have to keep listening to Randy Newman’s “I love LA,” Tom Petty’s “Free Falling,” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” (from Dodger baseball games) to assuage my missing LA.

TECHNOLOGY, THE WORK IT SAVES US FROM

Everyday I’m in Timor-Leste, the more I appreciate the work that technology has saved us from. In the village of Passabe, where I’m during the week, we have gravel makers next to my house. In the U.S. this would mean a large noisy machine where big rocks are dropped in and come out gravel. Tons of gravel can be made in a short time and only one or two laborers run the operation.

As you might have guessed, the gravel makers next to my house are quite different. Everyday ten or fifteen men, women and children haul rocks from the river and then proceed to hit them with a hammer from 9:00 until 6:00. They produce knowing that our project will buy it from them to make concrete. They community does have a job and some money flow, that is something to be happy about, but I can’t help but feel a little sad knowing that any respectable gravel operation could make all the gravel they make in a day in about ten minutes.

Often we lament how technology has caused us to specialize to the point where many of us sit in offices all day doing tedious tasks on a computer. We glorify the feeling of producing meaningful physical labor. However, there are representations like the gravel makers where our tedious easy office jobs sound a whole lot better than the tedium of breaking rocks into gravel all day.

RED, RED LIPS

The Timorese have such luscious red lips that glow a rosen hue. I’m not just speaking of the women; the men too sport these red, red lips. Interestingly enough, the lips are read not naturally or out of vanity, but the result of a mild stimulant. A chew, much like chewing tobacco in the States, is made from the betel nut and lime. Most of the population older than 35, especially those in rural areas, chews this substance the whole day through. The dark reddish color of the chew covers their lips red and leaves their teeth stained.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

I always wondered after learning Spanish well enough to get around, if I would be able to learn a 3^rd language well. I doubt that I will learn Tetun well in the three months that I will be in Timor-Leste, but at least I’m seriously trying to learn the language; I’m definitely not doing it for the fun of it. I am noticing that learning that learning this 3^rd language is different in many ways. First, I can’t seem to get it past my head that this is a third language and not Spanish. I keep having the tendency to switch into Spanish if it’s not English being spoken.

Second, I’m much more patient and realistic. I know a lot better what is attainable. I’m not so frustrated that I don’t understand that much after three weeks. I’m really relishing the small improvements and not dwelling on my failure to accomplish the whole learning process at once. I guess I have realized that learning a language is hard, takes time, and can’t be done Matrix style by download through a cord directly to the head; though I do concede that this would be nice.

Third, I can listen and not understand and be all right with it. I guess I did this while learning Spanish, but what I usually did was not focus on anything that I didn’t understand. Now I seem to be able to not understand, and still focus on the sentence. What I mean is that, I don’t quit paying attention or get caught up when I hear a word I don’t understand. As is the case with most languages, they are redundant so understanding every word is not important; it is getting the gist of what is being said that counts. It was a big step for me in Spanish when I was able to let the words that I didn’t know by without my brain getting caught on them, I’m happy to see that I’ve retained that skill.

RAIN

RAIN

The rainy season is supposed to end by early July in Timor-Leste, but this year seems to be an exception. It is raining everyday and it is nearly August. The roads are a mess. They are mountain roads going up and down at grades incomprehensible to someone who grew up in Iowa. Of course, this steepness is only accentuated by a surface that is random rocks and mud. It is making it difficult to get to and from work sites. When we are there, everything is a muddy mess. At least, the communities’ job, digging trenches, foundations, and whatever else we need them to dig, just got a lot easier.

The down part is that the trucks that deliver our sand and supplies use the muddy roads as an excuse so they don’t have to deliver anything to the communities, but just to the sub-warehouse in Passabe. I would agree with them if I didn’t know that the worst section of road was the one they have to traverse to get from the main warehouse in Oecusse to the sub-warehouse in Passabe. Our pick-up trucks don’t have the capacity and have to haul too many other things than supplies that should be dropped off on location.

CHECK YOUR BOOTS BEFORE YOU BUT THEM ON

Yesterday, I got up. I got ready. Then, just as I was walking out the door, I put on my boots. When I got out to the car, I felt a painful stinging coming from my right big toe. I pulled off my boot to check, but found nothing. I figured that it must have been a thorn stuck in my boot. But, when I got back to the house some nine hours later and took off my boots, I noticed a big piece of something on the inside. This didn’t surprise me after all the brush I was walking through that day. I dumped out my boot and much to my surprise, the big piece of something was a two inch long smashed dead scorpion. That explains why my toe hurt so badly. I’m just lucky I killed it so it didn’t keep stinging me.

When I’m camping and need to leave my boots outside I’m in the habit of checking inside them before I put them on. But since I’m staying in a house, I haven’t felt the need to do that. I guess I need to change my habits.

LIVING FOR TODAY

A language is often one of the most intimate windows into the values of a culture. Words and phrases are created for those things that are important to a culture and those that lack importance go without a descriptor. For example, the Inuit language has a gazillion different ways to say snow. In Honduras bananas were broken down from the two names we have in English to five names. For cultures that are exceptionally polite, language usually has more courtesies thrown in (e.g. Spanish), while other cultures have languages that get right to the point (e.g., English). In all, a culture describes how it wants to be seen through the language that it speaks.

Tetun, the primary language in Timor-Leste, is an interesting case. The language has no past or future tenses, only a present. To denote that something happened in the past you must say that it happened yesterday, one year ago, or another time descriptive. For example, a literal translation into English might sound like this, “One year ago, I go to the house of my parents.” This may just be a coincidence, but the local culture does seem to be living very much in the present with very little talk of the past, and definitely very little planning for the future. I see this in the locals that I work with. In our work, we had to scale back our weekly plan to a two day play, because we found out, the community could never plan ahead further than the day after tomorrow. Maybe I’m not being fair yet as my language skills are still pretty elementary, but for me the coincidence is striking. Then again, when you don’t have much, and there never is anything to save, would you think about the future, dwell in the past, or just try and get through the present?

AM I JUST HERE TO BABYSIT?

Every day I feel like I’m babysitting. I have to tell everyone I’m working with how to do everything. The moment I turn my back, they are taking a shortcut that undermines the water system’s quality. The only way I can get the final result I desire is to never take my eyes off the projects I’m working on. This applies not only to the communities I’m working in, who I could expect to not be trained in how to do the tasks I’m asking, but the technicians who have been working on these projects from about three months to a year. They have done this before. Okay, maybe I should give them more leniency, but it just doesn’t seem right that I who am learning how to do something for the first time (e.g. making formwork or squaring a tank base and making it level) am showing them when they have at least helped do it before. I know, I should remember all the education I’ve had, especially the engineering part since many of the tasks are technical, but it now feels as if it is common sense. Just because it feels like common sense doesn’t mean I should expect others to know it. I guess I’m just frustrated and am tired to hold hands of, what are supposed to be, experienced technicians through task after task. The easiest solution will be to expand my patience threshold.

SUPERSTITION

Superstition, I have found, is a powerful force in many countries. I dealt with it in Honduras, but it was usually manifested as ghosts, or small fears like a woman shouldn’t shower while menstruating. Here in Timor-Leste, superstition is affecting my work.

In one of my communities, we were determining a proper location for the water system’s tank. The tank was to be on a nice highpoint right along the road next to a house. On either side of the road, set back 100 meters or more were 50 meter or higher limestone towers overgrown with heavy vegetation. As we had just placed the tank and were getting ready to leave, the man who owns the house next to the tank location came out and raised a little bit of a ruckus. We had placed the tank directly between two spirit hangouts. Our tank was going to disturb their passing from one limestone tower to another. The spirits would almost certainly become upset and we would die prematurely as a result.

Realizing that this was a serious situation, one that I couldn’t negotiate with easily, I immediately asked the owner where we could move the tank if not at the marked location (for engineering reasons we couldn’t move it far without serious issues). Luckily, he said we had to move the tank only a couple meters towards the man’s house. Problem resolved.

Later I found out that they had already discussed this site with the community and found out it was sacred. The community said that this was not a problem as long as a ritualistic offering, a party, where animals are killed and eaten to mollify the spirits (or, as my cynical side says, the locals’ stomachs). The animist traditions of most villages have turned such offerings into a budgeted expense on our water projects so as to be able to go forward. I’m not kidding when I say that it really is as essential as building the tank for getting the community‘s acceptance. We even have an extremely experienced local, who in extreme situations where a difficult spirit is blocking progress, who is called in to act as a witchdoctor. Pretty crazy, huh?

CHILDREN OF TIMOR LESTE

Always when I travel, the people are the most interesting part. This is not surprising because the culture, the history, the buildings, the way the landscape has been shaped (okay, it has been shaped by geologic forces) is a result of the people. If you want to understand why a place has been built up, exploited, or cared for the way it has, the people are the looking glass through which to peer. In Timor-Leste, the people are very much part of the landscape.

The people, especially in the rural areas are extremely friendly. This is especially true of the children. Everytime our car passes (and there are few that pass in the rural parts) children come running to the road yelling, “Bo Tarle,” a bastardization of the Portuguese “Boatardi” (Good Afternoon), though the children yell this no matter the hour. There seems to be no end to the children’s enthusiasm. Having so much joy greet us constantly, I can’t help but have a joyful heart as we pass through communities. The adults often join in on the greeting, but usually with less exuberance.

TIMORESE CUISINE; DISAPPOINTMENT

I really can’t discern whether there is a national Timorese cuisine. There doesn’t appear to be. All restaurants seem to be Indonesian or Chinese. The food really is a disappointment after having spent so much time in Honduras, where I enjoyed the food immensely. In the rural areas, the population seems to eat only white rice and a boiled spinach like substance. There is almost no meat in the diet. The only protein source seems to be the occasional fried egg. After one week, I’m already tired of these meals.

I’M OVERWHELMED

My first few days alone in the field have been difficult. I’m cut off from others. There is no phone. There is no electricity. There is no water. I have a squat toilet. I don’t speak the local language. And everyone on the project knows the project well. I’m the American the technicians can’t communicate with who is trying to get involved in their business. But, hope is still there, as I think we are finding a happy medium as my language skills improve rapidly and they get used to the idea that they need to come to me with their problems and not the other engineer who they have been working with for the last year. These types of transitions are always difficult. The hardest part is that I get back to my house and I have no one with whom to complain. It is a proven fact that complaining makes you feel better.

Yesterday (Wednesday) was the worst of it. I had to explain how to cast a tank with a separating tank on top, something that the local technicians had never done. After forty minutes it seemed clear that they needed to put a pipe in the forms, to allow water to flow between the separating tank and the storage tank. We even put a hole in the formwork for the pipe and gave them the dimensions. But when I came back after the poor, the tube had not been placed in the tank. In fact they had patched the whole in the formwork and cast the tank as usual. Now we are going to have the difficult task of boring a hole through 10 centimeters of concrete laced with rebar; we can’t hit the rebar, which would be a miracle.

What distressed me was that they didn’t trust my technical advice. At least the other engineer, who they do trust came into town for a short while and chewed them out for not listening to me, and creating a difficult problem. They may be a little more trusting of me from now on.

Also, it seems that more of the technicians are coming to me with their problems instead of waiting for the other engineer. That’s good, then they understand that I’m the local go to guy now.

Okay, it is ridiculous that I’m even mentioning this after so little time managing them, all of 4 days now. I’m certain that I will look back and laugh or I won’t even remember this difficult time because it will be a miniscule amount of my total time working in Passabe.

LAZY OR NOT – 7/13

Today was the first day I really worked alone in Passabe. Of course I got asked a bunch of questions I was unsure about, especially about designs that the engineer who had been managing the projects had mandated. I don’t know exactly what he was thinking, and I can’t call him as there are no phones where I’m at. All in all I felt confident enough in my experience to give direction to the technicians I’m managing.

I’m managing the construction of 11 water systems in and around the town of Passabe. They are in varying stages of completion, with one mostly complete and a few not started. By not started, I mean the designs are done, but just construction hasn’t begun. I have about 15 technicians who look to me as head engineer to help them with the many curves that construction throws them. Being that Passabe is between 2 and 3 hours by car from the town where I normally would be living, I live during the week in a house rented from a local family in Passabe. The family moved out of their nice house and into an old traditional house in the backyard, so as to make a little money. The company pays them for rent as well as cooking my meals, though if I want anything other than white rice, spinach, and super fried eggs I need to give them some money to buy nicer things.

Today, we were to a cast a concrete tank in the community of Oelbonat. This is a difficult process and must be done quickly, so it requires about 50 community members, to do the job. Today, none of the community members showed up to work. My technicians just told me that the community didn’t come to work today. Generally, this is a problem on Wednesdays as it is market day in Passabe, but today was only Tuesday. As I walked around the community I could see many healthy and strong men sitting doing very little. Such a problem is not new to me as it occurred frequently in Honduras as well.

For me such action always brings up the question of laziness. I find it a common and convenient accusation by many in the developed world that the locals are lazy, and thus this explains the local’s poverty. Of course there is a healthy group of contrarians that claim that these peasants are hard working but are held back by those favoured in our capitalist, neo-liberal world.

What do I think? First, the peasants by my definition do hard work, but don’t necessarily work hard. Most of the work that is done is solely for the local’s personal and familial benefit. This is a far contrast from the highly specialized work we participate in in the US, where you don’t necessarily know who your work is benefitting, but that you receive money for the tasks you do.

Since it is difficult to separate home chores from work chores as they are so often one and the same, it is difficult to define a day’s work in hours. However, it certainly appears that they do work fewer hours than 8.

I still don't believe that they are lazy. There really aren't all that many opportunities to work. To do eight hours of work, requires that there is eight hours of work worth doing. Laziness would imply that they wouldn’t do all the work that needed doing. Of course, one can always find work to do, but much of the work that is searched out, because it isn’t obviously apparent, would probably be mindless, and with little payback other than being busy. In other words, the work that can be found is not worth doing as it would hardly improve local quality of life. As I found with so many Hondurans, when they were offered the opportunity to immigrate to the US, either with or without documents, they were willing to work bad jobs for long hours for a mere $10 to $12 an hour. The remuneration definitely motivated the laziness out of them.

Oh well, I just hope that a comfortable community with a deeply ingrained peasant work structure, where time is definitely not of the essence, why keep track of it anyway, when you aren’t going anyplace, will be able to work enough days so I can get these water projects finished by the end of September.

THE PROBLEM WITH LANGUAGE IN TIMOR-LESTE

Language is a real difficulty for me in Timor-Leste. There are four languages of importance and I have no idea which one I should be learning. In Oecussi, where I live, there is a smattering of Tetun, Portuguese, Bahasa (Indonesian), and Baikeno. The problem is that a lot of people only speak one of the languages (except Portugese which is always a second language, especially with the older generation). I’m lucky if I could learn one language at a time with ease, let alone four. My Spanish is useful with the few people who speak Portuguese, but that is about it. Tetun at least has a pretty good sprinkling of Portuguese words in it, but this rarely helps me since the local Tetun speakers only adopted words that they hadn’t already invented, which means all the basic words of life are indigenous language based. Baikeno is pretty prevalent with the locals in Oecussi, but is useless in the rest of the country. Also, many of the technicians I work with don’t speak it, they speak Tetun. This is annoying!!!!!

So, I finally decided that I should learn Tetun. ....But that brings about the difficulty of finding a dictionary and a book to facilitate the learning process. They are scarce. The only two that I know of are a Lonely Planet dictionary/language guide and a Peace Corps guide from before they left the country a few years back. There is no chance of getting either while in the country. Maybe a borrowed copy will float my way. Other than that I can just forge ahead and keep looking like an illiterate fool.

How I got to Timor-Leste

HOW I GOT TO TIMOR-LESTE

Here, I sit in my house in Oecusse looking out of over the water of the Timor Sea. This morning I walked out to my back yard to snorkel in a moderately good reef 100 meters offshore. Yes, I live on the beach. Though, I only get to do my snorkelling and swimming on the weekends when I’m in the “beach” house. During the week I’m in the “mountain” house where I’m managing the construction of 11 water systems over the next three months.

I guess I ran off pretty quickly to Timor-Leste, so I better explain. About a month ago, I mentioned to some of you that I may have been going to only tell you later that I wasn’t. How I ended up in Timor-Leste (commonly known as East Timor in English) goes something like this. A few weeks before I graduated from UCLA with my Master’s I had been notified that I had been chosen for a position with a French NGO to manage the implementation of rural water systems in Timor-Leste, but with a catch, the position was pending financial approval. I was told that financial approval was probable. However, just days before my graduation I was informed that funding had not been approved by USAID and its contractor CDM. Upon hearing this, I graduated, went to Wisconsin for my brother Joe’s wedding and then spent a week at my uncle’s cabin in Canada before setting to finding another job.

Friday, June 25, I received an email saying that CDM had approved funding for the position, and the NGO wanted to know if I was still interested in going to Timor-Leste. Initially, I was hesitant. My joblessness had caused me to plan a bicycle trip with a couple of UCLA friends from Vancouver, Canada down to Los Angeles, by way of the Pacific Coast. I was quite excited for this adventure. Eventually I decided that I couldn’t pass up a job in this tough market. (I had been applying to jobs for a month, and this one was the first that I had heard back from).

Being that the NGO is based in France and I was in the U.S. the time difference sure didn’t expedite the hiring process. I was needed ASAP as the project was short handed. Since, I received notice of the job Friday afternoon; it was already the weekend in France, which halted communication until Monday. To make things more difficult, I was flying to Los Angeles on Monday. Upon landing, I found out that I had a flight leaving two days later, Wednesday, for Asia. Foolishly, I agreed, but suggested that a more direct flight would be better. Thankfully on Tuesday, I was put on a more direct flight leaving Thursday, July 1 to Singapore by way of Tokyo, and then to Dili, Timor-Leste’s capital. I set about frantically getting all the items I needed, closing accounts, and visiting friends (I didn’t get to see nearly as many as I would have liked).

On Thursday, three days after arriving in Los Angeles, and six day after finding out that I had the job, I was on my way to Timor-Leste. After 21 hours of flying and 9 hours of layover, I arrived in Dili, greeted by a heat and humidity that slapped me in the face. The plan slammed down hard on the short runway, and slammed on its brakes and then hit the brakes even harder to keep us from going into the sea.

The airport was small, just receiving 3 commercial flights on a busy day. The majority of aircraft had United Nations insignia blazoned on their sides, hinting to their strong presence in maintaining government stability and legitimacy. Timor-Leste only achieved independence from Indonesia by vote in the late 1990s or early 2000s. The Indonesian forces didn’t go quietly, destroying much of the public infrastructure in the country as they left.

My departure had been so rushed that I knew nothing about how I was going to get a visa, who was going to pick me up, even what language I should be learning (even the guidebooks aren’t clear on this). The situation was such short notice that when I checked in with Singapore Airlines in Los Angeles, they didn’t even show in their system that I was a passenger on my Singapore to Dili flight with their subsidiary, SilkAir. The man had never even heard of the airline company with whom my ticket was purchased, Austasia Airlines. He just checked my bag through to Dili, and told me to make sure that I talked with someone in Singapore so that I could take the same flight as my bag. At least, I knew my luggage was going to make it.

We deplaned onto the tarmac and walked through a group of Timorese soldiers heading in a different direction. As I was waiting to get my visa, a girl tapped me on the shoulder. She was Marie Anne, another new hire to work in Oecussi with me. She, unlike me, knew a little bit about the situation and even knew that I was coming on the same flight as her (I was ignorant to her coming at all). She was armed with a picture of me. We went to the visa office to get our $30 visas. The baggage claim and customs were housed in a small house structure (it looked like an old Pizza Hut with the tall roof). The baggage belt was no more than 50 feet long.

Outside of the baggage claim my friend David was there to meet Marie Anne and me. Oddly enough, somebody I know is working in the same country, for the same NGO, on the same project, but just on another site, as me. David was a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. When I started he had already completed one year of service. I found out he was working on the job by a random mention of his name during my interview. With this I arrived in Dili and stayed in the NGO’s rented house.

I arrived in Dili, Timor-Leste on a Saturday. The boat leaving for the province in which I was to be stationed, Oecussi, was not leaving until Monday night. My two days in Dili were miserable. I was jet-lagged beyond belief. I guess an eight hour time difference and nearly a day and a half of transit time really took a toll on me. Also, the high heat and humidity, which I wasn’t used to and my asthma acting up as it always does until my immune system gets accustomed to a new place, gave me pounding headaches and a poor disposition.

Dili does not feel like a capital city. The streets are quiet. Taxis drive slowly, but definitely not orderly. There are no McDonalds, KFC, or other franchises. There are few restaurants. Even government buildings feel absent. In most of the developing countries that I’ve travelled in, the capital cities are pockets of globalization, chaos, and modernization (for better or worse).

Dili is relatively expensive given the extremely low standard of living being that items have to be shipped to what seems like the end of the earth. The place feels completely devoid of wealth, except for the expats. The country has parity in impoverishment. Seeing poverty across the entire population and none of the extravagant wealth of a few reminds of what a Romanian friend once told me, “Even though we [Romanians in general] are poor, the concentrated wealth in the hands of a few at least signified that our country had wealth and one day we would get it.” I was surprised by his optimism but couldn’t deny seeing where he may be right.

Monday, July 5^th, I took the ferry from Dili to Ocuessi. The ferry leaves twice a week from Dili at 5:00 and arriving in Ocuessi twelve or more hours later. The ferry can be delayed a bit if the tide is too low when it arrives, as the boat can only dock when the tide is fairly high. The ferry, a pretty good sized boat donated by the German People five years ago, is the only boat on the route so if it breaks down, transportation from Oecussi to Dili can be stopped for weeks. Oecussi, is an interesting Timorese province in that it is not contiguous with the rest of the country. Instead it lies on the Indonesian side of the Island of Timor. The airport, if it can be called that, has been closed since independence and is only used by the UN. It is quite difficult for the Timorese to travel through Indonesia as the countries are not on good terms. The ferry is the only option. The cost is a high, $14. The boat is filled, to the brim, I’m not sure if to an unsafe level or not, but all the people lying on the top deck, in the halls, and the floor of the main seating area, certainly gives that impression. We, due to a friendship between one of my co-workers and the Capitan, were able to get one of the six cabins. Surprisingly, I slept almost the entire trip in air-conditioned comfort.