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Michael Elliott

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By Posted Tuesday, April 1, 1997, at 3:30 AM ET
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About 45 minutes into the 14-hour flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, I started feeling nauseous. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor of the bathroom, retching my guts out. Flu? Airline food? Who knows? But it didn't seem a particularly propitious omen for an eight-day, round-the-world trip.
Fortunately, a young doctor from Minnesota had a magic pill, the United Airlines flight attendants were solicitous and helpful, and I slept most of the rest of the trip. I woke just in time for that unforgettable swoop into Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport, the plane threading its way between the apartment blocks of Kowloon, so close to the windows that you feel you could reach in and pick a rice cake off a dinner plate.
Pretty soon, landing at Kai Tak will join those other forgotten romances of air travel--flying boats, silver service on the old Pan Am clippers. A new airport is being built on Lantau, one of Hong Kong's outlying islands. I'll miss Kai Tak. My late father-in-law, who was a colonial official in Hong Kong, supervised its construction in the late 1940s. That was when Hong Kong was one of the world's great open cities--British, Americans, and refugees from Communist China; merchants, adventurers, writers, and saloon-bar heroes, thrown together in a tiny, vulnerable place. After I leave Hong Kong, I shall go to Britain, to pick up a journal that my mother-in-law kept of her life in Hong Kong in those years. So I am writing a diary of a trip in search of a diary. Tom Stoppard could make a play out of that.
I can make this trip, of course, because of the wonders of air travel. We've become blasé about planes, forgetting how they have changed the world. My mother, who died when she was 75, never flew. I flew for the first time in 1969, when I was 18. Both my children had flown more than 30,000 miles before their second birthdays. For them, an adventure is getting on a train or a bus--air travel is commonplace. When I was a child in Britain, my father used to read me the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. My kids, by contrast, went to sleep after hearing stories about Jumpy the Jumbo and his friends, a collection that so far exists only in my head and theirs.
The Mandarin Hotel sent one of its Rolls-Royces to meet me at Kai Tak, and we crossed under the harbor to Central, still, for me, one of the most romantic, thrilling slices of real estate in the world. The Mandarin folks, bless them, have put me in the same room I stayed in last fall, with a harbor view and old, comfortable furniture. The horrors of throwing up are forgotten, at least for now. I shall have a pot of Lapsang tea, and so to bed.


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By Posted Tuesday, April 1, 1997, at 3:30 AM ET
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Michael Elliott is the editor of Newsweek International.
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