O’DAY’S TRAVEL WOES #40: NO LEG ROOM OR BREATHING ROOM

May, 1995: I left not only for my first trip to the country of Colombia, but my first to South America.

Radio Caracol, through the efforts of Carlos Arturo Gallego, brought me in to present HOW TO CREATE MAXIMUM IMPACT RADIO ADVERTISING to their salespeople at their annual sales conference in Cartagena.

Radio Caracol is a very large, very successful group, with (at the time) 92 radio stations in Colombia. And radio advertising was very healthy there. In Colombia, radio received a larger percentage of the advertising dollar than newspapers did.

The company that owned Caracol also owned Colombia’s national airline, Avianca. That’s why I flew Avianca from Los Angeles to Bogotá, with a brief stop in Mexico City.

Avianca 757

Although the crew was fairly nice, I couldn’t enthusiastically recommend Avianca on this route, because they flew a 757…a very narrow aircraft and very uncomfortable on long flights. There were only three rows in Business Class, and Row 3 was the “smoking” row. I had to choose either:

1)    A seat in Row 1, away from the smoke but with absolutely no leg room
2)    A seat in Row 2, with room for my legs but no protection for my lungs

I spent the 8-hour flight with my legs scrunched up.

Even Row 1 didn’t keep the smoke out of my lungs. A couple of hours into the flight, I realized my sinuses were closing due to cigarette smoke.

I looked at the row behind me: no one was smoking. And no one was smoking in my row, either. So I got up to investigate.

I went up the galley, immediately in front of my seat, and peeked behind the closed curtain. And there was a flight attendant, puffing away.

My Flight Attendant, Smoking. (I believe Avianca's uniforms have changed since then.)

Next: Comparing the real Colombia with the American movies’ version of Colombia.