Marco Polo Never Dealt with Jet Lag

April 2, 2003
By GREGORY J. RUMMO

BEIJING -- It's the middle of the night half a world away. I am lying wide awake in our hotel room when suddenly there's a gentle knock on the door. "Who's that?" my wife, who is equally as wide awake as I, asks. Jumping out of bed and walking to the door I look through the peephole to see our older son, John, standing in the hallway, showered and dressed in his street clothes.

Our two boys are sharing the adjacent room on the fourth floor at the Beijing Radisson and it's obvious their biological clocks are as confused as ours.
Opening the door I ask, "What are you doing up so early?"

"What time is it?" he shoots back smiling. "James said something about a buffet."
He's looking better than he did six hours ago when we were all so tired we could barely stand up straight. "It's 2:30 in the morning. Go back to sleep. We'll call you when it's time to get up and get ready for breakfast."

There are some things you just can't prepare for when taking the family on vacation, especially one that's a 7,000-mile, 22 hour inter-continental trek from our home in New Jersey to the capital city of the People's Republic of China.

One of them is the effects of jet lag on the human body.

Marco Polo dealt with war and other adverse circumstances when he traveled to Kublai Kahn's court in medieval China during the thirteenth century. But he never dealt with jet lag.

I've tried all the remedies to lessen its affects-extra vitamins, melatonin, avoiding caffeine-none of them work with the exception of the one time I flew first class on a Virgin Atlantic 747 to London. Included in the airfare was a complimentary one-day membership to a health club upon arrival. Thirty minutes of swimming followed by a dip in the Jacuzzi, a hot shower and a fresh change of clothes proved to be the magic elixir.

But this time I wasn't so privileged.

Instead of spacious sleeper seats with gobs of legroom and gourmet cuisine, we were packed like sardines in row 36 in coach in the back of a United 777 for almost 14 hours.

It was a L-O-N-G flight, especially for our two sons whose longest flight up to this point was only 4-1/2 hours when we visited my wife's dad in Las Vegas a few years ago.

Our trip to China began at 4:15 on a Thursday morning when the clock radio cheerfully went off, rousing us all from a deep sleep. We showered and I walked Chewy one last time before saying goodbye to him for two weeks. Then we ate a hasty breakfast and helped the driver load our luggage into the back of his van.
We arrived at Newark airport at 6:45. Check-in and security was a snap as the airport was virtually empty due to fears over the war in Iraq and an orange terror alert in the homeland.

The first leg of our journey was a short, 2-1/2 hour flight to Chicago. The plane was not even half full and we had plenty of room to spread out. We left on time and arrived at O'Hare airport early. In contrast, the flight to Beijing was oversold.
When it was time to board, there was Pandemonium in the boarding area. We made like a herd of steer-lining up in a long queue that stretched as far as the eye could see.

Forty-five minutes later the door to the aircraft was shut and we taxied to the end of the runway where we held for about ten minutes until a long enough window between arriving aircraft afforded us a slot to roll for takeoff.

The flight seemed to go on for days. We ate. We ate again. We had a snack. Then we ate again. I watched a couple of movies. Our sons played Super Mario Brothers on their Game Boy Advance. We dozed on and off and talked with each other and with some of our fellow travelers. I read half of Steve Martini's "The Jury."

Mercifully, fourteen hours later we touched down on the runway in Beijing. By the time we went through quarantine, immigration, and customs found our bags on the carousel and rode twenty minutes on the bus to our hotel, we had been traveling for almost an entire day and night.

I imagined the feeling of awe that came over Marco Polo upon his arrival in the Far East; as he went about immersing himself in China's culture, meeting the people, learning their language and sampling the cuisine.

But we were too exhausted to follow in his footsteps. We took hot showers followed by a short nap and then walked across the street to KFC for a light super before finally passing out.

The experts say for every time zone crossed it takes one day to recover from the effects of jet lag. That means our biological clocks will be synchronized in thirteen days, just as we get on the plane for the return flight back to New Jersey.

Good thing Marco Polo never had to deal with such difficulties. There weren't any KFCs back then to help with the adjustment. n

Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist. Read all of his columns on his homepage, www.GregRummo.com. E-Mail Rummo at  [email protected]