Brother-in-law, though a frequent flyer, forgot to move his pocket knife from his carry-on to his checked bag. He groaned when TSA discovered it. The knife was a gift from us, a gorgeous little oval less than two inches long, but heavy and well-made. Bob and I found it on a trip to Germany, and bought one for ourselves, too. A Mammut MicroTool, it’s called.
B-I-L, the self-proclaimed Swedish Okie and country bumpkin, was on his way back to Sweden. When the TSA officer dangled the contraband with its dangerous half-inch blade, B-I-L recognized a glint of proud ownership in the eye of the new beholder. The officer beheld a prize. B-I-L is a sore loser.
B-I-L snatched the knife away, determined that it should not slip beneath the crumpled handkerchief in the warm pocket of the TSO. He could not bear the thought of his fine knife snug among the unmentionables, in pilled cotton intimacy under an overhanging gut. B-I-L intended to destroy the little tool.
He hadn’t counted on the strength of the precision German instrument. He ripped, he stomped, he tried to bend. It took him fifteen minutes to render the tool unusable, the stubborn vengeful bumpkin.
I know a man in Las Vegas who makes his living on the forgetfulness of travelers. He buys great lots of TSA’s confiscated pocket knives for pittance at auction, and sells them one by one on eBay. (The profit, they say, is in the “shipping and handling” fee.) He’s never seen a fine little tool like the exotic Mammut MicroTool. He must get an, um, filtered selection.
What we call “confiscated items,” TSA refers to as “voluntary abandoned property.” [sic] If I were a TSO, I’d protest the extra work involved in providing envelopes to passengers. I’d say it’s a bad idea. It would mean I’d have to hand over an envelope, wait for the passenger to address it, then collect a fat fee and provide a receipt. All that work! No more perks!
We good citizens are trained from an early age to respect authority. It’s not easy to ask a uniformed policeman for identification, or even a plainclothes officer who flashes a badge. And if we were to request ID, how closely would we scrutinize it? Would we detect a fake? What about identification in a foreign language, Thai for example, or Russian?
What’s the difference, anyway, between a pseudo cop—an impostor—and a legitimate but corrupt official? Both rely on their perceived authority, both act fast (before they’re found out, by the victim or others), both do the shake-down dance in one form or another. We, the good citizens, never see it coming. “It all happened so fast,” one victim told me, “I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t have time to think.” We’re more than victims of crime here. We’re victims of our upbringing, we who are taught to follow rules and obey laws.
Bob and I were accosted by pseudo-cops in Russia. I can tell you, it’s frightening, especially when the scene expands to include additional players. Sydney’s had them, and so has Barcelona. Stockholm’s in the news now with pseudo cops stationed at ATMs frequented by seniors, collecting PIN codes under the guise of “regulation.”
BBC News reports a horrific scam that takes place in the Bangkok airport. A number of travelers browsing the duty-free shops have been accused of shoplifting, put in jail holding cells, and forced into negotiations that amount to police extortion in exchange for their release. They’re being tricked into relying on the advice of a man who seems to be a police accomplice.
One of the victims in this report, Stephen Ingram, was taken by airport security to a police office, put in a cell overnight, then given an interpreter. The interpreter took him (and his travel companion) to a police commander who attempted extortion of over US$12,000 and threatened a prison stay of two months before they’d even get their case heard. After paying a portion of the “bail,” Mr. Ingram and his travel partner were put into a hotel and told not to leave, not to contact a lawyer or their embassy, and cautioned that they were being watched. They eventually escaped and got the their embassy, where they learned they’d been victims of a classic Thai scam called the “zig-zag.”
An Irish woman was subjected to the same scam when she made a small purchase at the duty-free shop. She bought an item of makeup, which the shop clerk put in a bag; a customary practice, right? On leaving the shop she was surrounded by security guards shouting ‘You! You! You go jail six months.” The shopping bag contained an item not paid for. Did she steal it? Did the shop clerk plant it? Did the guards? The woman was held overnight “in filthy conditions,” and eventually had to pay up to free herself and her passport.
In her case, the Irish woman thought she had purchased two items. She paid by credit card but didn’t pay attention to how many hundreds of baht she was charged. Did the shop clerk intentionally charge for only one item, as a set up? Why, otherwise, did security immediately pounce on this customer?
Both of these examples begin with the company called King Power, which runs the airport duty-free shops, and both include collusion by government officials and others. King Power has tried to substantiate some of its accusations with surveillance video, and has three cases “explained” on its website.
In an article in the Irish Daily Mail, Andrew Drummond wrote that in Thailand (where he is based), this is called the “Monopoly scam, ”
not so much because of the high amounts of money involved but the fact that victims…could buy …˜Get out of jail’ cards to escape airport shoplifting charges. These …˜cards’ were letters issued by the local prosecutor and police.
Fake police with false ID at Bangkok airport. How is one to know what's real?
Bangkok airport, it seems, is infested with scammers, corrupt officials, and according to the pictured article, pseudo-cops. There are more horror stories:
Paul Grant and Lynn Ward, both from the UK, separately reported another Bangkok airport scam. In this one, incoming passengers are instructed by a customs officer to put their duty-free items into their checked luggage when they retrieve it from the carousel, and that they should not declare the items, “or they will be prosecuted for smuggling.” When exiting the customs area, other customs agents “discover” the undeclared items, and levy hefty fines or threaten jail. ATMs are conveniently located beside the customs office, or travelers are escorted to machines in order to withdraw the large sums charged.
If you haven’t read this or another warning specifically about the shake-downs in Bangkok’s airport, you haven’t got a chance should you be chosen to be a victim.
We flew from Anchorage to Homer on Alaska Airlines flight 4878, operated by ERA Aviation. No TSA. No screening; none at all. Liquids? Okay! Weapons? Whatever you want! Just check your large roll-ons and climb aboard, big boots ‘n all.. 20 seats. Open seating, open cockpit.
The moment Michael Griffith turned his back, his wife let out a bloodcurdling scream. He whipped around to see Nancy jumping up and down, crying, her face contorted with panic and disgust. They were at the immigration desk at Lagos airport with barely an hour left to suffer Nigeria.
Michael now knew for sure he shouldn’t have brought Nancy along on this short business trip. She’d been so warned, so exhorted, so horror-storied, that she was utterly paranoid and never even left the perceived safety of the hotel.
A few days earlier, as Nancy browsed the hotel gift shops, she’d had a brief conversation with another hotel guest.
“I hope you’re not leaving this god-forsaken country on Friday,” he’d told her.
“I don’t know for sure,” Nancy said with alarm. “Why?”
“They steal passports on Fridays,” the man explained. “Goddamned immigration officials at the airport.”
“Why on Fridays?”
“Because they know you’ll pay anything to get your passport back so you can get the hell out of Nigeria without waiting all weekend until Monday.”
When Michael returned to the hotel that evening, Nancy asked him what day they were leaving. Friday, Michael said. So Nancy related her newest tale of terror and, together, she and Michael came up with a plan. Nancy would carry their remaining cash in a flat leather pouch attached to her belt and slid inside her jeans. 100 nairas, the exact amount of departure tax for two, would be put into Michael’s shirt pocket. Nancy would tuck an American $20 bill into each of her two front jeans pockets in case bribes were necessary, and Michael would carry a 20 naira note in each of his two front pants pockets. Never let go of your passport at immigration, they’d been warned. Michael would hold onto their passports during examination and stamping.
Attorney Michael Griffith
As a lawyer who represents Americans arrested abroad, Michael was no novice at foreign travel. He’d been to almost eighty countries, through hundreds of airports. It was his business to know the laws and procedures of other countries, their customs, and dangers. He’d been through the notorious Lagos airport many times before, but never with his tall, blond wife. Nancy, too, had traveled extensively. She had just retired from her career as a supermodel.
Nancy’s jitters came from the endless Nigerian nightmare experiences she’d heard and read about travel through Nigeria. Even the U.S. State Department considers it one of the most dangerous, corrupt, and unpredictable territories on Earth.
Nigerian nightmare
So it was not a pair of travel virgins who meticulously prepared themselves for
the perilous journey through Nigerian formalities. These were travel warriors. From New York. Michael, at least, thought he’d pretty much seen it all.
They approached the immigration desk as planned, Michael in the lead, Nancy dragging their wheely bag. It was not crowded, and they stepped right up to the official’s high desk.
“Airport tax fifty nairas each,” the government official demanded.
Michael reached into his shirt pocket and extracted the prepared cash, five
20-naira notes. As the officer’s fingers closed around the money, Nancy shrieked. She yelled with a shrillness and urgency Michael had never heard before, unlike her wail of frustration on the tennis court, her cry of anger occasionally directed toward him, or her extremely rare explosions of rage. In an instant, a heartbeat, a fraction of a moment, Michael heard intense terror and overpowering repulsion, desperation, and primeval fear. He felt it in the hollow of his chest. In his bones. On his skin.
He spun, already flushed and slick with instant sweat.
Nancy was screaming, but she was also jumping and twitching. And Michael
saw that she was covered with cockroaches.
Covered might be the wrong word. There were only twenty or thirty cockroaches. But they were huge, shiny as glass, and black as terror. They skittered up Nancy’s jeans, down her blouse, and along her bare arms. One had become entangled in her hair, and kicked frantically at her ear. A few dropped onto the floor, where Nancy crushed them as she leapt spasmodically.
A uniformed immigration officer strolled away from the hysteria, indifferent. At his side, he casually swung a large-mouthed jar of grimy glass. It was empty.
Michael, accustomed to extracting people from sticky situations, was at a loss. He’d pulled people out of South American prisons, choreographed an American’s escape from a Turkish jail, rescued the wrongly accused and the clearly guilty. Now, as he grabbed his delirious wife by her shoulders and tried to steady her, he saw the same overwhelmed eyes he saw in many of his clients. They bulged with a desperate plea for a savior, and of unspeakable horrors.
Michael swatted and kicked away most of the creatures. Then he opened the lower buttons of Nancy’s blouse and removed one more. He pulled one from her hair, and then removed the serrated legs that had remained stuck there. He asked her if there were any more. Then he held her.
“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered in her ear. “We’re almost home.”
He turned back to the immigration officer, still placid in her high booth.
“You only gave me four twenties,” she said. “I need one more.”
“Lady, I’m from New York,” Michael said dangerously, “and this is the best I’ve ever seen. You know and I know that I gave you a hundred nairas. You’re getting nothing more from me.”
The officer waved them through, expressionless.
Nancy, catatonic with shock, began to regain her composure when they arrived at the gate for their flight.
“If I ever get out of here, I’m going to kiss the ground of America,” she said with conviction.
And she did so, eighteen hours later at JFK airport, though it was technically not ground, but the dusty terrazzo floor thirty feet above it.
A U.S. Customs Officer must have seen Nancy bend to the floor in the busy baggage hall.
“Ma’am, you must be just back from Lagos!” he grinned. “Welcome to the U.S.A.! Welcome home!”
So you’ve made it through security. Does that mean you’re in a secure area? Not secure enough to relax your attention. Thieves have been known to buy multi-leg plane tickets and work the gate areas in each airport, never needing to pass security after their initial entry into carefree-land.
You wouldn’t look twice at the couple sitting back-to-back with you in the departure hall. Smartly dressed, stylish bags, composed manner: they look like frequent international travelers—and they are. The troupe arrested in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport were not French, but South American. They, and other sophisticated gangs of thieves take the same international flights as their victims, stay in the same hotels, and attend the same trade shows, sporting events, and operas. “They’re clever, don’t take chances, and do a lot of damage,” a French police officer said. “They keep the cash and sell off everything else—credit cards, passports.”
“These gangs systematically comb all major international airports on both sides of customs,” said an undercover police officer at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. “They often fly between five or six airports on round-trip tickets,” explained the crime prevention coordinator for the military police there.
A presumption of safety prevails past security.
Many airports around the world have installed camera surveillance, which has cut theft of bags and theft from bags. In Cape Town, for example, while an inbound visitor stood at a car rental counter with his luggage behind him on a trolley, a thief simply lifted one of his bags, popped into a men’s room, changed clothes, and walked out with the stolen property. After leaving it in a waiting car, he returned to the baggage hall to scout for more goodies. It was all caught on tape.
Trains between concourses are another area where personal property goes missing. On these, as well as in airport shops and restaurants, one must maintain vigilance. This is especially difficult for people who don’t travel often and live in small towns where safety is almost a given. Thieves home in on relaxed attitudes like heat-seeking missiles.
What works: keep physical contact with your property.
Kharem, a pickpocket we\’ve observed in Barcelona since 2001.
Kharem’s Lucky Haul
Kharem, a pickpocket in Spain, sometimes chooses Barcelona’s airport over the rich pickings of the city. When Bob and I again found Kharem at work on La Rambla, nine months after we’d previously interviewed him, we asked how he’d been.
“Supremely good!” Kharem said. He swept his thumbtip against his forehead, fingers fisted, in a quick, subtle gesture.
“He actually said …˜son-of-a-bitch good,'” our translator clarified. Our friend Terry Jones was tagging along on our prowl that day. His own street crime expertise was more in the bag snatch discipline than the pickpocket branch. Although he’d watched the local thieves with fascination and sometimes wrote about them, he’d never interviewed one. Now he translated our conversation, intrigued and electrified by the novelty.
Kharem at work in Barcelona, carrying a coat with which to hide his thefts.
“But haven’t there been fewer tourists?” Bob asked. We’d last met Kharem just a few weeks before September 11. “Let’s get away from the crowd and talk.”
“The work is good at the airport,” he said. “I robbed an Egyptian there. It was son-of-a-bitch good. But yes, there are fewer tourists and it has affected my business. Also, there are more policemen around.”
The four of us ambled up a narrow side street in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. I tightened my grip on our camera bag. Bob was filming Kharem openly.
“Do the police arrest you more than they did last year?”
“No, they don’t arrest me. They just take the money and let me go,” Kharem said, flipping his thumbtip against his forehead again. “The police are not very good; they don’t have much experience. I’m better than they are, in the street.” He smiled bashfully and looked at the ground.
“Is there more bag snatching?”
“Yes, but they’re young people who don’t know how to work. If all you want is a wallet, you can take it without violence. But these people don’t know how to work clean. They’re young, and some of them are on drugs. Many children have come from Morocco this year, since Spain and Morocco are side by side. These Moroccan children work in a crude and unsophisticated way.”
Kharem, perhaps pleased by our attention, clowns for our video camera. \’Let me be in your movies,\’ he said. Our good friend Terry, right, interpreted.
“I think he’s a little proud of his own skill and style,” Terry added.
“Besides La Rambla, I work in the metro and sometimes at the airport. The Egyptian I mentioned—it was a briefcase I took from him just last week in the airport. It had thousands of dollars in it.”
“How did you take it?” Bob asked.
“I threw some money on the floor,” he said, “let me show you.” He bent to take our canvas bag from the cobblestones where it was safely lodged between my feet. I looked at Bob, but he didn’t seem concerned about letting this known thief and now confessed bag snatcher handle our $15,000 sack of stuff.
Kharem lifted the bag and took two steps away. As if in slow motion, I watched our camera, mixer, mic, and tapes of fresh footage retreat, and waited to see Kharem lunge and dash away with a fine fee for little chat. We’d greeted him like old friends, I recalled; we hadn’t criticized his way of life. Must we show this much trust? He’s not our friend. And we certainly are not his. But the alternative was unpredictable.
It\’s hard not to like Kharem in conversation, but we remind ourselves: he\’s a thief.
I could have stopped him from taking our bag, or snatched it out of his hands, or just said “sorry, I don’t think so.” And what might Kharem have done then? Did we care about preserving a relationship for the future? Or did we just not care to insult a person who’d revealed to us the most intimate secrets of his life?
Kharem set the bag down gently at Terry’s feet, steadying it so it wouldn’t tip. He tossed a couple of €10 notes and Terry twisted to watch them flutter to the ground.
“He bent to get the money and I just walked off with his briefcase,” Kharem said, lifting our bag once again. He smiled, swiped his thumbtip against his forehead, and handed the bag to me.
“Did you know you’re wearing mismatched shoes?” a well-dressed Englishman said to our friend, Brooks, at London’s Heathrow airport one day.
Brooks was talking on his phone, frantic at finding out that he was supposed to be at London’s other airport, Gatwick. He locked eyes with the stranger. “I am not!” he said, refusing to be distracted. “And you’ll not succeed in grabbing my briefcase!”
Brooks had become security-obsessed hearing our tales.
“Pardon me, then. But you are.” The man walked away, intentions defeated, whatever they were.
Brooks finished his telephone call, feeling rather smug that he’d thwarted a thief who’d tried to distract him. Then he looked down at his shoes, only to see one tasseled, one buckled loafer.
Everyone knows not to leave bags unattended in airports and, lest we forget, we are relentlessly reminded by annoying announcements. Bag-stealing strategists are devious, though. Even if you aren’t looking away from your things, you may be connived into doing so. Questions by an apparently confused or puzzled foreigner touch our good-natured core and we want to help. A moment’s distraction is all an accomplice requires. Who would suspect that the pretty girl asking to borrow your pen is merely a diversion as her colleagues snag your bag?
Or, here’s a good one: you’re suddenly paged. Who would page you at an airport, possibly a foreign airport, or a stopover? Who even knows you’re there? You rush off to find the white courtesy phone, befuddled and worried. The accented voice on the line sounds unclear, yet urgent. You may be asked to write down a number, requiring some gymnastics while you extract a pen and find a scrap of paper. Have you looked away from your briefcase? Have you lost physical contact with it? Where is it, anyway?
Earlier, the thief had examined the object of his desire, your bag. Its luggage tag informed him of your name. The strategist paged you. He distracted you. He created his own plausible situation. Or, as Bob would say, he created a shituation.
TSA
Airports give the illusion of safeness, especially now with increased security. The swirling crowd of dazed travelers, lost or rushed or tired, makes a perfect haystack for the needle-like thief. Your bag might disappear before you even get inside, in all the curbside commotion. Long, tedious, check-in lines can be disorderly madness in some airports, inducing inattention when you need it most.
Computers and purses disappear, too, at airport security checkpoints. Guards have their hands full keeping order at the chaotic bottlenecks, and they’re watching for bigger fish than bag thieves. Don’t assume they’ll safeguard your bags.
Practically every television news program has shown this ruse. The scam occurs just after you’ve put your items on the belt. Before you walk through the metal detector, a stranger cuts in front as if in a hurry. The equipment buzzes and he has to back up and remove his watch, his coins, something. Meanwhile, you’re trapped in limboland and your bags are free-for-all on the so-called secure side.
If you’re traveling with another person, make a habit of this: one person goes through security first and collects her and your bags as they appear. The other waits to see that all bags go fully and safely into the x-ray machine, and watches the belt to see that it isn’t reversed, leaving your items vulnerable on the other side. If you’re alone, wait for any crowd at the checkpoint to pass, if you can, or be alert to anyone who barges in front of you after you’ve let go of your things.
I made 105 takeoffs and landings during the calendar year. I stayed 162 nights in beds not my own or on planes. A record low for the past few years; probably for the past 15 years, except for 1996 and 1997, when we had a couple of very long-term gigs (and almost grew roots).
This is good, and by design. Although Bob and I still love travel, I’ve felt the urge to indulge my homebodiness more: to enjoy our home, cook, entertain, and get things done that can’t be done on the road. So we’ve made more trips: more domestic, fewer international. That means fewer flight segments per trip and fewer hours in the air. It’s still a lot, though.
2007 had 115 take-offs and landings and 176 nights away from home.
2006 had 117 flights and 184 hotel nights.
199 hotel nights in 2005; 222 in 2004.
I’m not counting any prior years, but I think they were higher still.
A few days ago, a foreigner arrived at Mexico City’s international airport and exchanged money there. What he didn’t know was that he was being observed by lookouts. When he left the airport, his car was followed by two others. He was forced off the road and approached by gunmen, who simply shot him in the head when he resisted their demand for the cash.
By now everyone knows that Mexico has become a risky destination, thanks to drug gangs and their brutal operations. Police officers have been steadily targeted by the gangs, and are being killed from the top ranks to the bottom in scary numbers I can’t quote.
Last year, the director of the federal police division monitoring trafficking and contraband was killed, along with his bodyguard. So were other top police officials, including the head of Mexico City’s anti-kidnapping unit, and the director of national police operations against drug traffickers.
Little girls in Mexico playing with bottle caps.
All of Mexico is dangerous now, from the capital city to the most popular resort towns. Acapulco (the city in which Bob and I met), is now called a “violent Mexican resort.”
Tourists to Mexico are in the middle of it all. They are perceived to have cash: either on them, accessible by ATM, or available as ransom.
Mexican police say that the drug gangs now post lookouts at the airport money-exchange booths. The lookouts phone their colleagues outside the airport, who rob the visitors as they leave.
If an ATM must be used, it should be accessed only during the business day at large protected facilities (preferably inside commercial establishments, rather than at glass-enclosed, highly visible ATMs on streets).
About Mexico City specifically, the State Department suggests:
Arriving travelers who need to obtain pesos at the airport should use the exchange counters or ATMs in the arrival/departure gate area, where access is restricted, rather than changing money after passing through Customs, where they can be observed by criminals.
It’s easy and common for criminal gangs to recruit low-level airport employees as conspirators. I wouldn’t feel much safer in the “secure” arrival/departure gate areas.
Mexican citizens have long been the targets of express kidnapping and carjacking, along with the usual burglaries and robberies. Tourists have had to be alert to pickpockets, drink-druggers, taxi-robberies, and psuedo-cops.
Lord and Lady Ball (yes, their real names), enjoyed a week in warm Palma de Mallorca, an annual retreat from the dreary London weather. They nimbly dodged the numerous pickpockets, flower sellers, and con artist that live in this paradise, supported by tourist dollars, pounds, euros, yen, etc. But their visit began with a fiasco.
On arrival at the Palma airport, they collected their luggage and piled it onto a cart. Then they pushed the cart out to their assigned rental car in the crowded lot. The way the cars were parked, they couldn’t get the cart close to the trunk of the car. So they left it in front of the car while they opened the doors and the trunk lid. When they turned back to the cart, it was gone. The whole thing was just gone.
Yes, I know. It sounds doubtful. You’d think they’d hear something, or at least see it being pushed off in the distance. But no.
Lady Ball gave a little shout and who should be nearby but a nice, friendly policeman! Just when you need him, right? Strangely, he didn’t have much of a reaction, but he directed the Balls to an airport police desk where they should report the stolen luggage.
So they did. And upon returning to their car, there was their stuff, next to a trash can in the parking lot. Everything of value was gone from inside. The Balls were left with a distinct feeling of fishiness.
They never discovered anything more about the incident. Neither did we.
Beach creature.
Palma de Mallorca has long been a favorite holiday destination for Germans, Brits, and Swedes, and for Europeans in general. Many British retire to Mallorca, or have second homes there. Ferries bring daytrippers from mainland Spain, and cruise ships regularly dump sightseers by the thousands to bask in this balmy Spanish paradise. Its beaches and nightclubs are a perennial draw, and have been long before the spotlight hit Ibiza.
Low-lying criminals, too, are attracted to Palma’s easy-going lifestyle and laid-back law enforcement.
Bob and I have spent many a blistering summer day chasing thieves in Palma, a well-stocked laboratory for our research. We’ve been threatened there, and physically assaulted by thieves. Stories of these to come in future posts.
So I wondered: did Mallorca’s prevalent pickpockets plague every tourist attraction? Even underground? With that weak theory to prove, I had excuse enough to join the daytrippers on a journey to the Cuevas del Drach, or Caves of the Dragon, at Mallorca’s eastern coast. Well? If thieves can be nocturnal, why not subterranean? Leaving Bob on downtown surveillance, I set off by coach across the desolate landscape beyond the city of Palma.
Cuevas del Drach, Caves of the Dragon, in Mallorca.
The caves contain the largest underground lake in Europe, a superlative that failed to inspire my need-to-see instinct. So I paid for my ticket with minor lethargy and ambled off in the direction vaguely indicated, drawn to the cool, the dark, and the quiet.
A rough path descended gently into a forest of unfamiliar forms. Organic shapes and amoebic ponds in utter darkness were exquisitely lit to dramatic effect by an absolute (probably Italian) master. Disney couldn’t have done as well, and certainly couldn’t have created something so unreal, so otherworldly.
I got quite wet during the twenty-minute stroll into the depths. The surroundings first seemed inspired by Antoni Gaudi—or perhaps vice versa. Around me rose huge, undulating floor to ceiling columns in complicated bundles. Vast expanses of icicles by the millions pointed to curvaceous, humanoid formations below. I felt as if I were inside a giant pin cushion of some undefined shape. Or in the mouth of some great beast chewing taffy. Now, instead of Gaudi, I felt the influence of Dr. Suess. Among looming trunk-like forms the ceiling dripped and spattered and ploinked into puddles and pools. Stalactites and stalagmites were forming as I watched.
The uneven path wound down and around, along crystal clear ponds containing underwater figures—or were they reflections from above?—and eventually to an enormous gallery surrounded on three sides by a lake of such stillness and clarity it could have been air. A number of visitors had already gathered on the peninsula, settling onto wet benches facing Lago Martel and the thick and thin columns growing out of it.
Lights went out one by one and the crowd became silent. We were allowed a few moments to savor the cool void, the faintly clammy air, the crisp smell of absolutely fresh water, the surround-sound of erratic drips, and the unfortunate absence of bats.
Then, far, far in the distance, a violin. Chopin. The music grew, as did a faint glow from the depths of the cave. Finally, still distant, a curved row of fairy lights appeared, doubled by its reflection. It was a small boat encircled by a string of white lights, gliding smoothly as if on a rail. Another Disney effect. The boat carried a small orchestra and a single rower who dipped and pulled his oar like a slow metronome. Chopin became Offenbach as the boat drew near; the music swelled then filled and overflowed what had been a void, an unnoticed nothingness. Ghostly and surreal, the boat slid past us to hover in a small grotto, its single string of bulbs still the only illumination.
The concert ended as it had begun, with the simultaneous dwindling of music and light as the vessel and its orchestra sailed slowly, serenely, out of sight. As the last note sounded, a thunderous applause exploded in the darkness.
Gradually, stalagmites were randomly lit and the audience came out of its collective trance.
“Where’s my purse?” A woman’s panicked voice echoed nearby. I snapped my head around to look for her.
“Here,” said another, lifting dripping, waterlogged leather from the cave floor. I fought an urge to lecture the woman.
A line of rowboats had magically appeared. Visitors rose reluctantly to be ferried across the lake to a path leading up and out of the cave.
I emerged damp, blinking like Gollum, and drunk on the multisensual subterranean experience. While not exactly relevant research on the underground subculture we study, the venture below had been well above my expectations, and a fine respite.
