Ted Botha

They might not have moving walkways, monorails and smart carts, but they certainly make travel an adventure

I was about to leave the Dominican Republic after a recent holiday there when an official at Las Americas international airport asked me for two things. One was my passport. The other was beer. To the best of my knowledge, he asked during his interrogation of me, did I have any bottles of cerveza in my luggage?

At that point I could have asked several questions of my own, such as, Why beer? Why not cocaine or Cuban cigars instead? And what did he want beer for? To drink? To prevent me from drinking it? Did I actually look like a beer drinker? And, come to think of it, why would I want to take bottles of Presidente beer back to America when I could buy them at the bodega around the corner from my apartment in New York?

I could've asked these questions, but I didn't, and for one simple reason (besides fear, that is): Las Americas is not your average international airport. The beer question was only one of several things to confirm that. The others were: lines in the main hall that had no rhyme or reason (or visible end); strangers who, without even introducing themselves, asked me if I wouldn't mind taking a few of their bags to New York for them; and two power shortages before I could even check in. Some of it confused me, some of it made me laugh, but none of it left me indifferent.

While international airports in the First World get smarter, bigger, whiter, more metallic (and design magazines clamor over them to fill their pages), and the process of checking in and departing gets smoother, their counterparts in the developing world seem to stand still in time, and to even go in reverse if that's possible. As a result, Denver looks like Schipol, Narita could be Frankfurt, but once you've been in Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta or Mauritius's Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, you will never confuse it with any other terminal on earth. Except, in some cases, terminal inertia.

Filmmakers cottoned on to this difference long ago, although seldom for the best of reasons. The one kind of airport became the cinematic setting for sad partings and lover's embraces, the other for incarcerations and drug busts (think Chile in Missing , Turkey in Midnight Express, Burma in Return to Paradise ). The most memorable movie to break this mold, if only for two hours, was the one where Ingrid said goodbye to Bogie, and that wasn't really a developing world airport at all but Hollywood's idea of one.

Not that either kind of international airport has ever had the ambiance of an international train terminus. When could a Heathrow compete with a Victoria Station or an Orly with an Austerlitz? Can anyone imagine Brief Encounter taking place at Dallas-Fort Worth? But if it has to be an airport, some of us will always choose Nairobi's JK over New York's JFK.

The reason? Developing world airports still promise to deliver that most primal element of travel - The Surprise. And if you think it's the odd architecture - resembling a giant golf tee or a concrete spider, or incorporating dangerous-looking metallic flying buttresses - that's only the beginning.

Often it's the kind of surprise you could do without, especially after, say, a transatlantic flight of 12 hours. Like the immigration official who wants to know why you don't have the visa or yellow fever inoculation that your travel agent and every guidebook you ever read assured you wasn't necessary. Or the request for a $10 airport tax at an airport where the tax quite obviously isn't finding its way to backup generators and baggage scanners. Or the requirement (thanks to the non-use of airport taxes on equipment like X-ray machines) to personally identify your luggage on the tarmac before it's put in the hold.

One way to prepare yourself for a developing world airport is, of course, to fly with a developing world airline. The experiences I've had range from the downright shocking (passengers talking on their cell phones during takeoff and long afterward, in Haiti); to the mildly disconcerting (passengers seated in the toilets for the entire flight, in Cameroon, or on the laps of other passengers, in Mauritius); to the utterly amazing (an honest-to-goodness inch-thick steak and vegetables during a shorthaul flight, in Uganda).

I'm always more than happy to be back on the ground, sometimes because of the airline, but mostly because of what awaits beyond customs and immigration - namely, the arrivals and departure halls. For anyone tired of the congested, indifferent, tobacco-liquor-Toblerone sameness of First World airports, that's where the developing world side comes into its own.

Taxi drivers look for you rather than you for them; duty free shops carry items as bizarre as 52-inch black-and-white TV sets that would never fit into any overhead bin (Abidjan); billboards advertise massage parlors (Belize City); and officials organize a free bus tour of the countryside during your layover (Sal island, Cape Verde).

But modernization is inevitably creeping their way too. In Johannesburg international airport recently, I noticed that a major overhaul was turning it into another white metal clone that you'd find in the First World. Just when I was commiserating the loss, however, an announcement that welcomed us to Africa also told us where to pick up our guns. Which is when I realized that some things about a developing world airport will, thank goodness, never change.

Submitted to The New York Times, but rejected with a handwritten note: "Dear Mr. Botha, I'm sorry we're not able to use the enclosed piece. Thanks for giving us a chance to read this piece. Yours sincerely, ..."