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By 7 a.m., I’d worked up enough of an appetite for a life-changing breakfast. I found an empty stool at the Boqueria’s Bar Pinotxo, where sunny proprietor Juanito poured me a modest cava before sliding plate after plate across the bar: whole langoustines with roe still attached, razor clams, chickpeas with blood sausage. When I fell deliriously into my hotel bed afterward, I felt as if I’d had an entire day. And it was barely 9 a.m.
When you find yourself wide, wide awake at improbable hours, with no chance of drifting off again, my advice is simple: Go with it.
Sure, jet lag can leave us with crushing headaches and heavy-limbed exhaustion. But decoupling your body clock from your surroundings isn’t all bad.
If I hadn’t been racked with insomnia in northern Finland, I wouldn’t have witnessed the eerie pre-dawn twilight of a summer sun that never fully sets (or a Finnish reality show of competitive nude male lumberjacks). I would have missed the sun rising over Rabat, Morocco, sipping a mint tea and watching the walls of the medina stain with a pink glow. Even when snug in a hotel room, the quiet in those earliest hours, when the world hasn’t turned on yet, feels profound. I’ve gotten some of my very best writing, and thinking, done in those times.
I love the liminal space of international airports, which seem to exist outside the strictures of time altogether: Any hour is an appropriate one for a glass of Champagne or, conversely, a cappuccino. And when in a new city, my body’s inability to figure out the time zone can be an asset for the kind of after-dark adventures that I rarely have at home.
It’s a good maxim for travel generally: Embrace it. Ride the wave, don’t fight it.
Conventional wisdom says to avoid naps after red-eyes, but I adore them. There are jet-lag snoozes I remember with as much nostalgia as a trip itself. Like a huge sandwich after a long hike, or a cold beer on a hot day, the feeling of a nap you’ve earned, and need, is an indescribable, almost sensual pleasure.
And nothing can replicate the dreamlike sense of landing in an unfamiliar part of the world after a red-eye and driving away from the airport, watching the morning streets through the haze of a time-zone-altered state. These, too, are moments burned into my brain: the first street vendors outside the airport of Penang; soft rain against brilliant green fields just beyond Dublin’s airport; the chaos of motorbikes on Hanoi highways.
After a recent 10-hour red-eye to Fiji, my toddler’s eyes were bleary but wide with wonder during our first taxi ride. He whispered, “Wow,” one of his few words, over and over: at plumeria blossoms, at banana trees, at the jagged, lush landscape. I knew he was jet-lagged, which we’d both pay for later, but in the moment, awake despite the odds, he was simply awed. Like travel itself, stepping out of your time zone can be surreal, dislocating and wondrous — sometimes all in the same moment.
Carey Jones is a food, drink and travel writer, and the co-author of the upcoming book “Every Cocktail Has A Twist.” She lives in Sonoma County, Calif. You can follow her on X: @careyjones.
