Later tonight…

21/03/09

…well, technically tomorrow morning, but it is still dark and there is a heavy chill in the air.
Today will be long and horrible.
And chronologically very confused… In fact ‘today’ really is going to be long, almost 24 hours in fact, before the genuine darkness of night spreads her gentle wings over my tired form again. Still, onward and upward!
I emerge blearily, reluctant to answer the 4am wake up call, but knowing that, if I don’t, I will miss my flight. This in itself would be disaster enough, but Flight Centre’s ticket is arranged in such a way that if you miss even one flight without telling them, then the rest are forfeit… That got me out of bed sharpish! I had the clock radio and my phone set to go too, just in case… All I have to do right now is have breakfast and get dressed, in the clothes I laid out last night. Breakfast of muesli and milk, eaten out of a mug with a teaspoon before stashing the box away in a plastic bag of hand luggage. That left-over self-catering muesli has been very useful so far, I wonder how far it will get with me on my travels… The milk snaffled from the Castle was useful too – how thoughtful of them to leave a carton in every guest-room’s fridge! J
I blearily wander into reception, pay, and turn to see the friendly driver at my elbow. He helps me with my bags and we make unintelligent 4.30am conversation. It doesn’t take long to get to the airport and he helps me find the end I need to be (not that it’s very big!). I have a good while before my flight is due to leave so I check in my hold luggage and potter about for a while. The chap in the Global Culture shop where I meander in is very nice. He’s not busy (given that it’s 5am!) and we chat about our respective homelands. He is from Japan and has that peculiarly aloof and butlerish dignity of many Japanese, though he has clearly picked up the calm and relaxed manner of the Kiwis. I like Kiwis, they have a can-do, happy-go-lucky attitude, but one which is tempered with, ‘but if I don’t or can’t, no worries, we’ll sort it, sweet as…’.

I discover, to my indignation, through reading various posters, that I have to pay to leave… What’s that all about???
I am puzzled by this. Do they not want me to leave, but to stay in the airport living off scraps and making a mess? Why could they not have added it onto the airport tax; it’s just another inconvenient queue to stand in… Hmph. I get into the indignant, inconvenient queue to part with my $25 (which I could have spent on another nice t-shirt, or better food somewhere) and get chatting (indignantly at first!) to a nice, middle-aged English couple who are on a round the world trip too. Their daughter did it and they saw how much fun she had and decided that, since she was old enough to cook for herself and was no longer living at home, that they were going to go and do one too!
Hooray for them!
They are going the opposite way around the world from me, but we wish each other well and wave as we go our separate ways, them bound for Singapore, me for the USA.

Eventually my flight is called and I gladly leave the blue-carpeted, muffled blue blueness of the departure area and head through security. They are happy to let my breakfast item through as hand luggage – I guess it won’t worry them if I’m leaving the country, it’s not as if it’s contraband! Soon I am on another ‘plane – ensconced in a tiny seat, luggage overhead and seatbelt tight around my hips. I feel sleepy now.
However, my slightly jittery and apprehensive state of mind is not in the least helped by hearing the cabin crew saying, in broad Kiwi accents of course,
‘Oh shit…!’
*tug, tug, rattle*
‘It’s stuck!’
*clatter, clonk*

Oh dear…

The sun comes up over the horizon and the sky turns faintly orange. There is a violently-coloured stripe along the sky-line, and the rest is blue. The clouds from above will never cease to amaze me – these ones are peach-tipped, jagged, fluffy, cumulus I think. The sky is still slightly pink, though the colours grow stronger and less delicate all the while. The sea of fluffy, pink clouds stretches as far as the eye can see – how can monotony be so beautiful…?
Sydney is only a few hours away and I try to snooze while we fly.
The flight is uneventful and we touch down in Sydney sooner than I expected. I head off the ‘plane and onto the tarmac at Sydney… Now, I wonder if my luggage is in the right place too? I’m not entirely sure if I have to hunt it down off the carousel and check it all in again, or if they do all that for me, as I’m waiting for a connecting flight… Hmmm… I pootle off to check.
No sign of it on the carousel.
Hmm… Poor little luggage – I do hope it’s all right.
I find a queue to join to ask. I have a while yet (four hours or so), so queuing is no great hardship – in fact I meet (and hopefully calm a little) a very stressed Kiwi lady whose flight for the Orient leaves considerably sooner than mine and whose luggage has vanished on her connecting flight in. I try and reassure her as best I can whilst I quell my rising panic. Her irritation, when told by a passing, chubby and nonchalant airline person that she is in the wrong queue and needs to be on the other side of the airport, is well-contained I think, especially as she is nearly at the front of our queue and STILL doesn’t try to rip anyone’s head off… Good for her…
By this time, I am distinctly perturbed about the lack of luggage…
…and am pointed towards a different different queue myself. I give in after a brief and pointless queue elsewhere and head for the second check-in, in the hope that they can tell me what to do about my poor little lost luggages. A nice gentleman partially checks me in after taking the details of my luggages, then asks me where I’ll be staying in the USA. I proudly announce that I’m going to stay with my cousin near San Francisco and meet his three-year old for the first time. J
But it turns out that he isn’t just being friendly (though he is very nice) but that the USA immigration officials need to be told every minute detail of your location on arrival. Hmph. I rummage trough my bags and realise that my notepad containing the all addresses I will need for America are, yep, you guessed it, in my luggage.
Aaargh!!
I weigh up the options in my head and decide that, on balance, spending an arm and a leg on the phone to home isn’t such a bad plan. I pace around in one of the lounges as the phone rings – it’s daylight here, which means it’ll be getting towards bedtime at home (it is somewhere after midnight across the pond), and this isn’t an answer that will wait until morning – eek!
Fortunately, my (decidedly organised-sounding) mum picks up and is able to locate the address I need (wonderful woman!) and I waddle proudly back to the check-in desk with it clutched carefully in an increasingly sweaty paw. I hand over the details as if they were little gold bars and the chap on the desk types it in carefully. That ought to do it… Whatever do they do if you are heading to the good ole US of A for a road trip and will have no fixed abode for a while, deliberately, and for fun?

I decide that it is about time I made sure they know I am still here, so I check in properly and head through the doors to the departure lounge. This process all becomes a bit of a blur when you do it too often and too close together. And why are airport lounges all the same depressing grey-blue? It’s like being in a large grey-blue hen coop, waiting to be plucked out of your little cage when they call you, to be tucked into a little, mildly-coloured, egg box, all nestled away and tied down in your own tiny space. Hmmm…
I find myself a spot on the floor to wait. I have snacks, a drink and a power socket, so I settle down to write for a couple of hours and watch the world go by.
I do hope they can find my luggages and put them in the right place. Not only do they, between them, contain the majority of my souvenirs, but, more importantly, life without clean socks would be unbearable!
I realise, shortly after a chunky couple have come to sit down on a seat near me, that I might have been better off sitting somewhere else. They are the latest in a gaggle of Americans who have all come to sit in this area of the departure lounge.
Good, because it means I’m in roughly the right area.
Very bad because I am now surrounded by giggling, scantily-clad, feather-brained teenagers running around on one side, chatting loudly to one another like peacocks screaming in your ear, and on the other, by the chunky couple who are clearly unused to the idea of a thought living exclusively on the inside of your skull…
*sigh*
Do they EVER not announce to the world in loud voices exactly what’s in their head, inane or not…?
I type on regardless and shoot dirty looks at the noisiest of the peacock-girls. My state of mind is not helped by the fact that she has smooth, healthy-looking, bronzed limbs, whereas my stubby little pins are still white as slugs, despite over a month in the sun!
Boredom sets in eventually, but mercifully, before I bring myself to strangle one of the peacock girls, the flight is called and I herd towards the gate along with all the other travellers. I use my elbows judiciously to retain a place in the queue – well, no-one else is going to look out for me in this gaggling crowd and this is not a queue made up of the hospitable Aussies and easy-going Kiwis…

Still, I make it onto the plane and muse…


The important things about travelling are:
To have been
To remember the good times and the bad
To share what you have seen
To learn from everything
To incorporate what you have learned into your life
To gain experiences
To taste life!

Alrighty then – let the fun commence!
:P
I have, I am happy to say, a window seat, but it is right over the wings so I can see nothing much of the ground though the wings are impressive. This also means that I am near the bassinets…
Oh.
Joy.
However, I think I am sufficiently far away to avoid projectile vomiting, but I have left my earplugs in my hold luggage I think…
Bugger.
Especially as this is the longest flight yet! :P
I shall have to use my headphones instead – which aren’t as good, but never mind.
Still, there’s no-one in the middle seat – bonus! – and the guy sitting on the aisle side seems very nice and has just celebrated his 50th birthday in Cairns, lucky chap! Maybe I should start saving for that party now…? ;)
Sydney’s towers peak neatly in the distance and I stare at their hazy grey silhouettes wistfully. Leaving the Antipodes (again!) is a bit of a wrench; I do love it here, all of it…
*sigh*
A couple of hours pass as I type up some more notes in the strange, crystal, high-altitude light (rather as if it’s been boiled, distilled and strained through a blue muslin). I sink into my notes and type, tapping away like a little beetle as the chap to my right reads and snoozes. He has a penguin classic. J
However, we are both disturbed a short while later by a stewardess who appears in the aisle near us – I don’t hear what she says to us and the couple on the inner bank of seats as I notice her from my reverie and remove my earphones a little too late. The chap to my right is looking determinedly at his novel, trying to ignore her, and there is an unwilling silence from the other bank of seats. I am puzzled – what’s going on?
I notice, hovering a little way behind her, an anxious-looking man trying to make eye contact with someone, (anyone!), youngish, late thirties, early forties perhaps, looking gray and tired, and wringing his hands pleadingly. I meet his worried gaze and smile. This sets off a chain reaction.
The chap with the novel sighs and huffs crossly (I had him down as a nicer guy than that, but perhaps I was wrong…) and a sense of relief radiates from the inner bank of seats. I realise that my smile has just sold the seat in the middle and I look wistfully at the small space beneath my feet and set about cramming my, hitherto seated, bags into it. The anxious chap smiles at me gratefully and tries to make his long limbs as small as possible as he squeezes past Mr. Huffy (And-I’m-Reading-A-Novel) and thanks the stewardess. He smiles and introduces himself – he’s a Kiwi too, not an American, and has been sitting, I think, next to a young mum who needed more space for her kids. That must have been a bit traumatic for him – I try to make a bit more room… After all, I HAVE got the window seat! And I have enjoyed a few hours more than I expected of lovely legroom. Anyway, he is soon dozing inside his Bose™ noise-cancelling headphones and I go back to my own entertainment.
Hex’s battery has run out now, sadly, but there is plenty of film-catching-up to be done! The flight is also seeming shorter than its stipulated 13 hours, but maybe that’s just because I am expecting it to be horrible and it is mercifully merely a chore!
Anyway, I while away the hours with:
Ghost Town – very good film – I want to see it on a real screen sometime and would recommend it.
Dinner!
Rather tasty dinner of chicken.
Twilight – having been fed the books by Trina I felt I ought to watch it, and it is a decent enough couple of hours of brain-fluff, though a little jumbled in parts.
A light snack – I like these little soft plastic, drawstring lucky bags the stewardesses hand out, they’re fun.
A snooze… unusual but most welcome, as I am starting to feel revolting and groggy.
I wake again in the darkness – I don’t know if it is actually dark outside or if they have turned out all the lights to give us some respite. It is these false situations which I find peculiar and futuristic; the manipulated daytimes due to the unnatural experience of travelling so fast…
I wonder vaguely whether it is bright outside, and if I can make it to the loo past my two slumbering companions (the downside of a window seat – scrambling intimately over two men you’ve never met before!). I crack open the shutter half an inch and am immediately dazzled by the ice-white light that lances in beneath it, blinding me and setting the cabin, so it seems, aglow. I clamp it down again, afraid to have disturbed anyone, but they slumber on. I am desperate for the loo now, so I gently prod my neighbour, who reluctantly prods his, and we all three end up wandering about the cabin – does your legs good anyway…
I find myself drawn to the back of the ‘plane – there is a gaggle of young men there, one of whom is leaning intently towards the single window over the fuselage with a massive camera. I finish in the bathroom and pad gently over to them in my socks.
They are Scandanavian I think, and have cracked open the shutter to inspect the fabulous sunrise (not that there was much darkness anyway!). All ice-white and crystalline, reflecting, sunbeam over sunbeam, bounding off fluffy, snow white clouds, dotting off into the distance, like some strange sea. If strange and creatures still existed in our world, then this is where they would come to play – in the bright, pearly light above the clouds, where few would see… Maybe they do, and we have just dismissed them as odd clouds or sleep-deprived daydreams…
I bid a good morning to the chaps with the camera (who graciously made room on the box in front of the tiny window for me to take a few meagre snaps with my new little Samsung) and head back to my seat. No snoozing for me now I’ve seen so much silvery-bright daylight!
I leave my blind down in deference to the majority of slumberers and feel very decadent as I turn on the ‘entertainment system’ again. I find more films to watch and settle for The Day the Earth Stood Still – I am glad to see Jennifer Connelly back in films again – Labyrinth was still her finest moment though I think! ;) I want to finish watching this one – it’s a rather interesting take on the idea of alien visitations and I missed the nub of the tale because they switched off the entertainment system… Hmph. Still, nearly there then! Just prior to switching off the system, they bring us a nice hot breakfast. My stomach is completely confused now, but welcomes the hot food anyway. Quantas food may not look like much, but it sure is tasty! Mmmm… Hot and herby scrambled egg blob and hash brown splodge, plus ribbons of salty, juicy bacon – yum!