June 6, 2012
A Nice, Quiet Evening In… (a Plane).
Ciao all!
Oh how I love long haul flights – you can get through all your work you’ve been putting off for days or weeks, finally get through your latest book, watch a film you’ve had your eye on, study some geography through the window (I prefer to book a window seat), and intermittently in-between all that – simply catch some ZZZs – that is, if the plane isn’t being rocked around by turbulence, no one’s pestering with their phone calls or e-mails, and the stewardesses are only very infrequently offering meals or another Manhattan (for those who read my last post – you’ll notice I like to rotate my classic cocktails:).
I recently completed one such avia-marathon, from Australia to Italy, 35 hours door (of hotel) to door (of hotel), almost 22 hours in the air, and the rest of the time spent on connections and waiting in airports (with the usual war with Wi-Fi) plus road journeys between hotels and airports and vice versa. It all adds up to an absurdly long time spent on a journey – so long it looks like a record: I’ve never had a day and a half traveling before; that is, besides a couple of force majeure instances.
The second leg of the journey was the most interesting: we flew over India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Crimea, and then on to Romania and the rest of southern Eastern Europe to Italy. By the way, this completes my first time round-the-globe this year; my second one’s coming up soon. It’s a pity we only flew at night, since all I could see out of the windows were stars (Let There Be More Light!), then come the morning all that could be seen were the snow-covered Austrian Alps. Still, there was plenty going on in my booth inside the plane to make up for the lack of visible external scenery down below…
