Leaving on a Jetplane

Nearly six weeks has slipped away like it was nearly six days and my very personal adventure has finally resolved itself into the shared narrative of all such visits: I came, I saw, I left.

I am now back in Sydney, reunited with my cats and my old friends. Of course, the trip was horrible. The trip is always horrible.

It's bad enough that I never sleep on planes, even on nice planes. But this was a cramped and crowded cheapo flight with two stopovers of several hours in which my luggage and I changed planes and went insane with sleep deprivation.

On the longest leg, close to 11 hours in the air, I was sitting next to a very nice, very large man from California. We exchanged vague pleasantries and settled in to carefully ignoring each other. About 20 mins after take off the entertainment system was activited. For a few minutes my neighbour and I struggled silently with the technology. I couldn't get any sound out of my headphones at all, and I could hear his blaring away at top volume as he struggled vainly to change the channel. After a couple of minutes of this we felt momentarily united by the supremely crap entertainment facitilities and exchanged a few friendly cynicisms.

We gave up on the movies and I decided to read instead. So I pressed the button to turn on my reading light ... and his light came on. Momentarily bewildered, I turned it off, and turned it on again. Understanding dawned on us both. He pushed his light button. My light came on. Oh no! Our wires were literally crossed. He had control of my entertainment system. I had control of his. Two strangers squashed miserably into sardine class now have to co-operate. It was a long flight.

The rest of the trip passed in a haze of tiny, bleary, out of focus movies. By the time we arrived in Sydney my eyes were so dehydrated and gritty that I suspect my eyeballs might have wandered out onto the wing for part of the flight.

Customs spat me out after another hour or so of pointless waiting and Anne ferried my tired body and empty head back to my place. I was home, and so exhausted that I felt more desperately in need of a holiday than I was when I left.