Its funny. Ok its not all that funny. This may well be the furthest that I'm going to be travelling in my life so far, its also the illest I've been when about to travel. Now on both aspects its probably sounding far more dramatic than it is. By my ripe old age (37) a 12 hour flight in a plane is long overdue given the shrinking world. However I got into this travel thing late in the game. I never did the almost compulsory year out, though I have to say that it seems to be two years out now. One before university and one after. Demand being what it is I can see young people wanting three years out. Where it could be fit in is the problem and not one I intend to answer!
Anyway as I started saying, this is the furthest I'm travelling, 12 hours to Hong Kong. Until now its been the pond that has been my longest trip and this is another 50% further than that. Additionally I'll be landing into a culture and climate very different from anything I've experienced before.
I should be really excited, even if a little bit nervous. However the build up to the trip has been undesirable. 48 hours before stepping onto the plane l was about to spend a night waking every hour in shivers in a house at 25°C. I would have only just about classed myself as fit to travel, and that is mainly thanks to several days of top strength cold/flu remedies. I've got so many tablets in my suitcase I suspect immigration would easily accept that I was planning on opening a chemist. Of course I'd far rather be ill just before going on holiday (if I have to be ill, and I don't do being ill well) rather then when on the break itself, so in that respect I'm counting my blessings.
The normal airport processes were painless. No long queues or the like. I think they actually got the numbers wrong when calling people into the plane. I'd picked a seat at the front of a section for that little bit of extra leg room that would come with it. However what I did notice was how little 'wriggle room' there was compared with how I remembered seats on a jumbo. Maybe I was a lot thinner back then or maybe it is an issue with the middle seats. I'd not had any choice by the time I'd got on line, but it had been my own fault for forgetting. This now meant that simple flight operations were tricky. The seat belt clasp was down on my right side. Squeezing my fingers there and manipulating the clasp was not easy. I made a mental note not to have to go through the process too many times in case it sent the wrong signal to the chap next to me. Even harder to access was the tv remote. I'd come across as a total dimwit at the start of the flight by claiming my tv wasn't working. Part of me hoped they would move me into the empty business section just in front. The stewardess pointed out that I would need to use the remote in the left armrest. Given how chunky it was, to unclip it and then ease it out meant a series of body bending techniques that even top contortionists would have been proud of.
One nice touch that I'd not seen before was what you could only call a cockpit camera relayed to the cabin. This wasn't like with radio stations where if you are fed up watching paint dry you can instead watch someone talk into a microphone all day. To be honest I don't want to see what the pilot and co-pilot are doing while the plane is on auto-pilot. The was a pilot's eye view of the airport. There wasn't much to see at that time of night anyway. Just a line of lights going on and off to show us where and when to go. Kept me amused for a while anyway. It reminded me a bit of the images you get on the screens in the simulators just before everything goes haywire. Gladly none of that happened.
I'm about to have 8 hours of my life ripped away and I'm trying my best to think how much sleep I should get on the plane to cope. In the mean time I'm also trying to work out whether I will be collected at the airport or not. I never got a reply to the e-mail requesting confirmation. Still that, and other things, like not having a copy of my planned itinerary, will have to wait for tomorrow, or is it already that given the big time differences. Its too late or early, or both for me to cope with at the moment. Night, I think.
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