Flight Path

Leaving Glasgow airport

Sunrise over Australia

Well here I am in my little airborne bubble like a battery hen being fed and watered at regular intervals, with the lights turned off and on in ways designed to fool the body clock into submission. From leaving Glasgow airport in heavy snow to arriving in Auckland, hopefully in sunshine, is a journey time of about 30 hours. When Connie travelled in 1897 she came by steam ship and regretted the speed at which she covered the distance saying that she felt the earth was forever dwarfed and the ocean a mere pond – but then she was an inveterate sailor.

In 1961 my first journey to NZ on the Dutch ship ‘Oranje’ took about 6 weeks. Flying was very uncommon then and sea trips usually took between 5 and 7 weeks depending on the route and number of ports visited. On that occasion we went through the Suez canal, well I actually got off at one end and made a hair-raising bus trip down to Cairo, rejoining the boat at the other end of the canal. I do recall being abruptly woken up in the middle of the night and deep in the desert, by armed soldiers boading the bus and prodding us all awake with rifles and demanding aggressively to see our passports. Even the driver had no idea what was happening. All became clear when we reached Cairo and realised that President Nasser was making a street parade and hundreds of thousands of people were descending on the city. Infact, to get to our hotel, the driver had to crawl the bus through the narrow lanes of the ‘ city of the dead’ because it was the only place without any ‘living’ souls.

The man sitting next to me here on this Emirate flight lives in Kirkaldy but works in northern Australia and makes this trip every month. Some work commute. Changed times .

In the notes I wrote on that sea journey I noted my lack of ‘awe’ after seeing dolphins running in the bow wave of the ship. I was excited and fascinated but noted that because I had seen it on TV several times I couldn’t have the level of awe that earlier travellers would have experienced. This is interesting because I had first seen TV only 9 years earlier when an uncle had hired one for the Queen’s Coronation and it was several years after that before we had one at home. So even that small exposure had totally changed the nature of travel for me.

Right now there are atolls below in the Indian Ocean with storm clouds ahead and I have my laptop balanced on my knee!