The Long Haul

And she’s back!  While I hope to at some point chronicle my last six weeks in England (and my bonus road trip to California), I’m back in the saddle again and am going to try and stay relatively current.  Current as in: I’m in Australia! 

Granted, I haven’t actually seen much of Australia except for the airport, a very clean train, and the immediate vicinity of my motel (that’s motel, not hotel) in Campbelltown, NSW.  I have already acquired a slight sunburn, despite having put on sunscreen.  I don’t exactly know why the sun is stronger here (scientifically speaking), but it is. 

Because of some very poorly thought-out travel plans, I arrived in Sydney on New Years Eve (Australia’s biggest, wildest holiday).  All hotels in the city and most of the suburbs jack up their prices to 3 or 4 times their normal ridiculousness.  I couldn’t find anything under $250 or $300 per night.  NOTHING.  All reputable-looking airbnb places were booked already.   So I looked at the train map, to find the outer suburbs that were directly linked to the airport train lines, and ended up at The Colonial Motor Inn in Campbellstown/Macarthur, which reminds me of one of those sort of sketchy 60s-era one-story motels outside Myrtle Beach, for a mere $130 a night.  There is a vaguely interesting historical story about this motel (which is a converted 19th century barn and stables), but I'm too tired to care about it.  

After a 42 hour travel day, with a total of about 2.5 hours of sleep involved, I would have slept on straw pallet in a snake-infested outhouse and probably not have been too unhappy.  When my head finally hit the pillow last “night” at 2:30pm, I slept for 15 hours straight. 

I thought I had been very clever (and I actually even paid more money) in booking a flight with only one stopover.  No, sir.  Do not do that.  The next time my Afraid of Flying Self tries to win an argument with my Reasonable Self, I will remind it what a horrible idea it is to sit sleepless in a cramped chair for 15 and 12 hours respectively.  In an effort to lower my number of take-offs and landings (“WHICH IS WHEN MOST PEOPLE DIE!!!!!!” says Afraid of Flying Self), I basically undid 6 weeks (and many many dollars) of physical therapy on my back, not to mention the normal tedium and restlessness of long haul flights.  This was not helped by the fact that the entire upper deck of my planes were filled with rich assholes with their *@#&$% charts and graphs and frequent flyer miles in FULLY RECLINING MINI-SUITES.  I could hear their smug snores.

I don’t sleep on planes.  1) If I fall asleep then the plane might crash because I am not able to guide us to safety by the force of my will. 2) I just can’t sleep on a plane.  I’ve tried ALL THE DRUGS.  Things that would normally knock me out cold for days were I in a prone position, just make me tired and irritable in an upright position.  I drank nearly a whole bottle of Children’s Benadryl and tried to find serenity.  I might have lost consciousness for about 2 or 3 hours if you add up all the times I was nearly asleep and some of the times when I was having strange out-of-body experiences.

I thought that first flight from Atlanta to Seoul would never end.  Never.  Ever.  I obviously don’t understand the 3D aspect of world geography, but we went to Seoul via the North Pole. Seriously.  In the footsteps of my ancestors, we crossed the Bering Strait into Siberia.  My Afraid of Flying Self informed me that this was to avoid an emergency water landing. My Reasonable Self was just trying to sleep. 

They also tried to kill me with warm orange juice and Korean Food.  I don’t know much about Korean cuisine.  I had some decent beef/noodle soup once at the Café Corea in Hyde Park, and I used to eat those seaweed strips when I was a nanny for a half-Korean baby, but that’s basically the extent of my Korean food experiences.  I was in the very backseat of the plane, so I got served last, and both the times they fed us, they had run out of everything but the traditional Korean option. “Well, I guess I’ll have the traditional Korean option,” says I.  I was slightly worried when they brought me a “How to Eat” pamphlet, and I didn’t really read it.  In a bowl, there was a dollop of cold, tasteless ground beef, some bean sprouts, something that looked vaguely fungal (mushroom?) and something that I hope was eggplant, and some pickled something.  No more than a teaspoon of each.  There was a tube of red chili paste (by far the tastiest thing on the menu).  Then there was some luke warm rice, and to the side a cup of seaweed soup.  This seaweed soup, I could have gone out and prepared myself by getting a bit of kelp and a cup of ocean water, and mixing it in a container that had just had some dead fish in it.  Seriously, it tasted like a wharf. 

The second meal, they ran out of everything except the low sodium chicken meal.  Let me tell, you I had my hopes up, only to have them dashed when I was brought a container of rice and pulverized, tasteless, boiled chicken.  This is the sort of thing that you give your dog after it has been throwing up for a few days.   Fail, Korean Air, Fail. 

Bad food was the least of my worries when on my second flight from Seoul to Sydney, where our plane very nearly crashed into the rainforests of Papau New Guinea.  I hate turbulence.  I feel like the wings are going to snap off at which point we will plummet to our deaths.  Or we are going to be flipped over and have to do an emergency landing while hanging upside down.  Or we are going to be sucked into a vortex and spat back out to then plummet to our deaths.  My strategy in dealing with turbulence is to grip my seat until my fingers turn purple, tighten my seatbelt until my legs turn blue, recite Bible verses and prayers from my childhood, and sometimes the Pledge of Allegiance and the French poems I had to memorize once upon a time, interspersed with whimpered, involuntary obscenities.  And most of the people beside me are looking bemused or….ASLEEP. Don't they know that we are about to plummet to our deaths? Even when the captain tells the flight attendants to strap in, I seem to be the only one quietly freaking out.  For nearly an hour, we were hurtled around with only brief breaks.  I was just praying, perhaps irrationally, that we make it to Papau New Guinea (at the time, we were in the middle of nowhere, east of the Philippines) until I realized that Papau New Guinea is mostly mountainous rainforest, which is a bad place to attempt an emergency landing (with my mind, of course). 

So, needless to say, I was giddy (and totally crippled) by the time we landed in Sydney—a happy, hot, bright place.