On the road again...

Wednesday 27th - Saturday 30th December

Made my flight last night after an extremely stressful afternoon of trying to pack everything I need for the next 7 months in an hour and a half (a personal best). After lots of faffing about and some serious panic smoking, I boarded the 19:25 to Hong Kong, found my seat and tried to relax, despite the fact that I was surrounded by highly flammable liquid, inside an aluminium can suspended in the air - and I couldn't even have a cigarette to help myself deal with this. For 12 hours. I started to twitch, and began to wonder how much the HK$5,000 potential fine for being caught smoking in the toilets amounted to in sterling. I decided it probably wasn't worth it, and after the evening meal was served (not bad for airline food, dreadful judging by any normal standards of what constitutes food), I settled down to "An Inconvenient Truth". While it was informative, and made you sit up and think, there were a few points that irritated me about it. If you're easily bored, or not remotely interested in my tree-hugging ways, skip to the next paragraph. Firstly, Al Gore used the Mercator projection map of the world (rather than the Peters one), which not only fosters internationally inaccurate sizeist views, it meant that whenever he talked about the possibility of the ice sheets melting on Greenland and halting the Gulf Stream, the map looked disproportionately alarming. On the Mercator map, because of the way the poles are stretched out, Greenland looks roughly half of the size of Africa, but Africa is in fact 14 times larger. Stuff like this irritates me - you don't need to find quasi-legitimate ways to exaggerate the predictions of global warming, they're terrifying enough told honestly. All distorting the truth does is make the information you're presenting seem like it has less integrity, and makes it easy for the oil industry and stupid politicians to argue back. I also objected to the way he seemed to be trying to put himself in our minds as on the front line of, if not leading, the battle against Global Warming (a couple of things he said seemed to imply that he was the only one making the information available to the public - he showed a graph saying that only a handful of scientists had seen it - that graph has been around and has been readily available for years, has been published in numerous journals and is a standard part of any environmentally slanted undergraduate science course. Plus he kept referring to anyone whose research he used as his friend). It reminds me of a comment he once made about the internet being his idea, and makes the whole film seem like a bit of an ego trip. And he really can't say niche correctly. Don't get me wrong though, I was quite impressed by the ways he presented most of the information, I just wanted to give him a kick up the arse for the things I really didn't like.

At some point in the middle of the film it became clear that someone sitting in the immediate vicinity of me was having digestive problems, and was releasing greenhouse gases of their own periodically into an unpleasantly confined space. I breathed through my mouth for the rest of the journey. Oh, and at some point in the middle of the night (Christ only knows what time it was in whatever time zone we were flying above), some idiot who had been getting progressively more and more drunk as the flight wore on got really aggressive and abusive with the flight attendants, and he was arrested when we landed. Moron.

When I got to Hong Kong airport, after 12 hours on a plane with less than 2 hours sleep, I wandered around window shopping for a short time (I really don't understand the point of window shopping - standing there with my nose pressed against the glass staring longingly at pretty diamonds that cost a sizeable fraction of my annual salary is just frustrating). I was just thinking how desperate I was for a shower, and feeling pretty skanky, when I walked past a "tourist lounge" where for just under 30 quid I had a 30 minute seated massage (absolutely blissful), a shower, food and drink and internet access in a plush lounge. By the time I left for Auckland I felt like a new person.

The next flight was less eventful - I couldn't handle any films that required any depth of thought, so I distracted myself with "Step Up" (cheesy dance film where a boy from the wrong side of town and a rich girl get thrown together as dance partners by circumstance, and the whole romance develops with a very formulaic inevitability), and "Vertical Limit" (ridiculous climbing film), and managed a few brief power naps that didn't really leave me feeling any more powerful at all. I also discovered that the best way of distracting myself from the terror I experience during turbulence was to listen to Bach and breathe slowly.

I arrived at the hostel in Auckland at about 3pm, had a wonderful shower and changed into comfy clothes. After a bit of arrival faffing, sorting out of stuff and blind panic when I checked my e-mail and discovered that Maz's flight had been cancelled, I went to the roof for a cigarette and got chatting to a group of randoms from all over Europe, and we decided that we all needed to chill out a bit, so we booked the hostel's sauna and outdoor spa for an hour (for just under 4 quid altogether). It was just divine lying on the jets with steam coming from the water while being surrounded by the cityscape of Auckland. We spent the rest of the evening drinking on the roof (I discovered that they give free bubbly to anyone staying in the rather lovely but slightly more expensive all-girls dorm and happily sipped that for the rest of the evening). Had a wonderful night with some lovely people - I hope the rest of NZ is this friendly. I went to bed a little more noisily than I intended, probably waking up half of the dorm in the process, but what can you do if you've got the hiccups, and you're trying to find your pjs buried deep in your bag in a darkened room that won't stop spinning?

I'm now in Wellington having caught a flight far too early this morning (I still thought it was yesterday evening though, no matter what the sunlight was telling me), after about 5 hours sleep. I intended to sleep on the plane, but I got chatting to a lovely ex-professional rugby player called Jason who was back visiting family after a couple of years of living in Italy. Turns out he studied in Cambridge too. Who needs sleep anyway (the voices in my head and the chocolate fairy that no-one else sees tell me they do though)?

Oh and for some wonderful reason that I didn't understand or question, my seat was in first class. I love it here!

In a couple of hours I'm going to catch the ferry over to the South island where I'll be staying in another lovely youth hostel with another lovely spa in Picton, surrounded by the Marlborough Sounds. I'll wait there for Maz (who I'm informed is definitely on a plane now), idling away the hours in the spa and kayaking around the coast. It's a hard life.