Start with a long one, then...

Guess where | Barquing

The woman at the check-in desk didn’t even look at me when she told me that there was no chance of me getting a free upgrade for the flight.
I had suspected that the signs weren’t good when she had looked to her left when I initially approached her from her right.
“Passport.” She barked, sounding bored already. I handed it over and stammered my well rehearsed question. Not even a pitying glance, not even contempt.
“We have none.” She said instead to the passport before her.
I coughed, embarrassed.
“Worth asking, though, right?” I said, starting to suspect that this might not actually be true. She didn’t answer, at least not directly, although I think I heard a little snort.
She passed back the passport with a boarding pass tucked between its pages. Finally she met my eyes, her eyebrow slightly arched. I thank her and shuffle off, quietly mortified with my performance. If I were more suspicious than I suspect I am, I might have taken this as a particularly bad omen for the start of the trip.
Everything else seems to go smoothly, however. In stark contrast to the nightmarish ordeal we put ourselves through to get on an American Airlines plane to Ecuador a few years earlier. On that occasion, the check in queue took so long that we did not have any time for strung out, tearful farewells. On this occasion however they were strung out, tearful and probably not the sort of scenes that might be expected from a bunch of stiff upper lipped Brits.
As it was, I shortly afterwards found myself wondering around the Duty Free shop in the departure lounge with reddened cheeks and sticky eyes, and it was under these circumstances that I found myself purchasing an electronic sudoku toy in order – I had convinced myself – to cheer me up a little.
Ironically, as I discovered once I had parted my remaining pound coins for it, that it was not actually supplied with batteries, and that should I buy some, they could only be inserted into the device with the aid of a small screw driver – the sort of tool which is, of course – now banned from being taken onboard airlines. Even more frustrating, was that when I tried to open the packaging itself, the plastic bubble which housed it proved embarrassingly stubborn when not – as I was not – armed with any other sort of sharp instrument which should not under any circumstances be found in hand luggage.
Thus, for your own amusement, you might like to imagine for yourself the exact details of the scene in which I was sitting by the departure gate, wrestling with a small plastic package illustrated with a grinning photograph of Carol Vordeman. And yes, teeth were indeed employed for the task.
My non-upgraded seat suffered from the usual crippling lack of leg room, despite being next to the aisle. The entertainment system, piped into a tiny screen on the seat in front of me, was fairly impressive, but sadly the screen became almost unwatchable when the woman in front of me clunked her seat back and proceeded to snore for the rest of the trip. The lack of easily viewable in-flight entertainment might have been a more forgivable loss if the company in the seat beside me had been more interesting, but the only two details that I managed to ascertain about the man sat beside me were the he was the spitting image of Phil Mitchell from Eastenders and that judging by the way he coughed expansively and generously throughout the trip, he was a likely candidate for patient zero for the human strain of bird flu.
One of the programs that I did manage to catch before my screen ended up in my lap, was an episode of the Hugh Laurie drama, House, in which – and this strikes me as being in questionable taste given the context of where it was shown – the hero treats a woman diagnosed with Deep Vein Thrombosis, complete with computer generated recreations of what this looks like from inside the body. I watched silently, then nervously pulled up my flight socks.
The twelve hours to Singapore proved very long indeed. I don’t think I managed to get comfortable for the entire trip and given that our hosts had decided that the flight took place at night-time (the shutters had to be lowered because it was blindingly bright outside) they turned all the lights off, so reading was out of the question. So too was sleeping, apart from one occasion, during which by some twist of fate I managed to get three seats to myself (something which karma has clearly been making me pay for ever since) I don’t think that I have ever managed to fall asleep properly on a plane. I had a little more success from Singapore to Sydney, but this was – I suspect because the aisle seat that I had specifically asked for turned out to be a window seat, which had less leg room, but did have a wall for me to lean against, which was an acceptable trade.
My plane arrived in Sydney this morning, and I could see the cities and towns below, sparse, glittering dew-drenched cobwebs in the darkness. The sun was just starting to make itself known beyond the horizon, yellows and reds gathering strength before the final push. Fog banks kissed the surface of the harbour as the plane turned for its final descent. A little unnerving watching the ground I had already seen was so close vanishing into clouds as we crept dangerously close. The lights rushing by of the runway came as something of a relief.
I shared the shuttle bus from the airport with a trio of American couples who had arrived, quite separately, from San Francisco. Excluded, I hunched by the window and got privately annoyed by the way they complained about the customs process and laughed at quaint little details they spotted as the bus rocketed around town.
“Look at that,” said one, pointing out the window, “It’s Burger King, but they’ve called it Hungry Jack’s!”
They all agreed that this was a perfectly ridiculous name, as though the original – advocating as it does that grilled meat patties might opt for a monarchical government was any less silly.
Once they had all been dropped off at a string of slick looking hotels, I was left alone in the bus with the driver, who apologetically informed me that my hostel was quite a way away from all the other hotels. I told him that I was in no rush whatsoever, which was a rather smug thing to do, but pleasingly accurate.
Although my original plan had been to get to the hostel and then pass out, I had clearly come upon a second wind of some description – something, perhaps, to do with the huge mug of coffee I purchased at the airport. Having dumped my bag at the hostel, a scruffy but charming little place set in a long suburb rich in colonial architecture, I chose to walk into town, all the way down to the harbour to gawp at the bridge and the opera house (plus a ghastly great big cruise ship which dwarfs both) just to make visual confirmation that I had ended up in the right place.
However, I had arrived on Good Friday, and everything – and I mean everything – was shut. Less, I suspect, to do with any devout adherence to Sunday and Bank Holiday trading laws, and more to do with the Australian personality’s ability to take any public holiday very seriously indeed.