9321 Miles of Solitude

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not a huge fan of flying. It’s nothing to do with the turbulence or deep-vein thrombosis or even the possible potential for Lost-style shenannigans. Jetlag isn’t even a huge problem since I’ve done so many all-nighters over the course of the past few years that going 24+ hours without sleep isn’t that huge a problem.

A few things stand out really: no internet; no electrical charging and hence minimal battery lifes for things and; the horrible, horrible food.

This was all then amplified to the n’th degree on my recent trip back-in-time to Paris recently. I’ve only ever been ahead of the +8GMT timezone and this was the first time I’ve ever gone before that and hence, trip back-in-time. I can’t do what white-folks can do and call trips to Europe visiting the Mother/Fatherland, being Asian kind of stops that.

My flight from Perth to Kuala Lumpur on Monday marked the second flight in a row I ended up sitting by myself, absolutely no-one next to me, empty seats. Before that, it was almost a year ago on a trip back from Queensland with an army of butch female netballers (that were fortunately nowhere near me) and Swine Flu.

It was largely uneventful, I rationed my DS battery life (having the olde original model with the crappy battery life), got the lamb curry and rice dish because it would probably be one of the last rice-based meals for the next 5 weeks and watched How To Train Your Dragon.

It was a movie that people were telling me was good but not one I had the inclination to pay to see, or download illegally for that matter. It was definitely worth watching though, I mean it had vikings and dragons and Leonidas from 300 in it. How is that not the makings of an epic movie? It also had the fat guy from Superbad, McLovin and Ugly Betty; how is that not just the greatest voice acting cast, like in the history of ever.

On landing in KL Airport, there a horrribble promo-video from Malaysian airlines in the form of a terrible, illformed song that just went for far too long and never seemed to stop. It’d hit a crescendo and you’d think it’d end before starting on a another long verse-and-chorus. If you’re feeling particularly masochistic, you can listen to it, all 5 minutes and 45 seconds of it, below.

The hellish banshee-screech that was the Truly Asia song marked the most minor of problems on that transit leg. After an obligatory parental phonecall to tell them I was still alive and hadn’t been in a fatal aviation tragedy, I roamed around for food. All the food places are all horribly scattered around the top floor of the airport and to get from one to the other is a fairly long walk.

Then there was the fact I’d been told a number of times that all the Malaysian food places at the airport were crap. That left me with… Starbucks which looked too busy, Burger King which had no particularly interesting sounding Malaysian-speciality-dishes/burgers to bother with, some strange ‘Meditteranean’ restaurant and Delifrance. Whilst it seemed most appealing out of all the shitty options at the time it would have made absolutely no sense to go to Delifrance when I was FLYING TO FRANCE.

I then started looking back at the Malaysian places to find that, at 10pm at night, they didn’t have any Nasi Lemak left. So I settled on some ‘Irish’ cafe called O’Briens’ where I had a guava juice (so so Irish) and a slice of crappy blueberry pie. I took a picture of said pie on my phone and did some wandering and being all disgusted at the prices at the shops before heading down to the customs gate and dealing with all the metal detectors and the boarding passes and there I was at the transit gate. I then did a rumage through all my things doing the check-off:

• iPod – check
• Wallet – check
• coin-wallet now holding DS games – check
• wrist-watch – check
• passport – check
• boarding pass – check
• Mobile phone… … … …

I did the typical 3-pocket touch system, a fail. I dig through the many compartments of my backpack carry-on luggage, also an immense fail. Probably an immense lol for the Australian family watching me freaking out and swearing under my breath for a good 3-4 minutes, as I went to leave to frantically run to try search for it, the woman said I’d dropped something on the ground. I hoped it was my phone, in actuality it was just the little black ring thing that you have on belts.

I ran out through customs and metal detectors on a mad rush of a mission to find my phone. I had about 45 minutes to do it. I ran to the last place I had it, the Irish cafe, a total fail. I walked through all the shops I’d speed-browsed in, again to no avail. I surrendered 15 minutes prior to my scheduled departure time and sat down dejected next to a Frenchman who was already in the seat next to me. We had a brief chat, he was in Malaysia on work designing villas or something for stupidly-rich-Malaysian people, I told him about the dee-bar-clay of losing my phone as I was about to embark on a 5 week journey and was all panicky and fidgety about it.

Then he checked my inflight monitor thing since his was in black and white instead of having any form of colour. He ended up moving to another free seat, one that did have coloured in-flight entertainment. Perhaps also due to the fact he probably knew 12 hours on a flight with me in a near hysterical state wouldn’t be very fun-tastic. And again, I was alone on a flight. No-one next to me.

Normally this’d be a great thing, except when you’re freaking the shit out about some greasy Malaysian with your phone that has international roaming unleashing super-expensive international calls of an apocalyptic nature. I sat there staring at the flight-path video they showed without anything else for the better part of two hours or so. Any attempts to sleep were marred by thoughts of stupid phonebills that would arise whilst I was unable to do anything to cancel the phone. I ended up getting about an hour tops on that flight.

The advantages of having two window seats to yourself eventually got slightly better, you can sit diagonally to have slightly more leg room, move between window and aisle to get some semblance of a view, having two tables to rest used cups and trays of food on… great times. There’s also the omnipresent aisle benefit of easy toilet access, without having anyone trying to get over you at any stage.

The hour of sleep I did get was during the movie Up. From what I saw of it, it had the makings of a really good film. It worked in the same way that reading the first and last chapters of a book probably did. You find out who the characters are, get to some situation “Hey, there are talking dogs hunting that bird that are commanded by someone. The old man is all angry and hates everyone, especially the little fat kid and his shenannigans” ,”Heyyy so that’s who the badguy is! Take that bad guy! Yeahhh go good-talking-dog! Awwww the old man likes the little fat kid now~!!! Awwwwwwwwww…”

It was still a horrible journey having no-one to have any semblance of a conversation with. 17 hours of solitary activities gets very boring. I mean sure, someone may bring up the argument that I do that a lot of the time anyway when I’m in a frantic gaming state but that’s generally paired with the fact I’m perpetually connected and accessible via a mobile phone, the internet or Facebook or so many other mediums. I can also Facebook stalk or just randomly internet it up. This was a ‘truer’ form of isolation than my usual singleplayer gaming-sessions in my hovel: suspended in a tin can in mid air, no outside world contact.

I’m most definitely a child of the Information Age, removing me from the constant stream and it’s like I’ve lost a limb. Remove any ‘real’ human contact on top of that and give me some horrible situation to overanalyse and think about and I’m a paraplegic of Christopher Reeve-esque proportions…

To end with in my initial-journey-entry, great series’ have soundtracks and I feel that, despite not fitting the descriptor of great, the whole series of travel bloggerizing deserves some kind of soundtrack. I mean sure, most of my blogs have YouTube links to vaguely related songs anyway but I suppose these can have slightly less abstract links.

Anyway, without further ado, A Thousand (x9.321) Miles – Vanessa Carlton