I’ve clocked many air-miles in the
last ten years or so. I’ve even circumnavigated the globe on one particular
trip, but this summer was the first time I crossed the equator. As I’ve
written before (see here), a lot of the journeys I make are done on freighter
flights where the lack of the usual creature-comforts of standard air travel
are sometimes compensated for in other ways. Watching the world passing by
below, charting rivers, mountains, seas and lakes with your own eyes, surveying
an endless cloudscape, or watching the night time stars merge with the growing
glow upon the horizon really allows you to gauge the vast expanse of the globe
beneath you.
This was another long haul trip.
Travelling from London via Mumbai to Hong Kong; then Hong Kong to Sydney and
Melbourne, finishing up with a truck ride several hours overland. Quite an
exhausting itinerary with the shock of transitioning the whole spectrum of
climate zones. From a sunny but mild London summer’s day to the torrential
downpour of Mumbai’s mid-monsoon, to Hong Kong’s tropical 40ºC with matching humidity, to
Australia’s frosty winter mornings with lows of -3ºC.
The journey took four days in total
which meant I slept for long portions of two of the flight’s four stages.
Consequently I missed what route we flew from London to Mumbai, but I suspect
we may well have flown over or close to the Ukraine, where only a few days
later the tragedy of Flight MH17 occurred. From Mumbai we flew across India and
Bangladesh, where I had a good view of (what the pilots told me was) the
confluence of the Rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra, before crossing Burma into
China, where we then headed down to Guangzhou. I sat in the cockpit for what
was quite a spectacular night landing at Hong Kong. Below we had good views of the
bright lights of Guangzhou, the Pearl River, Macao, Hong Kong Island and
Kowloon as we weaved our way between dark fluffy lumps of cloud in which
tropical lightning was flickering on and off. What the pilots (when speaking over the radio to
air-traffic control on the ground) calmly referred to as “patches of weather.” This
was quite an otherworldly spectacle to behold and far better than any firework
display I’ve ever been to!
On the flight south from Hong Kong
to Sydney I asked the pilot to let me know when we crossed the equator as it
was my first time travelling to the Southern Hemisphere. He joked that he’d
come and pour a glass of water over my head in honour of the traditional
‘crossing the line’ ceremony! Thankfully he didn’t, especially as it turns out
I was asleep at the time. He did give me a map with our exact route printed-out
as a souvenir though, consequently I could easily pin-point the place where we
crossed the line of zero degrees latitude over the Molucca Sea between the
northern point of Indonesia’s Sulawesi (Celebes) and North Maluku, islands
which resonate in my imagination as the setting for Joseph Conrad’s novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896). After
which we crossed the Banda Sea which, ever since watching Lorne and Lawrence
Blair’s Ring of Fire films, I’ve
always wanted to cross – except I’d rather hoped to do so in an old Bugis
sailing prau as they did, but hey-ho,
you can’t always have your cake and eat it, I suppose!
When not reading I spent much of
the daylight hours of this journey cloud watching or trying to interpret the
physical features of the landscape below. Along with the two great rivers of
Bangladesh I had some wonderful views of the interior of Australia. Coming into
land at Sydney I had an excellent view of Sydney harbour, the famous harbour
bridge and opera house. As the aircraft banked round and came back along the
coast, descending into land I watched the cliffs and beaches growing closer and
I couldn’t help thinking of Captain Cook sailing along that same stretch of
coast in HMB Endeavour. Thinking how
much has changed in all that time, and yet still how each new landfall we make
is a similar personal voyage of discovery of our own – and, of course, without
a doubt it’s always fun to make such new landings in novel and unconventional
ways, like arriving in your own private 747!
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