Safely arrived

Our flight to England was uneventful, which is the best kind of flight to have. Somehow, BA economy felt even more cramped than United; the food was (incredibly) worse, but I suppose I shouldn't complain, since I got something to eat. At Heathrow, we walked and walked and walked, then took a bus to Terminal 5 and went through a series of security cordons where they kept photographing our faces, in case we were shapechanging aliens intent on infiltrating the airline network.

War or Peace?

I think somebody is taking the piss. At the end of every night's cacophony in Chinatown (my wife swears last night's finale was a sped up version of "Could You Feel Love", sung in Mandarin), there's a comedy trill, bop-bub-babaBAABAAbompBOM, and then everything went quiet, like the finale of a not-very-good sitcom from the 1970s.

Then, blurry and confused in the taxi on the way to the airport, I had one of those conversations where you begin to doubt what you're hearing."Do you prefer war or peace?" my driver asked.

Border Controls

One consequence of sleep deprivation is that I become increasingly ill-tempered, beyond the point where I subvocalise curses at the nth Singaporean who's incapable of walking in a straight line, and approaching the moment in my life where I punch somebody out for something trivial like breathing too noisily.

Clearly it's not good to combine this frame of mind with going through passport control, but that's an unhappy conjunction that I can't avoid.

Slightly troubled travelling

Although the flight to Japan was uneventful (if you exclude the inevitable unpleasantness of sobering up midway through the journey), leaving was more difficult. It was raining hard at Narita and there were lots of planes queued up to leave, which mean that our aircraft burned up too much fuel on the ground and had to return to the terminal to have more fuel added. This has never happened to me before in 15 years of being squashed into aircraft, and paranoid ideas began to flow from the back of my brain.

The back of my brain isn't very imaginative: but then I didn't say the paranoid ideas were well-thought-out, creative ideas, did I?

Overworked

After spending all day in an air conditioned hotel, I took a taxi (lamentably unterrifying this time) back to the airport, checked through Immigration and hung around for two hours in an air conditioned building, before getting back on a plane and returning to Singapore. The only exotic part was the air conditioning on the plane on the way home, which managed to be even colder than the conference room yesterday. And there were all those scientists thinking you couldn't go below absolute zero. None of them work for Singapore Airlines, or in the Thai hospitality industry.

Narita

Narita airport is a curious anomaly in Japan, where everything is highly advanced and magnificently splendid. While the train from Tokyo to the airport is superlatively comfortable, fresh from the 23rd century, the airport itself is just a featureless purgatory.

Stressed

Maybe it was the four and three quarter hours of sleep this morning. Or the way the lift stopped working - it happily came to my floor and let me get in, but after the doors shut and I pressed the G button, it simply sat there, docile yet immobile, and whatever I did, whichever buttons I pressed, it remained where it was.

Stuck in customs

We took a taxi to the airport and checked in (Soekarno is another airport where they xray your bags before you go to the check-in desk, and also one that bizarrely collects cash off you before you're allowed to fly). After another lap of the terminal to ensure we'd looked at all the doughnut shops and determined it's not just J.CO that arranges doughnuts randomly, we went through to immigration.

First impressions, Indonesia

Last night we flew into Jakarta for the start of our holiday. Arriving in Indonesian airports I always have a feeling that the processes are vaguely farcical. I might complain about getting into the US, but I don't have to join a queue, pay twenty five dollars for a piece of paper, take that piece of paper with my passport to a separate queue in order to get it stamped, and then go and wave my stamped passport at a third person. (Or, like the guy in front of me, fan out five different passports - a strange thing for a man travelling on his own - and then walk straight on).

Still, we got through, and then went to hire a taxi to the hotel. We haggled the fare down 33%, but since it started off 400% over the odds, we didn't do that well. Oh well. The hotel was great when we got there: lots of terrible reviews on Tripadvisor but we didn't encounter any of the things people were annoyed about. Your mileage may vary, etc.

Rehearsal for security theatre?

At Changi, they check everyone's bags and boarding passes through an x-ray machine before you go to immigration, but the check feels a bit suspect because there's none of the expected take-your-laptop-out rigmarole that you get when you are checked again at the boarding gate before you get on the plane.

It doesn't feel that efficient, which is surprising for Singapore. Unless the dread hand of the economist-king is optimising for maximum-bottles-of-water-purchased-from-the-duty-free-shops. (You can't take more than 100 ml through the first checkpoint, but if you buy notionally terrorist-free water after that, you still can't take that through the second checkpoint. It's almost as if it were some immense boondoggle, whatever one of those is.)

Oscar Wilde was wrong

Or was it St Augustine? Never mind who said it first, the "triumph of hope over experience" isn't a second marriage, it's the same Chinese holidaymaker elbowing past me again to get to the baggage carousel again to find that staring at the one bag making its way around is not his, and that it doesn't turn into his, no matter how hard he stares at it. Again. And again. Lord, why did you bless me not with forebearance for the vagaries of others, but with stainless steel elbows and a business class attitude?

Flying around, United in boredom

I made a mistake flying back to Hong Kong from San Francisco; not only did that mean flying for two hours in the wrong direction to start with, the flight from SFO to HKG is much more punishing than going from Seattle to Tokyo and then flying on. You're just not meant to be sat on a plane for 14 hours, especially when the only entertainment is watching a movie on a screen at the front of the cabin. No screens in the seatback? No individual in-flight entertainment? What are we, animals?

Ice Cream at Narita

Flying to Tokyo today wasn't as bad as I'd feared: I got a comfortable chair, food I could eat and the sun was shining when we landed.

What is that awful smell?

Today I'm flying with Jetstar to Singapore; Cathay was too expensive and I didn't want to repeat the urine-and-burning-scented odyssey that had been Tiger Airways. Which seems to leave me with Jetstar.

Leaving Singapore

Another day, another plane. I was smart enough to check my seat before I got to the airport today, and picked the middle of row 30, where there's nobody in front of you and you can stretch your legs out a bit. The comfort of this was in marked contrast to the flight out, where I was only four rows further back, but because I'd chosen the D seat, had no room under my seat to stretch my legs, because that's where a lumpen box controlling the audio visual system for the row lives. I didn't know this at the time; it was just a large metal box that was in the way, but diligent study of the internet will reveal these things. I'm now very grateful to the aviation nerds of the world, who have catalogued information like this.

Back to Hong Kong with Great Expectations

Happily, the flight from Penang to Hong Kong left on time so I didn't spend much time in Penang airport. It's an odd airport - there is a McDonalds and a quite decent coffee shop before you go through security, but airside there's a small stall selling two kinds of potato crisp and one kind of bottled water. Does that imply that McDonalds is some sort of security threat? Or that people go to the airport for fine food, but only if they're not actually flying?

To JFK and beyond

JFK is a pretty poorly laid out airport. Perhaps it's unfair to compare it to modern terminals like Hong Kong or Heathrow's T5, but I'm sure it wasn't a mindbending epiphany in the 1990s that it might be more efficient to have departures and arrivals on different floors of the same building, rather than cram hundreds of people walking in opposite directions through the same concourse.

Arrived

We got to New York without any major difficulties, apart from a lot of turbulence somewhere between the West and East Coasts, but I was asleep so I avoided noticing any of that. Navigating JFK was not an absolute joy though. After we'd rechecked our luggage with a cheerful man (possibly a function of arriving at 7am, long before their social skills have been eroded by contact with the public) we walked over to the inter-terminal train, and then waited fifteen minutes for a train to go from terminal 7 to 8. Finally we gave up, after 3 trains had gone in the other direction, and took the following train in a big circle round to terminal 8, via 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1.

Sick Transit Gloria Mundi

So we're back to Airportland. I hadn't paid proper attention - our flight to New York from Hong Kong stopped via Vancouver - but after 15 hours sat on a plane, it was kind of nice to disembark and sit on a chair for an hour before getting onto a plane again. And then another plane.

Sexy Time In Heathrow Airport

I haven't been to London since they finished Terminal 5, so when I disembarked after an uneventful twelve hours on the plane, I wasn't sure what to expect. I thought it would be a gleaming palace of delight, but at 5am in the morning there's not that much to be excited by.