Travelling Wearily

 “I need to leave at a decent time this evening,” I announced to my work colleagues flaunting an economy class ticket on one of our shabbier domestic airlines (which, to be fair is all of them).  I waited for the gasps of envy but strangely they didn’t come.  Nevertheless by dint of hard work and a collaborative team effort (I let everyone else do the work) I managed to slip the corporate chains and flee my office in plenty of time for my flight.

Which is probably why the airline waited until I had actually arrived at the airport before cheerfully informing me that my flight would be an hour and a half late.  Assuming it turned up at all.  With suddenly far too much time on my hands I looked around for something to do.  Ten seconds later I gave up.  I have in the past been, shall we say, a gnats critical of Sydney’s international terminal but I realise I was wrong.  It is a glittering beacon of excitement and hope by comparison with its low rent domestic cousin.

If the international terminal is like a badly lit shopping mall (it is) then the domestic terminal is like a badly lit DFO which has fifty thousand items that no one on god’s earth would ever want piled haphazardly all over the floor but ran out of the one thing you wanted half an hour ago.

I dined on something spectacularly overpriced.  I’m not entirely sure what it was but I think it had bacon in it.  That’s a pretty safe bet, most of the things I eat have bacon in them even, occasionally, the cereal.  After what for want of a better term I shall call dinner I found a bar where in return for spending half my disposable cash on a glass of wine I was permitted to sit and watch the tennis. Aryna Sabalenka was playing Coco Gauff and with the exception of the tennis racquets it bore a remarkable similarity to certain dreams I have.  The grunting, screaming, sweating and low level cursing in Belarusian were all familiar at any rate.

Having enjoyed the “tennis” for a while I headed off to find my departure gate.  The corridor narrowed as I walked along, the lights flickered, the brushed concrete changed to exposed brick and when I saw my first skeleton chained to a wall I knew I was getting close.  Eventually I arrived at what appeared to be a run down cow shed.  It was attached to the terminal but one got the impression that this was only because the terminal couldn’t get up and walk away.  I swear there were goats grazing outside.

Here I waited until a bus pulled up.  A couple of dozen passengers including me hesitated for a moment not daring to hope that the time had finally come.  Eventually the sole airline employee present informed us that if we wanted to get on the plane then getting the bus was an essential first step.

The bus swept us past rows of large planes.  Then it swept us past a bunch of smaller planes.  Finally it pulled up beside the powered metal tube that would take us to Canberra.  I could tell right away why the flight was delayed, they were waiting for the Airfix glue to dry.  If you stuck wings on our bus you would have a larger and more plausible aircraft.  Still we were here now and the driver seemed disinclined to let us stay on the bus so with varying degrees of reluctance we boarded our petite princess of the sky.

I had gained a window seat in return for indicating my readiness to help in an emergency by pushing out the emergency exit I was sitting next to.  I didn’t realise said exit weighed over ten kilograms and that I was effectively being asked to tear off a chunk of the plane and hurl it into the night while terror stricken passengers trampled me to mush in their frantic attempts to preserve their worthless lives for a few more seconds by throwing themselves bodily through the hole I had just created.

The flight attendant shambled his way through a safety announcement while apologising and pointing out he was very tired and should have been off duty two hours ago.   I hope the same couldn’t be said for the pilot.  Eventually they wound up the elastic and the plane trundled towards the runway only twenty minutes late.  That is twenty minutes later than the hour and a half it was already late.

Ten minutes later we were still trundling towards the runway and I started to suspect the pilot was going to drive us to Canberra.  The flight attendant explained between yawns that there was a build up of flights trying to land and we had to wait for space on the runway.  I’m not sure why, a decently sized slingshot could have launched this plane into the sky.  Eventually a narrow window appeared and we made a mad dash for the runway before anyone else could land on it.  I doubt if we used a tenth of the runway before our little plane was airborne and rattling towards Canberra.  The flight attendant shambled around with a bottle of water and some random cookies.  These were labelled refreshments but could well have been the remnants of his packed lunch.  He forgot what one of the types of cookies was despite only having a choice of two.

As we neared Canberra we hit some turbulence which would probably have gone unnoticed on a 747 but which made our aerial steed plunge like a bronco.  I gazed at the emergency exit and wondered if I should get a head start on the plane dismantling.  I underestimated our narrow tube’s toughness however and it erupted out the other side of the turbulence and plonked us on the ground at Canberra with nary a bruise.  I patted the aeroplane on the fuselage on my way out and told it I had always had faith in it.  It called me a liar and threatened legal action for sexual harassment.  Next time I take the train.