Dress rehearsal before the trip to Europe: my boss flies me to Dunedin and back to attend a work party and meet one of the top two guys in this country. No, I haven’t forgotten the story with the girl with coloured bracelets, how could i? But I’m on board a plane right now and that’s worth commenting. If you ask me what Dunedin is, hey, it’s a town in New Zealand, even smaller than Christchurch and definitely colder ’cause it’s further South. So I fly from the domestic terminal in my town after spending an hour playing pool in the friendly restaurant they have up on the top level of the old building. I expected a small craft but instead I found myself in this Boeing 737-300 configured as a one class only. As I’m sitting at the back I can see most of the cabin, really full of comuters and business folk. Loads of people travelling this maybe 250 mile distance in a blue carpeted Air New Zealand plane with blue uniformed air hostesses, of whom one is really nice. If you like the flat chested skinny type of girl with long hair and high heels. I have lollies. – pic needed – We are descending already and I have to switch my Nokia of. – pic needed – (One hour later:) As soon as we boarded the plane the captain said: ‘it’s going to be a bumpy ride’. And it bloody was. If you ever come this way, hire a car, get a bus or do the old hitch hiking. Nice scenery, too. As Dunedin is wedged between some rugged hills and the Pacific, its airport – pic needed – is a zillion miles away from the city and this sucks, too. The town itself is lovely, Scottish styled and full of students, not all drunk. I can’t say I’d like to live here, but its Octagon Square and the Chinese Garden are worth seeing. I this gusty Nor’Western wind is on tomorrow again, I’m not looking forward to my flight back.
Travel for Real: How I’m Gonna
November 27th, 2009Travel for Real: How I’m Gonna Go to Europe and Maybe Back – Part 4
November 25th, 2009(Later in that flight)
No wonder I couldn’t read the secret meaning of her bracelets. Something was terribly wrong! And it wasn’t then, no, then it was just beautiful, the comfort of the guilty feeling when you know for sure you can’t be guilty at all. The wrong part only comes now, as I write: I have just realized that it takes a wee bit of Dali and quite a strong dose of Picasso to make the hand and arm of the English girl in the KLM flight perfectly match the described position with her book, blue jeans, white fingers and the arm rest of my seat. She was young, all right. Attractive over the limit, all right (in a 22-hour one-stop flight who wouldn’t be?). But contortionist, no way! Russian ballerina, no way! How was she, actually?
Now, as I remember, she was asleep. Or so she seemed.
She moved slightly as the plane shook from some lateral wind and the light dimmed and most kids cried but only a few mums shushed. Her left leg crossed over my right one, which was a severe violation of my private economy class space but I could see no air marshals or even better looking hostesses, so I chose not to induce any panic on board and I did not complain. The light got dimmer but not fast enough to prevent me from seeing her fragile, almost argyle, agile, ankle. A while.
She was wearing sandals: vandal’s teeth marks, shark’s in her flesh, fresh. I didn’t like her much. So I didn’t touch. I looked at my watch. There was NO time. Just a chime. We were stopping soon, in Bangkok, at noon.
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NOTE: By mistake or just randomly chosen, the airliners featuring in this post and the previous one replace British Airways and its partners, with whom indeed I flew. This is thanks to a charge they applied to my MasterCard for trying to contact over their satellite (?) phone a number on the ground, as I was flying over. It was something like 30 US a minute for NOT getting through. I wrote to British Airways and that letter came back at some expense, too. But never mind, the girl was real. I just picture her in a plane belonging to a company I am more comfortable with.
Travel for Real: How I’m Gonna Go to Europe and Maybe Back – Part 3
November 24th, 2009I don’t read travel blogs. What a bloody stupid idea! Why would you masochistically read one’s joy of traveling when you’re stuck at home with a broken DVD player, a noisy neighbor, your own evening before going back to work next morning plus a mother-in-law and, in at least one documented case I know, with two mothers-in-law, an ex and a current one? And that’s not mentioning religions where you may have more than one current anyway… and that would be fine! Or why would you even read the misfortune of some sponsored guy from Alaska who missed the plane to Barcelona, where he had a connection to Reykjavik for a one-day conference on blogging and ended up at Ibiza instead, all paid off, with no return options for ten days?
Another reason I don’t read travel blogs is that they tend to be on the same page in the local newspaper with the adverts from the main two travel agents in town.
Yet the main reason I would never advise any of you, smart readers of this mockoblog, to ever touch any travel guide (and a travel blog is a travel guide disguised as a nice one way chat, with no responsibility, a bit like a lawyer is almost a kind of a surgeon, just almost, you know) is that when and if you actually come to visit the same places, your experience has nothing to do with what you have been taught by the failed writer who’d been there before. You know they are failed writers when you see their author’s name less than two inches close to the word ‘blog’ and I’m sure this applies to journalists as well, although, with my limited access to the Internet, I couldn’t tell 100% whether this applied to online blogs as well. I’ve heard from a couple of friends that bad stuff may happen on the Net, which may imply that even well-known guys may be tempted to… But I digress!
I meant to tell you about how I went about booking my flight from New Zealand to Europe, but I ended up in some one-eyed polemic with a bunch of chaps I don’t know anyway. So I’d better tell you how useful a famous travel guide was to me when I was travelling to Bangkok a few years back.
I was flying a KLM/Malaysian Boeing 747 from Heathrow to Sydney and, due to my advanced age I had managed to get a seat by the aisle at the top of my compartment (do you call them compartments in planes? I guess not, but who cares) so I could stretch my deep vein thrombosis affected legs. Next to me, on my right, there sat an English girl who must have been on her way to both Miss Universe and Miss Sister Theresa Aspiring Fellowship (if such a union exists, the resemblance here is purely unintentional). She was carrying this Whatever Travel Guide Thailand between the knees on blue jeans, with a long index finger stopped firmly at some page and the rest of her marble-like fingers resting with an abandoned palm upwards on the arm of my seat. At her wrist many woven coloured cotton bracelets were trying to give me a signal I could not quite understand at first.
(To be continued.)
Travel for Real! How I’m Gonna Go to Europe and Maybe Back – Part 2
November 23rd, 2009I don’t know what I’m writing about, yet I’m still doing it. So don’t take this information as the Gospel. However, some facts you will read in this series of travel and pre-travel mockoposts are not to be found in The Lonely Planet and the other guides. And they are certainly not meant to be commercial; at least not until someone decides my texts deserve a sponsorship or maybe legal action.
Here we go!
New Zealand has three main international airports. Two are in the North Island (Auckland, the largest and Wellington, a funny one, which resembles a carrier and where you don’t want to land with a cross wind). I live in the South Island and the only option here is Christchurch Airport. This is the main international gate for an island of about one million, not to mention the tourists and the migrants. The picture shows Christchurch International (and Domestic) Runways and the terminals as they were before the massive renovation and extension that’s happening as we speak.
The main carriers operating ex Christchurch are the Oceania-based Air New Zealand and Qantas plus two large Asian companies: Air Singapore and Emirates. The four could be perhaps listed in this ascending order when it comes to size, level of service and popular perception of pricing. I might be very wrong, but that’s my feeling and I had traveled with three of these airliners in the past ten years or so.
When you leave Christchurch going North, as most flights do, unless you are heading to Antarctica, you see the Waimakariri River and the Canterbury Plains.
After that, then the plane is too high for you to see anything else, really, except for the air hostess.
But how do you buy your ticket? Do you go through the agents, airlines or do you give it a go online?