Somewhere, anywhere...
Here I sit in the confines of an aeroplane, on the last leg to Australia, Singapore to Darwin. Thinking about the ocean below that we slowly traversed aboard the KM Awu from Kupang to Surabaya, the first part of the trip from Timor to Singapore taking a few weeks, not a few hours.
Already the trip is receding into an artefact of the past, something I did, not something I'm doing. After my last post, written in a state of lassitude, we spent another few days in the south-west of Ireland, then a few more back at Niamh's parent's place near Dublin.
We looked around Kerry a bit, drove north along the coast as the Atlantic battered the coast, closing off passage to the Aran Islands where we'd hoped to visit. We walked along the top of the famous Cliffs of Moher and almost felt blown off and, just inland, walked up the bizarre rocky landscape of the Burren, away for a brief time for the hordes of fellow-tourists who even well into autumn were in abundance. And for those of you who are fans of Father Ted (that probably means every Irish person and no-one from anywhere else), we stumbled upon his house, to Niamh's great delight.
The west coast
Kerry
The wild Atlantic
The Cliffs of Moher
The Cliffs of Moher
The Burren
Father Ted's house!
In Kildare we hung around enjoying the last days together, I went through the process of packing and discarding and found $800 carefully secreted that I'd forgotten about, which was nothing to be unhappy about. What was to be unhappy about was that my camera still wasn't repaired by the idiot I'd left it with over two months earlier. But he did have the part, which, after a very unconvincing promise to have it fixed by the next day he gave me along with the deposit I'd paid. But no contrition. We also, finally, had a night out on the town, going to a small comedy gig where I got to dance stupidly in front of strangers.
The weather was cooling down, but there were still periods of clear weather, as well as fairly frequent bouts of wind and rain – listening to an Irish weather forecast is like listening to a highly nuanced description of the various types of wind and rain, varying in quality, quantity, duration and frequency. Fine doesn't mean what it means in Australia, which would probably be described as clear, sunny and absolutely roasting. Fine means a lack of rain. Anyway, it seemed to bother the Irish more than me, partly because I would expect Ireland to be windy and romantic in autumn and partly because I knew I'd be heading back to an unforgiving inferno soon enough, so there was no need to pine for warmth. I was more lapping up the opportunity the walk outside as if their was air-con on everywhere!
But all good things must come to an end and late on Sunday morning Niamh drove me to Dublin airport and we bade each other a sorrowful farewell and I headed off, a little trübsinnig as the Germans would say (somewhere between morose and sorrowful) through the security scanning and into the departure area.
Air travel, which in some ways has become so commonplace, still has, for me, an air of excitement, especially for long flights. I once worked for a while as a storeman in an airside duty-free shop at Sydney airport (so know first-hand how slack security actually is, despite the show they put on!) and, despite it being menial work and the boss being a dragon, somehow got a bit of a thrill being around the atmosphere of people heading off on big journeys.
So there I was, looking at the destinations on the departures board, doing the rounds of duty-free, buying a book, wandering around the plush surroundings, in a strange world that is an everywhere, a parallel universe behind the security checks, connected by imaginary tunnels in the sky, where, no matter the wealth or poverty just outside, everything is almost the same. Of course there are regional differences that a well-funded PhD student might like to explore one day, but the similarities, all over the world, are striking. What is particularly bizarre, however, are the amount of shops. I can understand the attractions of duty-free shopping – the goods on offer are generally far cheaper that otherwise available, but that's really only true of booze, cigarettes and maybe cosmetics. But who goes suit shopping in transit or things a departure lounge is an excellent opportunity to buy a watch? Obviously a lot of people do, otherwise the retailers wouldn't be able to sustain their businesses and pay their exorbitant rents. It's particularly noticeable, though not surprising, in a place like Singapore that's so drenched in shopping already, but everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree, airports are retail experiences, prime real estate for merchants to sell their wares.
In the everywhere
Dublin airport
Singapore airport
Darwin airport
After my wanderings and wonderings I went to the departure lounge, skipped the security queue because of my Qantas frequent flyer card and then had priority boarding – what a puffed up little legend I felt, with my special little card affirming my secret feeling that I'm a bit better than everyone else. Next step a membership to the Chairman's Lounge, or at least the Qantas Club, yet another proof that capitalism is for the poor, socialism for the rich (where everyone contributes the same, then can have as much as they need once they're inside – my first invite into a Qantas Club by a workmate was part disgust, part amazement and part gorging myself on all the free stuff).
I was on Emirates to Dubai, then Singapore. I managed to snaffle an exit row seat next to a young couple on their honeymoon who were brought champagne and cake and generally treated nicely by the cabin staff. So it was a leg-stretching bonanza! I'm not sure of the general state of international air travel, not having got anything longer a trip from Darwin to SE Asia for 15 years, but Emirates are a step up from the Darwin to Sydney planes, even the Qantas ones. You have about two dozen food preferences to choose from, including vegetarian, lacto-vegetarian, Indian vegetarian, bland diet, gluten-free, fish, a menu which you can check before you fly, and the food is served with real cutlery. I once scorned in-flight entertainment as a distraction from the experience of flying, including facing up to boredom, which provides its own opportunities for contemplation and self-reflection and, although in principle I agree with that, I can not pretend not to have succumbed to our screen-saturated society – which is another way of saying the entertainment selection was vast, with well over 1000 channels of movies, tv, radio, movies, podcasts, playlists to choose from on demand. You could listen to a British journalist being interviewed about his book describing what life is like for Israeli Arabs, get an aural tour of the new luxury Emirates charter planes, watch a huge selection of terrible sit-coms or listen to chants from the Qur'an. Or you could connect to one of the two outside cameras and watch the progress of the plane or plot its path on a dynamic map..You could also, for a small fee, connect to the internet! Yes, the real internet out there in space. And even, using the small handset that changed channels and could check your email, you could, for US$5/minute, make phone calls! And I thought those little drop-down screens on the bottom of the overhead lockers were pretty nifty!
So the flight was a pleasant enough seven hours into Dubai where it was disorientingly around midnight rather than 8pm. The airport in Dubai is big – it was dark and I didn't have a window seat, but you got a sense of it anyway, reinforced by the ride in the bus from the tarmac to the transit lounge which covered a lot of ground. There were just rows and rows of planes lined up into the distance – and this was just the Emirates section! The terminal was huge, like them all I suppose, huge, clean, sparkling and the air outside it was hot, even at midnight. There was a mix of people, lots of Arabs, Indians, Asians, Europeans, Australians and this mix and the heat made me suddenly feel a lot closer to home in a most unexpected way.
After two hours I got on the next plane, another seven hour flight, leaving around 2:30 in the morning – Emirates put on their nighttime mood lighting, which includes stars on the room and, after a bit of food and settling in, with the windows all closed, the plane slowed down into quiet activities of sleep. After watching a bit more tv, and a bit more reading, I dozed fitfully until woken up by breakfast an hour or so before we landed. The windows started to open, letting in bright, bright sunlight, for it was early afternoon out there.
We landed just before 2pm and, after clearing immigration and getting my bags I headed sleepily down to the train station to get a train into town. In addition to, like Dubai, being warm, it was, like home, humid.
After travelling at the pace of the train for so long (which itself was fiendishly quick less than two centuries ago!), covering so much space so quickly was quite discombobulating. As you travel by land (and sea) you have a sense of the different landscapes, physical, cultural and social of each place, however fleeting, however superficial; you travel through a place, you leave one and enter another. The plane picks you up, puts you in the everywhere of the cabin, and drops you out somewhere else. You leave the cocoon of the airport and suddenly you're somewhere else!
On the flights from Dublin, in the airports and in Singapore I had waves of thoughts going through my head, a dislocation of my identity. A few weeks ago I'd been walking through German villages, fields and forests, eating sauerkraut, potato and meat with local beer, feeling very much at home, back in a place I'd spent a great deal of time learning about, being in. Now I was in Singapore, in the tropics, with the smell of curry everywhere (I stayed again in Little India), the smell of damp, of green growth and decay, the feel of perspiration, the body merging with the air around, not protecting itself against the chilly world outside. And I felt, not quite yet at home, but close to home. From interactions with those closest to us, to more distant social relations, to people from other cultures, to being surrounded by another culture we not only show a different instantiation of ourselves, but we feel or be different aspects of ourselves to differing degrees; I don't think like [insert brainy allusion to obscure philosopher / philosophical school here] that all personality or identity is an illusion, I think rather that there is a basic core of ourselves below our varying ways of expressing it. Such thoughts drifted in and out of my head as I shot through night and day across half the planet...
I stayed in Singapore two nights, to re-acclimatise to the tropics and dampen the jet-lag and because I'm returning to a house that is mostly packed in a shed! So I took some time to right myself before the job of unpacking in the heat of the build-up, before heading off after a night in Katherine to Milpirri and Lajamanu, before starting work next Monday.
It's still quite surreal, after this fantastical adventure, this sublime dream, to be on the way home, back to my beloved tropical savannah (although I have a confused and conflicted love for Katherine, I would never call it my beloved!), the gorge, the Tanami, the whole frustrating and wonderful, fulfilling and challenging, fantastical experience that the Northern Territory, my home, is.
Postscript - the journey home
After an amazingly easy exit from the airport I was at Will's house 30 minutes after landing and slept more fitful jet-lagged sleep after a short walk to the shops and a hello to familiar faces at Greenie's. Next morning - today - I got a lift with Tracks crew, heading off with the staging equipment for Milpirri. Tomorrow, to Lajamanu