Sunday, September 11, 2005
time travel
here we go, back in time to a week ago...
I am sitting in the airport at Nadi in Fiji. Local time is around 7 am – about 15.5 hours ago, I took off on a small and sparsely populated plane from Vancouver. We rose above sparse cloud cover as the sun sunk below the horizon. The mountains ringed with cloud were beautiful. The trip across Georgia Strait which earlier that morning had taken well over an hour was now completed in a matter of minutes, and soon the eastern coast of Vancouver Island was behind us. I think we may have flown over the Broken Group, which I paddled earlier in the summer, but then again, we had started veering south and so perhaps my geography is off. I was hoping we would keep up with the sunset, but as I just said, we turned southwards instead, later making a 90 degree turn westward (after complete darkness had descended). Out of my window, I saw the big dipper low on the horizon.
We touched down in Honolulu sometime in the middle of the night, and the only cultural aspect I experienced as I waited in a small waiting room for an hour and a half was listening to announcements about the designated smoking areas – a presumably Hawaiin word stuck out of the otherwise engligh recorded message – my guess is that it meant something like ‘respect’.
My companion on the plane was a woman named Joy who hailed from Canberra (though originally a Canadian). She knew of WebCT through her work as a sort of librarian at an Australian university. She now works for the National Gallery in Canberra and invited me to drop by and say hello if I made it there in my travels.
I slept for a large chunk of the 6 hour flight from Honolulu to Fiji, after watching a ‘Pink Lady’ become accidentally involved in the deaths of countless Elvis impersonators in the inflight movie: “Elvis has Left the Building”. I awoke to watch our descent into the Figean Islands, where the lights of civilization were far fewer and farther between than they had been in Vancouver or Honolulu. It was like peering at a strange starscape where each island was a unique constellation dotted with occasional stars of light. As me got lower and closer to Nadi, the light sources became closer together and were no longer point-like.. something like zooming in on a globular cluster like you might see in an image from a space telescope.
Though we arrived at the airport before 5am local time, we were greeted by a group of guitar and ukulele players singing a traditional song of welcome, occasionally shouting a warm “Bula!” whenever there was a pause in the lyrics. Joy invited me to be her guest in the members and guests-only Qantas lounge, so I decided to check it out. There were couches and chairs, counters with an array of toasters, bread, and condiments, and refrigerators stocked with juice, water, and other beverages. I picked up a copy of the New Zealand Herald and a tomato juice and sat down to read. In fact, the best part of the lounge was the bathroom – compared to the airplane’s cubicles, it was very luxurious. There was even a shower with towels provided, but having no change of clothes, I did not take advantage of this.
I have now moved back up to the regular waiting area, from where I have a nice view out a window-lined wall of a sunny scene with craggy hills, palm trees, and sunshine. Though I don’t have an internet connection, I thought I would write this up to send off a little later. In a little more than an hour and a half, I will be on a plane again for the final leg of my journey to Sydney!
I am sitting in the airport at Nadi in Fiji. Local time is around 7 am – about 15.5 hours ago, I took off on a small and sparsely populated plane from Vancouver. We rose above sparse cloud cover as the sun sunk below the horizon. The mountains ringed with cloud were beautiful. The trip across Georgia Strait which earlier that morning had taken well over an hour was now completed in a matter of minutes, and soon the eastern coast of Vancouver Island was behind us. I think we may have flown over the Broken Group, which I paddled earlier in the summer, but then again, we had started veering south and so perhaps my geography is off. I was hoping we would keep up with the sunset, but as I just said, we turned southwards instead, later making a 90 degree turn westward (after complete darkness had descended). Out of my window, I saw the big dipper low on the horizon.
We touched down in Honolulu sometime in the middle of the night, and the only cultural aspect I experienced as I waited in a small waiting room for an hour and a half was listening to announcements about the designated smoking areas – a presumably Hawaiin word stuck out of the otherwise engligh recorded message – my guess is that it meant something like ‘respect’.
My companion on the plane was a woman named Joy who hailed from Canberra (though originally a Canadian). She knew of WebCT through her work as a sort of librarian at an Australian university. She now works for the National Gallery in Canberra and invited me to drop by and say hello if I made it there in my travels.
I slept for a large chunk of the 6 hour flight from Honolulu to Fiji, after watching a ‘Pink Lady’ become accidentally involved in the deaths of countless Elvis impersonators in the inflight movie: “Elvis has Left the Building”. I awoke to watch our descent into the Figean Islands, where the lights of civilization were far fewer and farther between than they had been in Vancouver or Honolulu. It was like peering at a strange starscape where each island was a unique constellation dotted with occasional stars of light. As me got lower and closer to Nadi, the light sources became closer together and were no longer point-like.. something like zooming in on a globular cluster like you might see in an image from a space telescope.
Though we arrived at the airport before 5am local time, we were greeted by a group of guitar and ukulele players singing a traditional song of welcome, occasionally shouting a warm “Bula!” whenever there was a pause in the lyrics. Joy invited me to be her guest in the members and guests-only Qantas lounge, so I decided to check it out. There were couches and chairs, counters with an array of toasters, bread, and condiments, and refrigerators stocked with juice, water, and other beverages. I picked up a copy of the New Zealand Herald and a tomato juice and sat down to read. In fact, the best part of the lounge was the bathroom – compared to the airplane’s cubicles, it was very luxurious. There was even a shower with towels provided, but having no change of clothes, I did not take advantage of this.
I have now moved back up to the regular waiting area, from where I have a nice view out a window-lined wall of a sunny scene with craggy hills, palm trees, and sunshine. Though I don’t have an internet connection, I thought I would write this up to send off a little later. In a little more than an hour and a half, I will be on a plane again for the final leg of my journey to Sydney!
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