07avr It’s the journey
I’m writing this in Fiji, but it will probably only go up once I’m in Auckland (apparently Ottawa is the only city in the world that believe in providing free internet access). The trip to New Zealand so far has been extenuating: I’ve been up since 6:45 AM Tuesday Eastern time. It’s now 6:30 AM Thursday Fiji time. That’s about 31 hours and I’ve got another flight to take before getting to Auckland. I did manage to get about 2 or 3 hours of sleep on the LA-Fiji flight.
I can only presume I smell like hell right now. I bought a nice Fiji shirt with a turtle on front to try to mitigate partially the problem … I did come close to buying the National Fiji ruby team shirt, but not knowing how competitive Kiwi-Fiji rivalry is, I opted against it.
I did meet a few interesting people along the way thought. The guy in the aisle beside me on my Ottawa-Detroit flight started repeating the same prayer over and over again when they sealed the airplane door. He only stopped once we were in the air and we were told we could unbuckle our seatbelts.
I share my Detroit-LA flight with a Dutch lady who use to be a manager at IBM and ran more marathons than she can remember. She was on her way to Australia to participate into one actually (and explained to me that Kiwis and Australian have a mortal fear of mixing chocolate with peanut butter). On a side note, the Rockies and the Grand Canyon are beautiful from the air.
The LA-Fiji flight was an excruciating 10 hours. I shared the trip with another Canadian. She’s on her way to meet a long-time friend in Australia. Didn’t get the chance to talk a lot since we were both really tired and were trying to get whatever sleep we could. The airport in Fiji is small and not very luxurious, but we were greeted warmly by the airport staff and by three musicians singing what I presume were traditional Fijian songs. You will be surprise to hear the good people of Fiji seem to have managed the feat of keeping their country free of terrorists without asking travelers to removed belts and shoes or making them go through the see-through scanner.
So far the trip is going well all things considered. I did lose my Castro hat after the Ottawa-Detroit flight … shame.