Wednesday 7 December 2016

Time Travel

This week my youngest will take off to Vanuatu on her first independent holiday. I say independent because it is without any of us, her nuclear family, but she will be travelling with her beau to his family home.
Naturally, I am remembering my own first trip away. I had been dating my boyfriend for almost a year when, without any warning at all, he announced that he had overstayed his visa and immigration had been to his shared accommodation looking for him. I don't remember how long it took but his stuff was packed and a ticket home purchased in double quick time. With great generosity and huge naivety, I accepted that he hadn't known how to tell me his status and all was forgiven. He left and I stayed here to work and pursue my studies.
After six months or thereabouts, I got myself a ticket to go and see him while we waited for the immigration process to allow him back in Australia.
The airport queues were long and by the time I made it onto the plane, I was being paged, one of the very last to board. It was all a bit excruciating for me as a green 19 year old.
Some well meaning person had suggested that I should dress up for the long awaited reunion. I was leaving a cool Sydney spring and arriving in the tropics so I had worn the skirt from a summer suit with an angora jumper, swapping the jumper for the suit jacket in the plane toilet at the end of the flight. It was a special kind of madness.
I will never forget the moment I stepped into the air bridge in Kuala Lumpur. The air had a particular smell about it and the humidity was a stifling force. There were many, many security men lined up through the airport, they were mostly shorter than me (Australian men- in- uniform are almost universally taller than I am) and they all carried a very obvious shotgun.

13 comments:

  1. Now I want to know the rest of the story of your visit!

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    1. I'll write the bits I remember. It is mostly lost in time :)

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  2. Humidity makes me wilt.
    Like Anne, I am waiting for the next installment.
    Shotguns are bad enough, but in quite a lot of India the security officers carried machine guns...

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    1. I should say, I dont know anything about guns but I think they were shotguns.
      Machine guns on the streets would be quite confronting!

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  3. It's always pretty weird when I set out from Belfast in heavy winter clothing and arrive in Australia to overpowering heat! My most vivid flying memory is of getting food poisoning on a flight to Aus and just having to endure it until I arrived! (I deduced that it wasn't the airline food but an egg sandwich I bought at Heathrow)

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    1. Food poisoning on a plane is the 6th level of hell

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  4. Most of my family and old friends live in Chennai which is on the Eastern coast of India and very hot and sultry throughout the year. I live in Pune which is dry and temperate throughout the year. I go to Chennai every year around December / January the coolest there, but still find it uncomfortable without air conditioning in cars, and homes.

    I hope that your youngest has a safe journey to and from Vanuvatu.

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    1. Thanks for your good wishes!

      I had always imagined the whole of India to be hot and humid. Of course now I think about it, that was a silly assumption to make

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  5. You know as much as I travel I have never travelled alone, next February will be my first time and I'm already nervous about it. How uncool is that?

    I hope your daughter has a safe and enjoyable trip.

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    1. Without the buffer of companions, solo travel means one has more stories to tell at the end. I think you will enjoy it. Anything which takes us out of a comfort zone and into the growth zone produces nerves :)

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  6. “they all carried a very obvious shotgun.”

    Nothing like firing a shotgun in an airport, I suppose.

    South Mississippi (where I spent my first 37 years) is subtropical, and the humidity is as you described. After being away for a few years, I got off a plane in Jackson, Mississippi, one summer’s day, and the humidity hit me like a plank. I couldn’t believe how startling it felt, or that I had lived in it for so many years. Of course, the area also had short winters and long days, even in winter, and then there were all the beautiful plants…

    I enjoyed your reminiscence, and would love to read more of them.

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    1. If I remember my school geography, Sydney is also sub-tropical and it can be very humid but the tropics are a level up. Funnily enough, I think of the beautiful plants as being from cooler climates. I suppose we all see beauty in what we can't have

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    2. “I dont know anything about guns but I think they were shotguns.”

      Although shotguns can shoot a single slug, they are usually used to shoot a lot of tiny pellets that fan out. You've no doubt hear of buckshot, which is kind of shotgun shell that contains really big pellets. At the other end is birdshot shells which contain very small pellets. This doesn't necessarily mean that the latter if more lethal than the former when used against humans, the determining factor being the range between the killer and the killee.

      “Machine guns on the streets would be quite confronting!”

      Now you’re getting into an area about which I know next to nothing, but I do know that many (if not all) machine guns CAN be shot one bullet at a time simply by moving a lever, and this makes them more versatile than one might imagine based upon movies and such.

      “Funnily enough, I think of the beautiful plants as being from cooler climates.”

      Frigid places tend to have less variety, and the leaves tend to be smaller, but you’re right in that this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not beautiful. Tropical fish really do TEND to be prettier, at least colorwise, when compared to more northerly fish, although this isn’t to say that the latter can’t sometimes be beautiful too.

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