A travel Marathon: BNE-HKG-DEL-KBP-SVO

I am really looking forward to meeting up with friends in Moscow and heading out on the town. Its been a while since I last did. I only have one reservation: My body clock is likely to be rather messed up.

Having been introduced to ITA Matrix by a former college, I was able to book very rather tailored routing from Brisbane to Moscow which worked out far cheaper than other options I had found on line. I also tailored my trip so that I could visit a friend in Hong Kong and not pay extra for a stopover, and fly past Delhi to collect all my snowboarding gear from my recent trip to Gulmarg. That saved me lugging a 20kg boardbag all the way from India to New Zealand and Australia and then back again.

The reality of the connections that I have chosen means that I will have been in 5 airports, in 5 countries (Australia, China, India, Ukraine and Russia) from Sunday morning through to Tuesday evening, eat a whole stack of airline food and likely be in desperate need of a shower... airport security have just confiscated my deodorant from my hand luggage at Honk Kong Airport. I argued in vain that it was an aerosol i.e. gas, and not a liquid or gel and that none of the airports in Australia, New Zealand, India or Singapore that I have passed through recently had a problem with it.

I have done a few calculations courtesy of Google Earth and my itineraries:

Brisbane to Moscow:

Travel time: 59 hours
Flying time: 24 hours
Distance travelled: 16'025 kilometers or about 9;955 miles

By the time I have reached Petropavlovsk those numbers will look more like this (and I will be back on New Zealand time):

Brisbane to Kamchatka:
Travel time: 121 hours
Flying time: 33
Distance travelled: 22'816 kilometers or about 14'175 miles

All of this isn't too bad really. I don't mind. I am not complaining, just presenting my reality. I enjoyed my brief stop in Hong Kong. I caught up with a friend, Jonathan. I got to see a bit of the city. He took me for some amazing prawns. I am collecting airmiles. And I don't really believe that airline food is that bad.

I always request a special meal, usually low sodium or low carbs because that way you always get served first, and can go to sleep sooner. Try it one day. The meals are usually the same, just without salt, which you can then add, or a less fattening desert.

This probably doesn't have its place in this blog, but I am going to venture on with some of my thoughts on airline food. I remember flying out of Blantyre in Malawi a few years back and I decided that people who complain about airline food have got it too good. A few days earlier I had been walking around the village of Liwonde when I came upon someone selling dried rats to eat. The were sorted into size and cost next to nothing and where going like hot cakes. To the villagers, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary going on. There weren't foreign journalists documenting this disturbing reality. It was totally normal. Some food for thought.