In it for the long haul

Once upon a time a dilettante English lad smuggled a sentence or two about everything in his carry-on luggage and sat next to me on a flight from Sydney to Japan and didn't stop talking. He then nabbed the room next to me in the airport hotel in Tokyo so he could tap codes on my wall overnight - waited for me in the hotel breakfast room so that he could bag the seat next to me on the plane from Japan to London - and chewed my ears off followed by the rest of my body fat so that by the end of the flight I was a pile of bones. Ever since then I always try to avoid the long maul.

When I take my seat on the plane for a long haul flight I’m always really careful to avoid saying a word or making eye contact with the person next to me. The first few minutes may well determine your relationship for the rest of the flight and an unplanned greeting, a random question, may lead to twenty-two or so hours of conversation.

So now invariably I find myself seated next to a stranger whose origins and life journey I can only guess through quiet clues for the nine or so hours between Sydney and Asia and then the thirteen or so hours between Asia and Paris. It's usually only in the last five minutes when we’ve lived, landed, watched each other’s personal tv, and smelt each other’s food left to stagnate in open, sleeping mouths, that I dare open the lines of communication: where are you from? Oh you were visiting your son in Sydney – bon bon – ok, Bonne Fête. Saved from swapping travel tips and becoming penpals with her son.

For my latest long haul flights I was lucky to escape the casse-pieds, and except for one guy placed next to me on the Sydney to Hong Kong flight with wormish tendencies and toothless baked otter breath, I was left alone. I don’t know how anyone can speak, or drink alcohol, on planes. I become so dehydrated that my voice dries up.

I recall one particulary youthful flight from London to Dehli where everyone was completely trashed on bloody marys, changing seats and swapping sacred cow stories, and all cheered and vomited vibrantly when the plane landed. I sometimes feel compelled to applaud. After feeling vulnerable in the sky for so long, the spectacular landing in Paris the other day on an invisible fog swamped runway was the dramatic culmination of hours and hours of awakeness, and I clapped politely with the rest of the voyagers.

I can’t sleep on planes. I get weird on the long haul. Watching movement. This time around I watched In the Mood for Love four times, even though I’d seen it before. I watched it in different ways: first with its haunting music, then with the sound down and my ipod playing Bowie tracks with one particularly cringing moment when Little China Girl came on. Then dubbed in German. Then with no sound at all so that its deep colours jabbed at my eyes and I wanted to scream out: This is the greatest film ever made!

During the first nine hours I decided that life was all about being wild and I’m just going to live a party girl life, late nights and lost days. I swapped planes in Hongkong and was tempted from the airport window to disappear into the polluted mist - there's something incredibly romantic about the early morning mountains of Honkers (as it is affectionately dubbed by long haul Aussies). The last time I actually left Hongkong airport was when I was four years old and living there, streaming down back alleyways with my mother when I suddenly disappeared. She found me minutes after, nabbed by a sabre-toothed man who wanted to sell me his rugs, over estimating the buying power of a western four year old.

Back on the plane as the clock sweated out the hours and I could count the drip drop of the seconds as the plane left Asia behind, my condition deteriorated. Correspondingly I lost interest in being a party girl and decided life was all about quiet nights in a bath, combing my hair, general personal hygiene and food that wasn’t laced in aeroplane sauce.

On the screen before me I watched the plane follow a well dug path between Sydney and Paris. After we'd passed over Tashkent I started to feel like I was on the home run, and once on Russian territory my usual worries surfaced, inspired by memory clippings about planes accidently shot down. Out of Russia, ticking places off one by one over the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, Hamburg - where we could make an emergency landing if necessary - and there she is: Paris.

No real emotions about seeing Paris again. No flutter of I'm back home. As I said to a friend when he asked me last week how does it feel to be back in Sydney? It’s like I’ve lived here all my life and like I’ve never lived here before and the two cancel each other out so that in the end I just feel nothing.