Plane travel

A Flight ......to where?

It is after lunch on a soporific spring afternoon. The squatter's chair on the front veranda is very comfortable after the more-than-necessary lunch. My eyes glance towards the sound of an aircraft, then focuses ahead on a passenger jet heading into the west. As it disappears into the distant haze I forget about my daily routine and let my imagination accompany that Qantas Airbus. It is taking me to ...... to where?

Escape to foreign climes. But in the shrinking world of the twenty-first century are there foreign climes? Isn't this merely a carryover from Victorian times? What new is there to explore which hasn't been shown (with many repeats) on the Adventure Channel, or National Geographic Channel? The world has given up its foreign secrets. The world of today has been reduced to a 102cm flat plasma screen.

I have been allocated a window seat. Is this better than an aisle seat? Debates have raged over this. Passengers have fought over this. I personally remain quite neutral. To avoid arguments assume that in this instance I have been lucky and have the advantage of a window seat. Look out of the window and what do I see? The plane's wing and massive engines? No, I'm seated further to the back. The top of the clouds? No, when they are not there.

Snow covered fields -where? What does it matter to us in the sky.

Well tell me, what do you see? I see the page of an atlas. Watercourses meandering across the page and fading into the distance. Dots of settlements. land patterns. All so remote, sketched, so detached from reality. I am looking at a different world. Where are the personal struggles, the lovers' tiffs, the daily grind for existence?

Modern aeronautical technology has lifted us above the mundane. From 10000 metres there are no international borders, no power struggles. The trouble spots of the world pass unnoticed. Those magic flying carpet makers in Seattle and Toulouse have created a world of its own, a world apart. This world, high in the sky, is only so very tentatively attached to mother earth with the rarefied atmosphere acting as an umbilical cord. Qantas or Emirates, Air China or Lufthansa, it matters not at all. In this world of the high fliers the experiences are similar.

And then finally - it can seem like an eternity - a change in revs, a decreasing speed and altitude and the plane delivers me to the assigned gate. Buffeted now by other people's carry-on luggage I join the caterpillar line emerging from a long tunnel to claim my luggage from the carousel. I hurry. Yes, hurry. But why hurry? So that I can spend longer waiting for my yellow-spotted bag to appear?

I wait. Round and round, the same red case, the same bulging backpack. Should they be in Vientiane perhaps, and not in Vienna? Why are my cases always the last to appear on the carousel? Does anyone's case ever come out first? Eventually my yellow-spotted case finds me and we can move on to the other formalities of foreign travel.

These completed it's through the countryside and the suburbs to my hotel. Past the dwellings crowned with a defoliated forest (or a jumble of discs) tuned in to the local TV channels. All made in China attempting to standardise the world - a reverse Babel - but being strenuously resisted with the "no", "nein", "nyet", "siyo", "tidak". Wait a minute. Are they succeeding? Relaxed now in my hotel room, showered, shaved, re-humanised, I flick on the TV. CNN speaks to me in American, as it has always done. Does the hotel room TV set (made in China) default to CNN when switched on? Or does it have a personal disagreement with the antenna on the roof which is determined to speak German, or Russian, or Swahili, or Indonesian?

"Have you brought that washing in yet?"

I'm  back on earth with a thud. I'm at home dozing on the front veranda.