Fiji

 Fiji

 

February 12, 1999

So what has changed?  Well, our son (Brian) is currently in London, his fiancee (Frances) is in Singapore and Pat and I are in Bangkok -- all at the same time.  The world grows smaller every day.  This story will be sent by email back to the USA, Malaysia, Australia, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and assorted other places in the world.  But as much as things change, others remain remarkably constant. For example, the 747 that we caught out of Los Angeles International Airport may have been the same one that Pat and I flew on – with three pre-teen kids – to Australia in the early 1970's.  The kids enjoyed the flight.  They watched lots of movies, played all over the huge airplane, watched the passing scenery out the windows and were too excited to sleep.   But, some sleep came anyway.

Ellen sleeping

 

We stopped for a couple of days in Fiji (it was in the milage to Australia, so cost nothing extra) and stayed in a nice hotel that provided a large lawn banquet.  We all agreed that it would be fun to sample from the wide variety of tropical foods that were spread out on a long table.  The kids filled up their plates with roast pig, barbeque, fish, tropical fruits, and various other delicacies.  Then all three promptly went to sleep on the hotel lawn -- barely tasting the mounds of wonderful food.  As hard as we tried, we could not wake them or entice them to eat.  The jet lag and missed sleep had finally taken over.  Pat and I tried to eat our share and theirs too, but we were also exhausted.  So we gave up and carried the unconscious kids to the room where we made a serious effort to recover from our jetlag.  

Fiji Countryside

 

 

 

Fiji Marketplace

 On our current flight, Pat and I reminisced about “the good old days.”  Everything had gone so smoothly in our preparation for this trip to Bangkok.  We had stored the motorhome in a mini-warehouse in Upland, CA and our son, Jimmy drove us to the airport -- with time to spare. (We asked Jimmy to drop by the motorhome and check it out.  Sure enough, we had left a window wide open.)  Otherwise, we had planned our trip very well, because it was mostly devoid of the nervous tension that is often associated with air travel.  The plane was only about 1/4 filled with passengers and United international flights are now all smoke-free.  There was plenty of space to lie down for naps.  
  
But flights across the Pacific have not always been so much fun.  I remember one trip in particular that is firmly etched in my memory.  My friend and co-worker, Albert Hartstack, and I flew to Beijing on China Airlines to show off our computerized, cotton-insect model to the Chinese.  Every seat on the plane was taken and everybody except infants seemed to light up a cigarette as soon as the plane left the ground.  The seats were crammed together, so there was very little space for each passenger.  Babies screeched, everyone had to scream to be heard, and we tried to survive on air that consisted mostly of cigarette smoke.  Something close to claustrophobia struck me on that flight.  If I am ever punished for my misdeeds on this earth – my personal Hell may be in the form of a flight such as that one. 

But back to the present.  Our flight was to take us over the northern Pacific Ocean.  We broke out of the clouds along the coast of Canada.   

Coast of Canada

 

We kept our noses stuck to the window to see the inland passage – a beautiful sight. As we entered Alaska, there was not a cloud to be seen.  Soon Pat said, “I see a city coming up.”

I looked and quickly guessed that it must be Anchorage because the city was so big.  The air was clear and everything below was covered with snow except for the airport runways and highways.  To the north, we could see the Matanuska Valley and a little further away rose Mt. Denali (McKinley).  We were flying at 39,000 feet, but it seemed that the mountaintop was about level with the right wing tip.  It was a much better view of Denali than we ever got from the ground a few years before when Pat and I toured Alaska.  The view of the ground remained clear as we passed over the Alaska Range and the rest of western Alaska.  Several small Eskimo villages could be detected down in the snow.  Outlines in the snow of rivers and streams could be detected because of their serpentine shapes.  Passing over the Bering Strait, we could see cracks in the ice that must run for miles over the solid, white ice.  Except for these cracks, it would appear possible to walk across the ice from Alaska to Russia.  Polar bears were there on the ice, but unfortunately, they were invisible to our eyes.  At some point, we passed over the international date line and it was suddenly February 8th instead of February 7th.

The sun was very low on the horizon and it seemed that the sun might set.  The snow below took on an orange tint in the evening sunlight.  The shadows of hills and mountains provided some depth perception so we could make uneducated guesses about their heights. As we passed into Russia, we began to fly toward the sun, which now appeared to be rising.  For a couple of hours or so we passed over coastal areas, mountains, and valleys that were too far north for trees to grow.  I could see no evidence of any human habitation in this cold, forbidding area.  Now everything on the ground was white with snow – not even bare rocks showed.  At one point I saw something like clouds moving on the surface of the ground and decided that they must be a blizzard.  It was a beautiful, but hostile-looking land.  And, somewhere down there were the remnants of Stalin's Gulag prison camps and the bones of the millions that were tortured, starved and worked to death.  Not a happy thought.

Between movies, the screen showed the path the plane was taking so I could track our positions on my own map.  I wondered if, during the Cold War, Russian planes might have shot us down in this area.  The temperature outside my window was -77 F.  We continued along the Sea of Okhotsk, into China, over Beijing, and then it became too dark to see the ground.  As we approached Hong Kong, we could see the lights of the Chinese cities far below.  We landed in the new Chek Lap Kok airport and changed planes in less than 45 minutes, then flew on to Bangkok.

I have always heard that it is not “cool” to watch the scenery passing by from the window of an airplane.  It is used as evidence that the watcher is an amateur traveler.  Also, it is bad manners to let in outside light when other passengers are trying to sleep or watch the movies.  But I cannot help myself.  There was no movie that could be shown that day that equaled the sights I was seeing outside my window.  Yes, I chose a window that let light into an area where there were few passengers and I tried to close the shade as often as possible.  But I did not watch my fellow passengers intently for evidence of their displeasure with my behavior.  I received no reprimand from any stewardess.  Consequently, my bad behavior was amply rewarded by the incredible sights of this natural, frozen landscape.

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