Jafa39 – Trips, Tramps and Travel

This may take some time…but then so does the flight!!

It’s a long walk from the departure lounge in LHR T3 to the gate, eventually the miles of reddish carpet, missing ceiling tiles and general sense of heavy and somewhat overdue maintenance came to an end, I forget the gate number but as I passed the last wall pillar and ZK-NBW hove into view I stopped in my tracks…”Holy shit! Look at the size of that beast!”  My 75 yr old father–in-law, Chas, stood slack jawed and glassy eyed but he often looks like that so it was hard to tell if he was impressed or just replaying some long ago memory from when kids were seen and not heard and Mr Hitler was still in short pants.

I had flown long-haul before on an A330 to Goa but never in a 744, I had been looking forward to it for weeks and now the reality was upon us.

Some may think 12,000 miles is a long way to go for a job interview but the opportunity to cast off the shackles of Dunstable and the daily commute down the M1 to NW London was too good to turn down and made the effort of getting there seem pretty small beer compared to the prize on offer, hell, I’m no gambling man but Chas was financing the trip as long as I took him with me and Mrs Jafa was convinced the omens were good.

We sat in the departure gate and I started to slip into the semi-coma that is Jafa39 flying long-haul…any haul really as I love travelling….. planes, trains, boats, rickshaw….anything, the part I cherish most is just sitting back and watching it all go by, soaking up the otherness of it all and absorbing the memories.

This is why travelling with Mrs Jafa is a joy as she does the same, just soaks it all up and doesn’t freak out about things like dodgy rooms or suspect food. Travel, as someone once said, broadens the mind and loosens the bowels.

Now Mrs Jafa’s dad is the opposite, he seems oblivious of the wonders of the world and spends the whole time gibbering on about utterly random and trivial bollox, let me fast forward a few days to give you an example:

We are in a camper van, travelling through New Zealand on highway 1, just come down off the desert road and into some pretty gob-smacking scenery, Chas has been sitting there quiet for a few minutes and then suddenly:

“70 quid! 70 effing quid! And what for?….. A bleedin’ plastic bag!”

Stunned and a trifle concerned I switch my attention from the glories of Aotearoa and ask him what’s up.

“70 effing quid! That’s what those scheming bastards at Milton Keynes council charge a month for me rates, 70 effing quid!” he slapped the dashboard of the Maui campervan with all the bile and hatred he could muster (and that is quite a considerable amount for an old crusty git).

“And?” I almost dreaded the answer.

“And they effing well expect me to sort my rubbish out into re-effing-cycling and non-re-effing-cycling..I ain’t effing doing it! Eff ‘em, bastards! It’s rubbish to me…nuffin but effing rubbish..I don’t give that (snaps fingers with a decisive and triumphant gesture) about re-effing-cycling…70 quid! For an effing plastic bag…eff the lot of them!”

So, you see, I was looking forward the spending 24 hours in 52E with him in 52D like captured soldiers look forward to interrogation.

Not only does he gibber on but he is a space invader too, he gets as close as he can and tries to keep eye contact the whole time, be it 10 seconds or 10 hours….”great, this is going to be a blast!” I thought to myself.

Outside the window NBW sat gleaming in the February sun, the colour-scheme seemed to me to be indicative of what NZ is all about, clean, simple and deeply influenced by the icons of the Pacific Ocean and the Maori culture, I’m sooo glad I didn’t take those cheapo tickets on Korean, nothing against Korean but their a/c reflect a different culture and for me, it is as important to travel as it is to arrive, flying NZ meant I felt I was there before I left UK soil.

The boarding process began, 1^st class, Biz class and once it came the time for the paupers to shuffle on board I was pleased to note that families with babies were allowed on first, with the zimmer-frame brigade and the poor lad with his foot in a plaster-cast.

Chas was getting restless but seats also come to those who wait.

I was bowled-over by the sweet and smiling FA at the door, I may be married but I still think the Kiwi accent is the sexiest on the planet…although an angry South African woman can still make the hairs on my neck stand up with joy and anticipation.

Hmmmm, I digress but that is the Jafa way I’m afraid. I wandered into NBW and let out a gasp, the bloody thing was even bigger inside than out! So many seats!!!

We bagged our brace of 52’s, had I been as much of a flying whore then as I am now I would have arranged a window seat and an aisle at the back (then I could have suffocated Chas with an Air NZ cushion and no-one would have been any the wiser.).

I made my acquaintance with the pretty Irish girl next to me in 52G, she was going to a meeting or two in the states and claimed she was “Over commuting to LAX, it was fun for a while but it gets to you eventually”.

I fiddled about with the headphones and the in-flight mag and was totally impressed with Zane Lowe’s selection on channel 7, or was it 9, who cares, the sounds looked to be right up my street.

I eventually persuaded (with the help of another lovely FA) Chas to take off his beige car-coat and get himself sorted rather than just perch there expectantly.

FA’s scurried about getting stuff stowed and everybody to sit down and shut up for long enough to get airborne, forget about kids making long-haul wearisome, I bet any time-served FA will claim that old people are far worse, certainly between boarding and push-back at any rate.

I plugged Chas into some classical music and tweaked up the volume on Zane Lowe, push-back began and we started that odd lumpy journey to the runway that seems to be a feature of every flight.

As we sat there getting all spooled up my fave track ever came on the headphones…”Red Hot Chili Peppers, Zephyr Song”..

“Gosh!” I thought to myself, “Here am I about to fly to LAX, which is where the Chili’s live and I am listening to Zephyr Song!”

The omens really were good!

At that point the pilot let the brakes off and with a really impressive shove in the back, followed by some extreme acceleration; we hurtled down the runway and…I kid you not….at the very moment the wheels lifted off the deck I heard the immortal line….”rev it up to levitate her, super friendly aviator” in the ‘phones…..bugger! Omens indeed!!

The rate of climb seemed pretty steep to me, I caught glimpses out of the windows to my left and revelled in the feeling that something huge was blasting skywards at a rate of knots, the 744 seemed to have settled into the climb and we seemed to be at this nose-up angle for ages, probably about 20 minutes in reality.

As we levelled of for the cruise we seemed to be a long way up, 11,000 metres as I recall.

“Maybe Tomorrow” a track by an Auckland band, Goldenhorse, forced it’s way through the earphones, as Zane explained who the band were I felt some connection with Auckland developing, a musical thread and an image of a band rehearsing in a back-room. I was to follow that thread for the next 24 hours as the play list repeated, each time the Chili Peppers or Goldenhorse came round I felt a sense of satisfaction, of contentment and oddly enough, nostalgia for events that were yet to take place.

Mrs Jafa claims that when we were born our hearts were already in Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud, I usually dismissed it as the hippy ravings one would expect from a hypnotherapist but now, eating up the miles between me and my hoped-for spiritual home, after 2 years of dreaming, I could quite see where she was coming from.

Food!!!! I have a bit of a pash for airline food, its probably universally yuck but I have lived on mountains and eaten “expedition rations” for many years, if you can survive “Raven” dehydrated foods, you can enjoy airline tucker, even so, NZ serve up some excellent nosh, you could even recognise it as what it was supposed to consist of and the poached pear in cream…yuuummmm!!!!!

I love the light at altitude and I love that slightly spaced out feeling you get when flying, it was all too much, far too exciting for words and despite being old enough to have more dignity (I was 42 at the time) I wandered off for a tiki-tour of the cabin, clockwise like any good mountaineer should do and ended up at the back, near the lavs, doing my anti-DVT exercises and chatting to the first real live Maori I ever met, I lapped up her words and stored them away for the forthcoming job interview, an understanding of Tikanga Maori (customs) and Te Reo (language) are highly necessary when interviewing for govt depts in NZ.

Eventually I headed off to check if Chas was being a nuisance to anyone but he was watching a film about people who talk about their feelings all the time and it was heading for a very predictable end. I read the in flight mag, jotted some notes about Maori protocol into my “NZ pack”, drank heaps of water and fell asleep, at some point before I drifted off I contemplated whether it was possible to hold the fuselage together with my feet should a crack appear…don’t ask why, I am prone to random thoughts in that precious space between awake and asleep that people spend their lives trying to attain.

As I write this I can hear NZ 2 passing over my house on its long journey to LAX, hope everybody on board is enjoying themselves!

From deep in the depths of slumber I could hear Chas:

“Andy, are you asleep?” He kept this up until I was awake, I resisted the urge to rip his lungs out and wear them for a hat.

“I was”

“Oh, sorry, why didn’t you say”

“???????????????????????????????????????????!”

He then proceeded to tell me the entire plot of the film he had just seen (which was really depressing) and how it had related to his life, I can’t be horrid about this as you don’t lose a child to drugs and get over it, not even after 20 years, he may drive me nuts but I am not without compassion.

It is my firm belief that during a long flight they (The Iliterati? The Freemasons? G. W. Bush? who is this “they” that sits behind all decisions that are out of the hands of mere mortals?) turn the oxygen down so everybody goes to sleep, there is an odd atmosphere around the middle of a long haul sector, as if you are living life in one of those faded, grainy home movies (where everybody smiles, drives gorgeous American soft tops and is proud of their kids) from the 60’s and 70’s, it isn’t often one gets the feeling of actually living in the good times, usually this is a fleeting event, a few seconds of good cheer, the first beer of the summer with achingly pretty girls and guys who aren’t complete dorks.

Fly long haul, you get 5 or 6 hours of such illusion!

Chas had me pinned down for quite some time but I managed to stem the flow of painful reminiscence by insisting he walk about the cabin to keep the blood flowing as I wasn’t really sure if I could enter NZ with a dead rellie in tow…might attract the flies you know!

We ended up at the back again and I watched in total wonder as what I assumed to be either the Northern Territories, or Canada (there is a difference?) slip by the exit door window, I leant on the liferaft pack and pretended not to be sitting in the jump seat, watching the vast expanse of wilderness go by, hours and hours of it and not a man-made thing to be seen, ice, snow and tundra as far as the wandering soul could wish for.

Chas had hooked up with some senior citizens from Milton Keynes, of all the bizarre coincidences, and was having a good old yarn, funny how oldies never bore each other, must be the loss of memory, everything seems new! But he was happy and had pulled out of the depressed state he had slumped into watching Robert de Niro come to terms with his son’s addiction.

Back in row 52 I sat in a trance watching the video but listening to Zane Lowe’s selection, I just can’t focus on films when flying, it seems sort of disjointed as if there are things you do in the home that don’t sit in context whilst travelling, so I lay there lolling like a drooling idiot until “they” turned the wick up on the oxygen bottle.

The air seemed to refresh itself, people started to come alive again, the atmosphere inside seemed less thick and food was on its way, mmmmm, the last couple of hours of a long haul sector, one of my favourite times of any flight.

There was a lot more emptiness to be seen as we headed for LAX, only it was of the arid and dry variety, I recall seeing a railway line that ran arrow-straight for miles across the desert and ended at some random “facility” where people did whatever they did, in complete isolation.

But civilisation began to appear with greater frequency and the 744 started losing height, I was transfixed by the screen as it showed our outside temp drop from -60C down through the numbers, I totally got off on the feeling that the great bird was coming down from the stratosphere to mix once more with the comings and goings of mankind, the way it adopts that shallow dive and the sounds start to change, your ears pop and there is a general vibe of bated-breath and expectancy, as if no-one wants to disturb NBW in her endeavours to bring us all safely back to earth.

And then, by craning my neck to the left, there it was! LA!!! Oh my god! The Red Hot Chili Peppers are down there somewhere, rehearsing, or taking drugs or whatever, O-M-G, I’m in the USA and this is LA, oh look! Those funky palm trees, eeek! That must be Compton, where everybody wears their hat backwards and says “Yo, my Nigga, s ’up G?..S ‘appenin’?” and just to the right a bit someone might be going “Insane in da membrane”……..

Lucky all this was going on in my head or things might have gone badly for me.

The landing was as greasy as a greaser gets, utterly smooth and graceful and I nearly fell out of my seat at the sight of so many a/c and so many liveries, yikes! Hawaiian Planes, Jamaican Planes, a Virgin (pretty rare where I come from!!) and heaps more besides.

We sat at the gate for ages, the Captain apologised but he was waiting for someone to phone him say it was OK to disembark but the wait strung out interminably, eventually, things happened in the right order and we entered the living hell that at that time was “Post 9/11 security protocols”.

We had all filled in the little green cards, they cracked me up, questions such as “Do you intend to engage in terrorist activity whilst in the USA?”

You can imagine the conversation.

“Hey Osama, better put yes to that one, let no one call us liars! Insahallah!”

“Indeed effendi, only someone who’s mother bred with goats would stoop so low as to lie!”

We marched into immigration to be “processed”, the logic of the dept that decided it was safer to have pax going through immigration and out into the street, where they could get up to all sorts of mischief than to just keep them herded into transit where you can keep an eye on them, escapes me, talk about doing something just to be seen to do something.

This process involved endless queues, a brief few minutes on the pavement where I nearly freaked at coming face to face with a real US cop in a real US cop car, holy moroly, it really is like that! There is a strange building resembling a pink stucco octopus opposite the terminal building and there seemed to be helicopters everywhere.

The awful grey, brown and tatty beigeness of LAX was a bit of a let down, not what I expected at all, we struggled through endless queues and escalators that can only take 3 people, to end up in Starbucks, we grabbed a coffee and I was pleased to note that in the US they actually fill your cup at Starbucks, not like the stingy bastards in the UK ones where you get a splash of tepid coffee, three quids worth of foam and a bad attitude from behind the counter.

Say what you like about the USA but never diss the coffee shops!

Chas and I struck up a conversation with a couple from our flight, she was peroxide blonde and wearing far too many clothes, he looked ill, I mean desperately and terminally ill, he was sweating like a pig, red of eye and shaking, I made my excuses and moved away, wondering if I could hold my breath for 12 hours as I really didn’t want to look like him in a few days time! (I was racking my brains trying to remember the symptoms of Ebola)

After a quick trip to the lav we rambled over to the gate with nano-seconds to spare, they were frantically calling and you could see pax belting along the concourse, we ditched the coffees and legged it.

The very air in LAX seemed gritty and dark, twilight didn’t help but I was feeling utterly seedy by the time we re-boarded, grateful for the sanctuary of NBW after 2 hours 18 minutes of queuing.

We pushed back and it seems that LAX ground staff were far more willing to let us leave the gate than to enter it, we lifted of into the skies without a hitch and started that rumbling angled ascent into the heavens, it was dark and by my calculations it would remain dark until we got to AKL.

“There’s a story I know, we all leave and let go, there is nothing to hold us……….”

Ahh, Goldenhorse, how comforting to be back in your embrace, riding the lyrical wave to Aotearoa and the start of a whole new adventure.

Food!!!! Yes! Sorted! Can’t remember what it was but a rather good South island Cabernet Sauvignon washed it down nicely and I sank back, Chas looked done for, I showed him how to select the comedy channel on the ‘phones and slipped into blessed oblivion for the next 2 and a bit hours.

I awoke to find Chas looking neglected so I spent a few minutes chatting and headed out into the aisle, not many people looked awake, I did a tour of the cabin in the half-light and found “Mr Ebola” and his missus, they were spark out and were sleeping slumped forward, arms by their sides, heads perilously close to the brace position.

I totally wish I could sleep like that, I minced about for ages, almost tripping down the throats of several pax as they lolled about, heads back, glasses akimbo and dead to the world.

The very nice Asian-Kiwi FA let me sit on the rear door jump seat and I gazed through the night out onto the big wide expanse of wetness that is the Pacific Ocean, I wondered how big Captain Cook’s ship would look from 11,000m and decided all them early explorers were double-hard bastards and then some…and what about Kupe? the Maori explorer who did it in a Waka, which is really just an enormous double hulled canoe, how hard was he?

We take things like flight for granted sometimes but I was amazed at the 744, the fact that it just sat there going “whoosh” for hour after hour, such a technological marvel yet still possessing an animal grace and persona, too much to take in really.

I did my DVT exercises and spent 15 minutes in the lav to relieve the pressure from my butt and shuffled back to my seat, this routine was followed several times throughout the next hours, I watched Frazier and “Star Trek: Nemesis” a truly excellent film, thoroughly enjoyed it.

During one of my stints at the back, loitering near the toilets I met a rather agitated young man, he asked me the time, I asked which country, he said “England will do” and after I told him he said, “I dunno if I did the right thing, what do you reckon?”

He told me how he and his mate were professional DJ’s and were on their way to NZ to gig with “Salmonella Dub” a kind of Dance/Reggae/Drum ‘n Bass outfit of some note in Aotearoa.

All was going well until LAX, immigration looked in his mates passport and showed him a page.

“What’s this sir?”

“An American work permit”

“It’s 4 years old and you didn’t use it”

“No, there were family problems, I couldn’t come”

“I’m sorry sir, this is a violation of code xxxxxxxxx, you must leave the country immediately”

“The plane I came in on leaves in 2 hours”

“No sir, you must return to your port of origin”

“What!”

“And your baggage” he had all the vinyl and CD’s in his checked baggage.

“And that was it” my new acquaintance, shrugged his shoulders and asked what I would have done.

“Is your mate still going to make it to NZ?”

“Yeah, but it will be a hell of a journey, should I have gone with him?”

“No mate, you did the right thing, you never know how US immigration would have reacted, fact is, you’ll be there on time and you can wing it until your mate gets there, relax, you had no choice.”

We chatted some more and he seemed less agitated when we parted company.

I sat and listened to Chas for about a week and after an eternity I felt that subtle change in the air, the map screen showed we were not too far from NZ and I smelt the unmistakable whiff of airline food heating.

The screens showed a tourist info film about New Zealand and some Lord of the Rings stuff, we began our descent and I was too excited for words.

I watched the numbers on the screen and felt NBW easing herself back into the atmosphere, the whole cabin was filled with that expectant hush we felt approaching LAX, subdued yet pregnant with suppressed energy.

The Captain muttered something about a western approach, I looked to the side and caught a glimpse of some neon lights, only a few mind you, we threw a right and I could feel NBW heaving herself into position, things went “clunk”, flaps opened and the air went whooshing over them a few re-alignments a quick burst of throttle….”bump” “roar!!!!” that’s it, we were down, a blue neon sign said “Auckland” I was stunned…”we are here!” O-M-G! this is New Zealand!!!!!

The captain signed off with “If you’ve come from the UK, you are now officially upside down”.

Kiwi’s eh? Gotta love ‘em!

The scramble for the doors was very orderly, I suspect we were all feeling pretty much spaced-out, we dutifully followed the signs and were very impressed with AKL, it was colourful, clean and there was piped bird song! Chas and I joined the queue downstairs and I started texting my rellies in the UK, all of whom were glad to hear we had made it.

In comparison with LAX, AKL is a dream world, everyone was courteous, it was so clean!!! And even baggage claim was a nice experience; made all the more interesting by a lad whose rucsac was of great interest to the drug dogs…he was led away looking very unhappy.

I passed a little kiosk and a lady called out, “Welcome to New Zealand, have a coffee on us”.

“You my dear are a lifesaver”.

We grabbed our bags, hired a SIM card and headed out through gate 8 to catch the free bus to the camper van depot.

It was getting light; I took a deep breath of the warm and wonderfully scented air, stretched, yawned and turned to Chas.

“Well, better get this show on the road!”

“Too right Mon Capitan!”

It was the start of an awfully big adventure……