Rhonda Bracey: At Random

In an hour or so, I’ll call my friends to come and pick me up from the motel where I stayed overnight. My car is at their place, and, after catching up with them, I’ll hit the road to home. And after the 3+ hour drive home, this month-long journey will be over.

I’ll be very glad to be home. While travelling is great and seeing new and old friends and places is uplifting and energising, being back with my dearly beloved and in my own bed and comfort zone is pretty darned good too! I wouldn’t swap it for the world.

Update: I arrived home safe and sound!

It was like something out of a 1930s movie depicting British colonial times. In front and to the side of me on the flight from Hong Kong was a family of six: grandparents, parents, and two toddlers. The first thing I noticed about this family was the incredibly plummy English accents, and the exclamatory statements about everything. You know, “Thenk ewe!”, “Oh, Betsy has a glass of champagne! Jolly good, Betsy!” etc. So, everyone has an accent and some people talk in exclamation marks – big deal. It was what happened next that made this like something out of an old movie.

As the family arrived and started settling in to their seats, I noticed that there were another two people with them – an aging Chinese woman (Betsy) and a youngish Chinese boy perhaps in his late teens. This was the Betsy of the champagne.

After a short while, Betsy and the young boy handed the toddlers back to the parents, then were shoo-ed back to their Economy class seats by the “oh, so colonial” grandparents. Both carers popped back in to Business class during the flight, presumably to take care of the toddlers. We couldn’t have Mummy and Daddy doing that, now could we?

I had my fill of Cathay Pacific’s movies on the flight to Hong Kong from Vancouver the other night, so I really didn’t want to watch any on the 8 hour flight to Perth. I had a spare seat next to me, so I could get out the laptop without disturbing anyone else, and catch up on some reading. Before leaving Australia, I’d downloaded a heap of “Change This” manifestos, with the intention of reading them when I was at a loose end. Ha! It wasn’t until I was in the final stage of the journey that I had a chance to read them, and I still didn’t read them all.

Two that stood out, and that I recommend you read are:

• 36.04 Happy at Work
• 38.03 The Creation of Conscious Culture through Educational Innovation (which sounds way more pompous than it actually is!)

BTW, I only watched three movies coming over from Vancouver, even though there was time to watch at least seven. The three I saw were:

• Juno – terrific performance by Ellen Page as the intelligent and sassy 16 year old girl; good movie
• The Martian Child – quirky movie about a young boy who thinks he’s from Mars; starred John and Joan Cusack who played a brother and sister
• Bee Movie, the animation starring Jerry Seinfeld. I like good animations, but I hadn’t been taken with the trailers I’d seen of Bee Movie. However, I quite enjoyed it.

My last full day outside Australia. I get picked up from the hotel just after 11am; my Cathay Pacific flight to Perth is due to leave Hong Kong around 2:15pm, arriving in Perth around midnight tonight.

My only concern is the weather. There’s a cyclone off Western Australia at the moment and we’ll have to fly over it or through it to land in Perth. If we’re lucky, it may have become a rain-bearing depression by the time we hit the West Australian coast this evening, but there’s likely to be some turbulence the last few hours at least. Good news: I just looked at the satellite photo and it looks as though it’s petering out already. And there’s no rain predicted for Perth, so this cyclone mustn’t have much ‘grunt’.

BTW, I just looked out my hotel window – the weather in Hong Kong is like yesterday. Very low and heavy cloud, rain, humidity at 100%, temperature around 23C. Yuck.

My flight from Vancouver arrived early, but that meant nothing. The Hong Kong immigration area was pretty full, and I ended up in a line that moved the slowest of them all. I was in line for more than an hour, and after all that waiting and shuffling forward, it took less than one minute to get stamped and allowed in to Hong Kong.

By then, the baggage carousel from our flight was totally empty, except for my bags. At least they were easy to find! Customs was just a walk through too, then I waited close to another hour to get on the bus to the hotel. By the time I got to the hotel and to bed, it’d been 3.5 hours since I’d landed, and some 28+ hours since I’d last slept. I thought LAX was bad – Hong Kong was as bad, but that was for the line I was on only. The other lines all moved fairly quickly, but by the time you realise that, it’s too late to shift.

Oh, and I’d wondered why there were so many boofhead Aussie men, and those with Scottish ad New Zealand passports in the lines – The Hong Kong Sevens Rugby series starts today…