hongkong airport

Rachael and I are awake early as Tum goes to work. I have to fit everything back into my suitcase and she has to decide what she’ll need in Darwin. thongs. sarong. sunglasses and two bottles of jagermeister. Bitch. I have to ring my dad who is still wondering whether I made it, got a job, left or got kidnapped by triads…

we catch the ferry to hong kong, the idea after checking our luggage in town we catch a bus to Stanley. cause we love it. and we have presents to buy and beers to drink and letters to write by the waterside in the lovely sunshine. when we catch the bus back it suddenly occurs to us that it’s peak hour Friday afternoon traffic.
we are gonna be late. but there’s nothing you can do stuck on a bus that’s not moving in a big crazy city. we have to catch the airport express train from central and when we finally get there one has just left and the next one won’t leave for ten minutes. calculated to roughly arrive ten minutes after final boarding and five minutes before the plane is due to fly. sick to our stomachs, Rachael is swearing. I am not. just kind of praying for a delay and knowing that we have to still try. it might be held up. they might wait for us, we have checked in. we coerce a poor strange man into letting us use his phone to call quantas, but the lady hangs up on us. BITCH. so we wait the twenty minute train ride knowing we’ve probably missed our plane and there’s only 3 flights a week and I don’t want to get there and get strait back on the train back to town to find a hotel and god I’m glad Rachael is with me. and when the train stops and we run. through to departures into a customs queue that we push into only to be held up by the officer asking why my passport has been wet, long story long time ago, why we haven’t filled out immigration slips.. we have to go. he lets us through and we run run run trying to read the screens to find our gate number… thank fuck it’s only 19 and not 80. running through the biggest shiniest airport I’ve ever seen. we run and we run, about to give up or die when a man with a big walky talky runs up beside us. Australian airlines. uhuh you’re the last two. they found us! they know we are here! we are not a security threat. we are just late. we run with him. my hands are shaking, and feel as tho I’ll throw up first thing when I get on the plane.
but we still have 800 metres to run til the boarding gate and my legs are absolute jelly, and have been since the nasty realization on the train. the flight attendants at the gate assess us with a suitable degree of scorn and we proceed down to the plane with them in tow. walking slowly mind. are, hopper and stewart. I’ve never felt such relief to be on a plane, and I’m always relieved to be on a plane.

once our temperatures return to normal and we finish yelling for joy, we take off and it’s great. I love being on a plane with someone else. I get to share my delight at all things plane. like packaged weird food, and bad magazine facts and bad movies and hang on...they’re playing a Johnny Depp movie. we are so happy. swooning whilst drinking our VB & eating more rice.