The Flight

The flight was fairly nice, but pretty brutal at the same time. There's nothing quite like 26+ hours of flight time :). Here's the ol' route map, and I've updated the flight timeline with some more info.

T H E   F L I G H T Note: all of the images link to hi-res versions when you click on them.
EST	Local Time	Event
5:40 p.m. Monday	5:40 p.m. Monday	Left Toronto Monday, November 1st, 1999 from Pearson International Airport. Scheduled time was 4:40, but there was a 1 hour delay. Airline was Air Canada. Toronto looks beautiful from the air at night. Sigh. The last time I'll see it, or any of my friends, for quite a while! My stomach was totally flipping around. The thought constantly on my mind was "What the hell am I doing!?!"
7:15 p.m.	7:15 p.m.	Arrived in Newark, New Jersey for a 3-hour stopover. This is good because of the delay in Toronto. It would truly have sucked to miss every subsequent flight in this epic adventure because the first flight was late. The airport is quite nice, with a very intelligent layout. I believe this is the kind of terminal style Toronto is aiming for. I had to arrive in Terminal A and depart in Terminal B. The whole thing was effortless, using the monorail that takes people between terminals.
9:15 p.m.	9:15 p.m.	Left Newark on a Singapore Airlines 747 bound for Amsterdam. Sorry, no pictures of the plane. It was totally dark outside. The inside of the plane is pretty cool. Every single seat has a little LCD screen in the back, and there's 22 different channels to watch. About half of the channels are like MeTV channels with a bunch of shows on a certain topic (comedy, sports, etc.), the other half are movie channels (sweet!) and the last channel is by far the coolest. There's a route map (the inspiration for mine) with a little icon of a plane that slowly moves along the path in real time. As the plane taxies around the airport the little plane spins around. There's three levels of zoom to show you exactly where you are, and another 2 screens of detailed information like altitude, ground speed, distance traveled, distance remaining, elapsed time, time remaining, and ETA. It was more interesting to someone like me than several of the movies that were playing!    I was hoping to sit next to someone interesting on the plane because I would be sitting next to them for about 20 hours. As it turned out, it was this older Indonesian woman who spoke negligible english (though this didn't stop her form barking orders at the flight crew) and pushed her way in front of people when it was time to get off the plane. Total let down. At one point she tried to put her emptied tray of food on top of my tray in front of me. What the hell?! Speaking of food, it's surprisingly good. This is hardly the "airplane" style food everyone jokes about. I think there was a total of 5 meals from Newark to Singapore, and all of them were great. Vegetarian meals were available to those who wanted them. Drink selection was anything from wine to beer to soft drinks to juice. One of the meals was a steak dinner. Not exactly "The Keg" quality, but still quite tasty. Most of the meals had something designed by a famous chef from Chicago or London. I spent most of the night writing letters to friends. With a pen and paper. I'm totally not used to it. My hand was killing me after 30 minutes! It was the longest continuous time I'd held a pen since high school. I fell asleep briefly and woke up around sunrise -- beautiful! There was some frost on the inside edge of the window. It was something like -40 degrees Celsius outside.    Checking the cool map thing in the chair, I noticed we were minutes away from the coast of Ireland. I took a photo of it when it peeked through the clouds.
2:30 a.m. Tuesday	7:30 a.m. Tuesday	On the descent to Amsterdam's airport I got a really neat view of the incredibly geometric drainage canals that cover Holland. It's so wild! What a huge amount of work. Every bit of available land was farmland.    We hit Amsterdam for a 45 minute stopover. I didn't leave the terminal for fear of a hassle getting back in -- a risk I wasn't willing to take. This was my first time being in Europe, and first time in the country where my mother was born. It's unfortunate that I wasn't able to actually touch Dutch soil, but I'll just have to come back here after I come home! I wanted to get some Dutch money at least so I withdrew some from a bank machine and bought a Coke at a McDonalds. Either all Coke in Holland is really watery, or it was just that particular McDonalds. This seemingly minor disappointment got me worried about how Coke would taste in other countries. Would I have to go a year without a good can of Coke? Horrors! I nearly passed out at the thought.
4:30 a.m.	9:30 a.m.	It must have been very humid at high altitude on the way from Amsterdam to Singapore because there were contrails forming off the wings of the 747. I thought it was cool so I took a picture, and now I'm sharing it with all of you. Isn't that sweet. :)    It was very cloudy so I couldn't see anything on the ground. I was hoping things would clear up over the Himalayas, but it was night before we hit them. On the way there I fell asleep for about 2 hours and when I woke up, it was night time. That was the shortest day I've ever experienced. Time flies when you're flying into the sun. All the passengers on the plane were obviously going to hit SIngapore because we were flying non-stop now, and the flight crew handed out the customs applications so we could fill them out ahead of time. The only use of red ink on the form was to point out in large, capital letters that the penalty for drug trafficking in Singapore was DEATH. I love dictatorships! One other thing: note on the map above the kind of weird route we took to Singapore. We headed straight east for quite a while and then banked south instead of just going straight there. I'm sure the reason was to avoid Iranian airspace. These pilots...they think ahead!
5:50 p.m.	6:50 a.m. Wednesday	Arrived in Singapore for a 12 hour stopover. Had a (desperately needed) shower after a bit of a hassle. I wanted to be clean to tour the cleanest city on earth. Note to other travelers: showers are generally available in the terminal before you hit customs, but not after. If you need a shower, you'll have to have one before even picking up your bags. I found out the hard way and had to go through customs twice, which is not normally allowed. It's a good thing I look so innocent and unlike a Columbian drug lord. Singapore is very cool. I did a bunch of stuff in Singapore, and it'll all be listed in the Singapore section of this site as soon as I actually write it up.
5:00 a.m. Wednesday	6:00 p.m.	Left Singapore on a Singapore Airlines plane bound for Perth. Finally free of the stinky woman I spent 2 days with. Phew!
10:05 a.m.	11:05 p.m.	Arrived in Perth, Australia on November 3rd. Picked a hotel, got a taxi, booked in, and died.

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