Long haul hell or jet set delight?

Where am I? What day it it? Everyone reaches the future at the same speed of 60 minutes per hour. Yet flying long haul into the east creates a time warp for the mind, a twilight zone of existence. I left on a Thursday, travelled for 24 hours and arrived on a Saturday. I have only seen one dawn, slept three times for 2 hours and seem to have avoided jet lag. It is now Sunday, the sun is up and so am I. I feel good.

Between flights, waiting in Kuala Lumpur, I met a guy called Rino on his way from running Edinburgh festival to orgainse a similar event in his home town, Adelaide. He had been in the queue in front of me at Heathrow. Those fleeting moments were enough to create a familiarity here in the Malaysian melee of travellers. If people looked at us funny, it must have been his thrice pearced nose and twice pearced ears which set him apart from the crowd. Of course it may have been more to do with my pin striped jacket, pink shirt and cream cowboy hat combo- or a mixture of the two. We struck up a bit of a rapport and talked enthusiastically about living life to the full and the reality of knowing God.

The second leg of the journey went quickly. Dawn rose out of the clouds over Brisbane, Eastern Australia, as the Boeing 777 streaked across Pacific skies at 650 mph heading towards New Zealand and, as it turned out, the heaviest Tasman Sea rain storm for weeks.