It is blowing a gale outside when I wake up. The scorching blue skies of yesterday have been replaced by featureless grey cloud and much lower temperatures. The change has come, both for Sydney and for us.
I don’t know if I had a good sleep or not, except that I fell asleep early with a headache and it hasn’t left. Stress.
I swallow some paracetamol with the orange juice welcome drink, have a shave, then try to unsuccessfully sleep a little longer while the other two prepare. Returning to the bathroom, I dry retch. This again.
We are the only passengers on the shuttle bus to the international airport terminal. It’s a long walking distance away, doable in this weather, not yesterday’s, not with luggage.
After checking in online, all that remains is to drop off our luggage. Three hours in advance, there’s no queue.
Immigration and security is similarly fast, a nice change from last trip. After a short and pointless browse of duty-free, we head to the temporary Qantas Business and Club lounge near Gate 24.
Although it doesn’t look quite so posh as the currently under renovation lounge, there are plenty of comfy seats and much better aircraft views. I can’t stomach the hot breakfast of bacon, sausages and egg and just get fruit, muffins and juice. I use the bathroom, try to sleep.
When we leave, the lounge display says our flight is at gate 50, across the glass corridor in front of the food court. That’s the same as our last flight to Osaka, so it makes sense.
We wait there some time, charging phones, but there’s no indication of boarding. Then we notice the app is saying gate 9 and final call!
Run!
All the way across to the other side of the terminal.
We aren’t the last to board the Jetstar Boeing 787-8, but it’s close. I shove my big backpack up the top, the other bags go under our seats.
I’m paid a little extra for seat 24A, the window seat behind the exit row forward of the wing, my new favourite spot. Fortunately I have short legs, so legroom isn’t an issue, and I’m with family, so neither is width.
I’ve paid for the seatback entertainment, which is scheduled to disappear this year when the 787s are refurbished. Perusing it, I can see some movies I might watch, but the soundtrack options have shrunk to Sea Beast and Spider-Man No Way Home. No John Williams!
No matter, I have my own music.
Breathing deeply, I try to just live in the moment. We push back. It is only a short taxi from the gate to the northern end of the runway. Buses zip past. We had to board from a bus gate last flight to Singapore.
We begin our take-off run towards the south, into the wind. But as we rise up into the air I notice the lack of white crests on the waves.
Across the Kurnell Peninsula, where we were watching planes a week ago. Then up into the amorphous cloud, not dense enough for more than the lightest of shakes.
Turn through the white. I have lost track of which way we are facing, except that it is displayed on the flight map on my screen.
Northwest.
A clear gap, in the cloud, then through the next layer. The seatbelt light is switched off.
That was a very smooth take-off and initial ascent. Good.
The cloud thins after we cross the Blue Mountains and grey-brown farmland appears below. Small towns with airports, rivers and scrub, the thin lines of roads and fences splitting the landscape.
Our path is to the northwest through central New South Wales and up past Emerald and Longreach in Queensland.
The clouds below come and go. The colour of the land changes. Thin stripes of wheat are pale yellow, patches of iron read. Geometrically shaped fields, rectangles, ovals. Rivers dry and wet meandering through the landscape.
The meal cart passes through. With our $15 credit I get cheese and crackers, a slice of lemon tea cake and a juice. My stomach doesn’t feel like it could cope with more. The others select chicken wraps.
The skies turn grey as we pass up to the west of Mackay and the Whitsundays. A category 2 cyclone crossed the coast there this morning. Perhaps that explains the niggling bumps, but I am very thankful it isn’t anything more.
North of Cairns we fly through high cloud. I fall asleep for a short while.
Our route is right up through the centre of Cape York. Somewhere north of Cooktown the turbulence becomes bad enough for the seatbelt lights to be switched on.
Torres Strait is hidden by cloud and the big wall of high cloud lurks before Papua New Guinea. We turn northwest to avoid a storm, then cross the coast. A broad river can be seen briefly before it is swallowed up by the cloud.
A mountain range runs latitudinally through New Guinea. The central valley is clear of cloud and a large river can be seen below, twisting through the land, fed by dramatic mountain streams.
Then the high cloud returns, the northern coast just glimpsed through a gap.
There is brief clarity around the equator. The dark blue ocean, scattered tropical cloud reaching up and down. Then the high cloud and the storms return. We dodge and weave.
After 5 hours of flight I’ve had enough of this game. I just want to be on stable ground, lie in a bed.
There are more high clouds south of Guam, which we avoid this time, the skies calm early and we cruise smoothly above a bronze seascape of scattered clouds.
I need to distract myself with some mindless entertainment. We watched The Naked Gun 22 1/2 the other night, so I try the recent Liam Neeson sequel The Naked Gun.
Not a patch on the original.
With 2 hours 20 minutes to go it is gorgeous outside. But that means not so long until the scary descent and the gales of Japan.
And now the shakes have started again. Jetstream?
The Sun sets quickly, disappearing rapidly below the horizon, leaving an orange and gold streak between shades of grey. The air is rarely settled and I am starting to get anxious about the descent.
At an hour and a half to go meals are served. Alex doesn’t want his bacon and egg roll, B doesn’t want a chicken wrap again, so I swap for my quiche and spinach and feta roll. Neither she nor I can finish.
The descent begins at 40 minutes. Slowly at first, then more rapidly. I am so anxious!
Needlessly.
The descent is smooth, almost unnoticeable unless you are looking like me.
Around Shikoku, the lights of towns and cities visible behind a few black clouds.
But we don’t pass through those clouds.
Looping around, it isn’t until we are but a few thousand feet above the ground that the winds finally hit. We are travelling so slowly that even they do not cause discomfort.
Our landing in crosswinds is hard, with a bounce, but we are down and my anxiety has gone.
I am in Japan again!
Well, sort of. First the bureaucratic process of entry. I prepared my entry QR codes in advance, there are many opportunities to use them, but ultimately a very long queue for the immigration desks, the human aspect.
I purchase the prepaid roaming packs for our phones, mine already has expensive Telstra roaming enabled, while we transit and wait in queue. Our luggage makes it out eventually and we are landside.
Now I can use the bathroom.
Next queue, picking up our railway passes and reservations. Fortunately faster than last time. We reserve seats on the Haruka Express to Shin-Osaka and make our way down to the platform.
In contrast to 42°C in Sydney yesterday, it’s 1°C here! I purchase a couple of cans of hot chocolate from a vending machine for the ride. I don’t know what will be available to eat aside from konbini food by the time we get to the hotel.
While the gales ended up being of little consequence to the flight, it turns out their impact was greater on the trains. A delay of 70 minutes!
The Haruka that is about to arrive on the platform isn’t the one we reserved. That’s over an hour away! So we move to the unreserved section and board.
I think they are using auto voice translations for announcements.
“We discovered a flying object on the wires of the Hanwa line, so this train is delayed by one and a half hours…”
Repeat in other languages.
Damn UFOs and aliens!
Almost everything in Shin-Osaka is closed by the time we finally arrive and it is freezing cold. I’m still in shorts and just a thin jumper. We walk to the hotel, check in, drop our bags and go down to the adjacent Lawson konbini to buy dinner. In my case a microwaved yakisoba and karaage.
A hot bath in the busy hotel facility and finally bed. I just hope the trains aren’t so delayed tomorrow. We’ve got villages in the snow to see!