Hello Singapore Airlines. It's been a while.

29 Sep, Wellington - Christchurch - Singapore - Kathmandu

[my journey, as told to Angela via text message]

I miss you. It would be a lot more fun with you here.

I'm in a small "sub cabin", only six rows. 3x3x3.

I had fish curry. Yum. Properly spicy. Such a novelty getting food with stainless steel cutlery, with a plastic cup of wine

I watched the "Elvis" movie. It was great. And it must have been long!

Australia is big. We're halfway between Sydney and Coober Pedy. Hours and hours to go before we hit the coast again.

I went for a wander. Not a lot of wandering to be done. They've chopped the plane up into little cabins. I think that a lot of this plane is behind the curtain at the front

Only one little emergency exit window - and it faces the wrong way for me to catch a glimpse of Uluru. I think Uluru is actually like 300km away so probably can't see it.

There's a father and son beside me. Son is watching Pokémon. I keep watching over his shoulder. 

A little kid, 3 or 4, happily wanders down the aisle from the front from time to time. I wave as they go past and try to show them pictures in my book. Unfortunately my lonely planet 'Trekking In Nepal' guide has few pictures so it's quite boring. Mum has figured out a perimeter where she has to go chasing them when they get beyond it.

It's now 17:33 nz time. We have clocked over halfway there at last. 

Still over Australia. Still. Looks like we leave Australia over NT. Somewhere to the left of Darwin. Time for another walk,  a stretch, a bit more reading

19:08.  The world is going on around our little plastic flying cylinder. It's so metaphysical. 2700km to go. We're over Timor. East or west? There aren't any lines to show

20:01. Just finished the movie "Wild". It was great too!

I went to the only tiny window and saw a small tropical reef island. And a larger coastline through the haze. I have almost visited Indonesia now.

20:34. I've started that Stephen King book on my kindle. 11/22/63. It's good. Lots of foreboding so far

I like this. It's like I can just chat to you. So what if it will all just firehose down at once in ... 1 hour and 54 minutes when I hit the wifi in Singapore. Oh, and that the conversation is very one way.

21:30: dinner! They tell me it's chicken.

Choice of chicken curry, vege rice or no beef (they ran out)

And a slice by Pandoro, 8096km away

I'm crossing the equator!! What's that feeling your mother gets crossing boundaries and borders?

And I need to tell you about, "c'est si bon". What your mother says when she is "speaking French". I thought it was gibberish. But a man on this plane had that phrase on his t shirt 🤯 [and now I discover it's a famous song sung by Eartha Kitt, amongst others]

Look! It's Singapore. Very brief transit here.

23:48: Next leg. I couldn't get onto the Singapore Airport wifi in my 1 hour transit. Singapore-Kathmandu plane has wifi - but for streaming movies only apparently.

Oh well. You're asleep by now anyway. My plan is to sleep all the way to Kathmandu. The flaw in my plan is that my bag is at my feet so I have no legroom.

I am officially changing my personal timezone now. It's 00:45 in NZ and 17:30 nepal time.

Nice view taking off of the lights of hundreds of freighters queued up in the Harbour and the bright lights of Singapore stretching off in all directions. But now it's just darkness and what looks like the lights of villages. No seat-back map so I don't know where I am. Malaysia? Vietnam? No, just a floating metal cylinder suspended above reality.

OK. It's Malaysia. A floating metal cylinder suspended above ... Malaysia.

4°01'20.4" North, 103°05'05.7" East

Looks like I'll go over Malaysia, then ocean, then Bangladesh or India.

18:45: meal service is taking forever and the lights are blazing. Not conducive to sleeping :-(

We have gone over southern Thailand and now we're over Myanmar. Basically going due north from Singapore. Nothing to see outside. Especially with the cabin lights blazing.

19:09: well that was bad. Choice of fish, and "we ran out". Tough white meat in watery pea soup. My mum would have loved it. The people in front of me chose their dinners well, what ever it was they ate til it ran out. 

Yeah, nah

I don't think I'm going to sleep on this flight. Oh well. Book is good!

The seats are very familiar. Identical those on my Air NZ Wellington to Christchurch leg. But built for a 737 not an a320 so a bit narrower. (I have had two hours of not sleeping with the blazing cabin lights to think about this). They are perfectly fine for city hopping in New Zealand but hard and uncomfortable for a five hour flight where you just want to try to sleep.

20:03 I've been wrapped up in my jacket but not sleeping. Nothing to see out the window but the crescent moon, getting lower and yellower. The lights are out now at least.

21:00 the lights are up again and the hostie woke me up to put up my seat back.

21:40 We're here! I must have fallen asleep again because I got woken up by the ground hitting the wheels.

Kathmandu hotel room, nice

I look a bit tired