Before you point it out, I realise that two months is a long time between posts. And a lot of post-able things have been happening in my travelling life so no excuses there (except perhaps the fact that, with all the travelling, there's been little time for posting). So much for preamble.
When we last met, I was taking a decidedly long time to cover little ground - pedalling my way across northern Spain. Since then I've added several thousand more kilometres at a more rapid pace - by car. Including, coincidentally in fact, quite a few thousand kilometres back in Spain. But more on that in another post.
My most recent journey took me even further in even less time, travelling this time by air for something like six and a half hours and covering 5,300km. And this exercise nicely highlighted how summer in one place can mean something entirely different to summer in another. In my case, leaving France on a decidedly fresh "summer" morning of 10 degrees (C) and arriving at ten o'clock in the evening in Abu Dhabi in the "cool" evening of 39 degrees. (Daytime temperatures at the moment in Abu Dhabi are in the low to mid 40's).
I would have arrived in Abu Dhabi earlier, but the flight left almost an hour late. "Of course it did" you will be quick to point out, given that I departed from one of the world's more unpleasant and disorganised airports, Charles de Gaulle in Paris. To be fair, there are plenty of worse airports in the world: Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos and Jacksons International airport in Port Moresby come to mind for example. But in some places your expectations are low to begin with, so when they are met you are not too upset. In Paris one has - you would like to think justifiably - high expectations. But in the case of CDG these are most definitely not met.
I'd been to Abu Dhabi before - in fact lived there - so I knew that it was hot in summer. But that still didn't prepare me for the slap-in-the-face feeling as you step off the plane into 39 degrees in the middle of the night. Of course, the fact that France was unseasonably cold for summer (or at least, they try to convince each other that it's unusual) only served to amplify the difference.
Abu Dhabi airport was unusually busy; end of holidays, families getting back before the school year starts, local families laden with Hermès and Louis Vuitton bags (de rigueur in this part of the world) and so forth. The normally well-run airport was showing signs of strain and the arrivals area was bordering on pandemonium. I couldn't help taking a picture of a trolley loaded with what seemed a typical load for one person. The woman who had been pushing it - invariably it is the women who are tasked with pushing luggage trolleys, the men presumably having more important duties to attend to - was taking a break. Or perhaps she was waiting for the next bag to come off the belt.
When we last met, I was taking a decidedly long time to cover little ground - pedalling my way across northern Spain. Since then I've added several thousand more kilometres at a more rapid pace - by car. Including, coincidentally in fact, quite a few thousand kilometres back in Spain. But more on that in another post.
My most recent journey took me even further in even less time, travelling this time by air for something like six and a half hours and covering 5,300km. And this exercise nicely highlighted how summer in one place can mean something entirely different to summer in another. In my case, leaving France on a decidedly fresh "summer" morning of 10 degrees (C) and arriving at ten o'clock in the evening in Abu Dhabi in the "cool" evening of 39 degrees. (Daytime temperatures at the moment in Abu Dhabi are in the low to mid 40's).
I would have arrived in Abu Dhabi earlier, but the flight left almost an hour late. "Of course it did" you will be quick to point out, given that I departed from one of the world's more unpleasant and disorganised airports, Charles de Gaulle in Paris. To be fair, there are plenty of worse airports in the world: Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos and Jacksons International airport in Port Moresby come to mind for example. But in some places your expectations are low to begin with, so when they are met you are not too upset. In Paris one has - you would like to think justifiably - high expectations. But in the case of CDG these are most definitely not met.
I'd been to Abu Dhabi before - in fact lived there - so I knew that it was hot in summer. But that still didn't prepare me for the slap-in-the-face feeling as you step off the plane into 39 degrees in the middle of the night. Of course, the fact that France was unseasonably cold for summer (or at least, they try to convince each other that it's unusual) only served to amplify the difference.
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| A lightly-loaded trolley at Abu Dhabi airport |
And then I thought back to my bike ride and how little luggage I managed with for three weeks and it put things in perspective. How much stuff do we really need?
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