Day 1: Sydney to Dubai
I expected the plane from Sydney to be full of football fans, since Emirates is the official FIFA airline, and the source of many tickets. But if it is, they are quiet, their passion hidden until we reach Germany. There is a smattering of yellow shirts, including a very large, very fat guy with ‘Cahill’ on his shirt back. I doubt whether he would last 10 minutes in a Guus training session, and he is clearly uncomfortable during the flight, overflowing his economy seat like an overcooked soufflé.
It’s 17 hours to Dubai, and after we’ve been flying for 6 hours, we have still not left Australia. We cross the coast in North Western Australia, where Debbie and I had a holiday just a few weeks ago. The long trip is made bearable by an amazing entertainment system, with hundreds of films and football channels, and every No 1 song since 1950. I realised people are right when they say the seventies was terrible for music, and I will stop defending the music of my teens from now on. One nostalgic moment was hearing Dire Straits ‘Brothers in Arms’ again, from 1985. It was the year Debbie saw Dire Straits in a gymnasium in Basle, when she was pregnant with our eldest, Jenna. Debbie says it was the loudest concert she has ever attended, which may make Dire Straits the first band Jenna ever heard.
We start our descent, and the landscape around Dubai is unlike anything I’ve seen before. As the sun rises, the land looks immediately scorched, as if there is an ‘on’ switch that allows no acclimatisation. Colourless villages dotted here and there look as if they could be swallowed by the first sand storm. For hundreds of kilometres, it is sand and mountains and not a tree in sight, not even a struggling palm. Then through the vast yellow land is a six-lane highway, hardly used, seemingly heading to nowhere. Is this what those billions of barrels of oil buy?
A message flashes across all our screens: GO SOCCEROSS FOR GERMANY 06. Nice try, but there’s no Ross in the Australian team. Does Emirates do that for every country of origin of their flights?
Arrived in Dubai at 6.00 local time, gaining 6 hours over departure time. I’ll try to ignore that and pretend I simply had a long night.
It’s 17 hours to Dubai, and after we’ve been flying for 6 hours, we have still not left Australia. We cross the coast in North Western Australia, where Debbie and I had a holiday just a few weeks ago. The long trip is made bearable by an amazing entertainment system, with hundreds of films and football channels, and every No 1 song since 1950. I realised people are right when they say the seventies was terrible for music, and I will stop defending the music of my teens from now on. One nostalgic moment was hearing Dire Straits ‘Brothers in Arms’ again, from 1985. It was the year Debbie saw Dire Straits in a gymnasium in Basle, when she was pregnant with our eldest, Jenna. Debbie says it was the loudest concert she has ever attended, which may make Dire Straits the first band Jenna ever heard.
We start our descent, and the landscape around Dubai is unlike anything I’ve seen before. As the sun rises, the land looks immediately scorched, as if there is an ‘on’ switch that allows no acclimatisation. Colourless villages dotted here and there look as if they could be swallowed by the first sand storm. For hundreds of kilometres, it is sand and mountains and not a tree in sight, not even a struggling palm. Then through the vast yellow land is a six-lane highway, hardly used, seemingly heading to nowhere. Is this what those billions of barrels of oil buy?
A message flashes across all our screens: GO SOCCEROSS FOR GERMANY 06. Nice try, but there’s no Ross in the Australian team. Does Emirates do that for every country of origin of their flights?
Arrived in Dubai at 6.00 local time, gaining 6 hours over departure time. I’ll try to ignore that and pretend I simply had a long night.
posted by Graham Hand | 1:18 PM
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