Australia is really far away from Colorado.
Now this may sound like an obvious statement, but to understand what it really means you’ll have to fly thousands of miles in my shoes on a United Airlines flight packed to the brim with passengers.
You know it is a very long way when…
- You’ve watched 5 movies and you still have several hours of flight time left.
- You leave home on a Saturday afternoon and arrive in Sydney on a Monday morning.
- You are served three meals, several snacks and countless rounds of those luke warm, moist and flaccid towlets meant to refresh and cleanse.
By the way I’m always a little freaked out when they come to collect the used towlets and they refuse to use their hands to collect them, instead they use the little plastic salad tongs. It is like they don’t really trust me to use the towlet to wipe the “correct” part of my body...if you know what I mean.
But I’ve sugar coated the experience long enough. Flying economy on United Airlines sucks. And flying economy on a aging and overused United long haul 747 for over 14 hours sucks beyond description, but I’ll give describing it try never-the-less.
Recently I read Airbus was experimenting with a new passenger restraining system aboard its brand new uber-jumbo plane that would allow passengers (read cattle) to fly standing up. This would let the airlines pack up to 30 percent more people aboard the plane, which by the way, is already designed to fly as many as 555 passengers.
Image how much fun flying on this beast will be when you have to load and unload 555 people with all their stuff, issues and smells.
Speaking of issues, we almost missed our flight because a women with more tattoo’s and piercing’s than your average rain forest head-hunter freaked out on the connecting flight to LA because she was over come by strange odors from the back of the plane. After a long and very public 5 minute hug from the captain in the middle of the aisle, we had to taxi pack to the gate to allow her and her “issues” to depart the plane.
Now multiply this incident by 555 and you’ve got a fun day of travel once the new uber–sized airbus starts flying around the USA.
But I digress. I was explaining how airbus was working on packing 30 percent more people into a plane by allowing them to stand up during the flight. Well it seems that United, at least in economy class, has already accomplished this by stacking people horizontally instead of vertically…just like tumbled down dominos made by people with way too much time on their hands in one of those crazy domino lines after all the dominos have fallen.
On these long haul 747's, when the person in front of you reclines their seat, they are pretty much up close and very personal with you and your lap. Now this could be a good thing if done at the right time (read late night), in the right place (read bedroom), with the right person (your sexy spouse or girl/boy friend or eager new friend), with the right amount of clothing (read none).
But instead you end up with Jed, or Mohamed, or the perfect stand in for your crazy, fat and hated aunt from Rochester laying on your lap for 14 hours, while you lay on Jed’s or Mohamed’s or, your crazy fat aunt’s lap.
Either way this makes for a total no win situation. Imagine taking a Greyhound bus from LA to New York with perhaps a tad bit better dental hygiene on the part of your questionable fellow passengers…or cattle as the airlines call us when we’re not listening, and you get the idea.
Thus I arrived in Sydney on a beautiful Monday morning feeling like I had just been severely violated in numerous and unholy ways by the bad boys of the prison chain gang.
Australia is indeed a stunning and beautiful country. There are so many wonderful and positive observations you can say about a place the same size as the continental United States with only about 30 million inhabitants. I’ll leave those things to the travel guides. Instead here are just a few of my personal observations from the very limited time I spent Downunder.
Australia’s economy seems to be almost exclusively based on two things.
1) The buying/selling/making and consuming of coffee.
2) The buying/selling and brokering of real estate.
On every street corner, on every city in Australia, you’ll find either a real estate office or a coffee shop. I suspect that a typical conversation in Australia must go something like this, “G'day mate, let’s buy a new home and get some coffee.”
“Ah what a great idea mate, I could use a new place and a creamy rich macchiato.”
Indeed if you were to chart the modern Australian economy 40 percent would be coffee sales, with and additional 40 percent going to the real estate sector. The remaining 20 percent would be allocated to the production of cute and cuddly stuffed kangaroos, wombats and koala’s.
And just like in the United States 100 years ago, the real animals are either shot as vermin (Kangaroos), or poisoned as pests (Wombats) or run over by speeding cars (Koalas). It is good to know that we still lead the way in the world in so many environmental initiatives.
I wonder how many more years it will take Australia to follow in our foot steps and completely slaughter all of their indigenous animals just as we did with our buffalo, grizzlies and wolves?
But I prefer to look on the bright side of things. Once all of the indigenous animals are gone, Australia will be able to reintroduce a smaller and hopefully much smarter population of kangaroos, wombats and koalas back into the wild thus creating an entire new industry and finally diversifying their economy beyond coffee, real estate and stuffed cute animal production.
Next time the sights and sound of Sydney give way to the Long Distance Triathlon World Champions in Canberra.
