Flying over Hanoi, a journey back to Bangkok

Planes in the sky

Just a little note about flying 

The plane climbs steeply in to the sky and my ears try to pop under the pressure. They're struggling after THAT drift dive three days ago and the air con that lodged the water stuck in my canal in to some kind of horrid solid. The strain makes my eyes bulge.

Da Nang this morning disappeared among the sidelining mountains and left the beach at it's side. Now, Underneath me the City of Hanoi runs away to the sea.

As the plane banks sharply to turn towards Bangkok a huge cumulonimbus cloud threatens the city below. Towered, whipped and peaking up and up, our flying partner warns us, not this way. An electrical storm waiting to pour on the north of Vietnam? We skirt around it heeding the warning thankfully.
A flat wind-rushed cloud partners the multi storey storm and I wish I knew anything about weather patterns. That one looked amazing, an audible 'wow' escapes my lips. Although I'm not sure how audible, because my hearing is impaired from my blocked ear canals.

We've really got so high now, another plane several hundred feet below appears like a toy rolling towards Hanoi. And the red river winds a long the floor of Vietnam. Now I. Know why it's called the red river, it is literally red! Perhaps by way of the silt below. But all the time the colour adding to the drama of Vietnam and it's history.

The City below gives way quickly to flat green landscape, which gives way quicker to jagged forested mountains, that from beneath look like the knuckles of a giant. As you look further out they rise up and up, mixing with patches of cloud, until the mist filled sky hides their beginnings and you just can't tell where the two might meet.

Patches and wisps of white cloud mix with Asian pollution hazes, which although unpoetic and harmful still create a sense of mystery about this continent. We quickly get over Laos and ride through a great rain cloud, the rain falling towards the ground, we stick inside the creamy precipitation. I am back in Austria, blindly working my way down the side of the Tyrol, promises of strudel and gluhwein, and memories of swooshing and skimming over pillowy powder.

I love flying.

 There's the promise of what's to come, the nostalgia of where you've been, the gift wrapped partitioned food, which no matter whether it's good or not, is always going to elicit either a satisfied or amused smile (unless you're just totally joyless). There's also the free alcohol and remaining few people who still treat it like an occasion, looking the finest they can wedged in to a seat the designer meant for people with no blood circulation whatsoever. God love em!


Red dirt, green fields, towns, blue seas, all manner of cliches pass my window as we're not so high as to prevent me from gazing out at them. If I was a dog in a car, you know where I'm going with this sentence. It woud be great to be able to stick my head out of the window of the aeroplane, but natural physics such as either being sucked out or having my head whipped off my shoulders from the g-force, so alas that remains a dream.

I must be a traveler, for I am always happiest in transit.