A foggy morning, but fortunately not enough to delay us nor any of the others who were planning to leave Berlin this morning. Swissair’s service was in the gate next to ours: the BA flight was there too at this point, though unseen behind the ghost.
Boxing Day was spent walking in the Ochil Hills. Grey skies above us were contrasted with the sight of sun shining on hills to the south. This shot, from the summit of Innerdouny Hill, was taken with a very long zoom, and I am prepared to state that what is seen here is Culter Fell, the 2,454-feet high summit of South Lanarkshire — it’s in the right direction, and it certainly looks like it (see the second image down on the page as linked). Which means that here we have a view of just under 50 miles. That’s impressive — but in the end, I pick the shot because of also capturing the aeroplane, which is just cute. (More pictures from the walk will appear on my other blog in due course….)
I paid £24 to guarantee a window seat for my daylight flight and then found I was sat right over the wing — and as it was an Airbus A380, the most monstrous vehicle (with two decks, and hence stairs inside), this was such a bloody large wing I got to see nothing of the land below, and hence no photos. I was confined to seat 63A for much of the flight, too, thanks to my neighbour spending almost all of the 6.5 hour journey in this position. How anyone can sleep on a plane is beyond me, even at night; I have no idea exactly what time zone we were over when I took this, but the time stamp is what my camera said, and we were really very far from it being the hours of darkness.
Four days late, I finally leave St Helena. There were genuine concerns in the morning that the flight would be cancelled yet again — apparently at about 9.30am visibility on the runway was practically zero — but, hallelujah, the clouds cleared and the incoming plane duly landed, about half an hour late (and of course carrying passengers who had all been waiting since Saturday themselves). An hour after this picture was taken, we boarded, took off and I type this in a hotel at Cape Town airport, waiting for my flight back to Heathrow this evening.
This is the blog’s 76th photo to be taken on St Helena: the first one being 9th November 2021 at the same place, the airport, the day before I began my 10-day period of quarantine (spent in a rather nice house not far from where I have been staying this time, Alarm Forest). Will this be the last shot from here, though? At the moment I have no definite plans to return — and, perhaps more significantly, no more research grant money to do so. Data collection for the project is done and I really should now concentrate on writing it all up. But, you know, never say never.
There have been various flights depicted on here down the years and, I am guessing, my total amount of sleep achieved across all of them probably comes to little more than an hour or two. Ten minute dozes might have been snatched here and there on flights once a year, maybe. Johannesburg to Istanbul last night was no different for me. My neighbour did OK but failed to share the knack.
Finally, I’m off. This evening, this vehicle constituted flight ET729 from Manchester to Addis Ababa, via (for some reason) Geneva: the service that saved the day back in January last year when everything went tits up due to a few snowflakes, but that is in the past. I like the Ethiopian Airlines logo, which gives it a suitably avian feel. This will be my last photo taken in the UK until 20th May.
These have to be among the world’s most stoic horses. The poles in this field are one end of the series of guidance beacons for one of the runways at Heathrow. Gigantic flying machines like the one seen here are coming into land every few minutes, and the noise is incredible. But they don’t seem all that bothered.
At the point in time that this photo was taken, I should have been somewhere over the Congo, maybe Zambia. This, however, is definitely not the interior of Africa. Having got up at 4am, by 6am I and a few dozen other people were sitting on a plane at Manchester Airport waiting to depart, only then the powers-that-be decided that due to a few snowflakes falling, nothing could move. Time passed, and by 9am we were all back in Terminal 2, the MAN – AMS leg of my journey wiped from existence. (Other excessive flight delays to have featured on here: Bergen, Nov. 2012; Keflavik, Jul.2019 [still the epitome].)
I finally left the ground about two and a half hours after capturing this shot. I will still make my final destination, and already know that a completely unexpected new country is going to make the blog tomorrow, perhaps that can be seen as a minor compensation. At least I won’t be seeing any more snow for a couple of weeks, that’s guaranteed.
The clock on my camera was set to 4.15am when I took this but I can’t remember whether this is before or after I adjusted it out of Emirates time when I changed planes in Abu Dhabi. Maybe it’s Gulf time and maybe it’s UK time and maybe we were somewhere over [insert Eastern European country of choice] at this point; either way the night was endless, timeless. This is only the blog’s third 4.nn am shot and the first two were both in its first year.
Last morning in Tromsø. It started snowing. I could say I took the good weather with me, but it was crappy at home too (although not below freezing). Great week though — many good things to enjoy.
It crossed my mind that with Tromsø being on a small island, I have not been on the mainland of Europe at all this week. Small islands (not, like, Great Britain or New Zealand) that have appeared on this blog: Tromsøya, Kvaløy (this week), Snilstveitøy (also Norway), Kangaroo Island, Stradbroke Island, Tasmania (Australia), Stewart Island (New Zealand), Wayasewa and Wayalailai (Fiji), Æbelø (Denmark). None in the UK… perhaps I should make an effort…
Being 42 