January 04, 2005

Somewhere near Davis Strait, 30,000 ft. above Greenland

I am about 4 hours into a 15 hour trip to Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific Flt. #831, seat 56H. Nice aisle seat. Flight has been uneventful and pretty good so far. Salmon for dinner and tons of movies to watch.  I have 43 different channels with videos, music, and television, and on the back of the remote is something that looks like a Nintendo controller. My kids would have already figured this out and been playing Mario Bros. for several hours by now...

What I will try to do with this journal is provide some idea of where I am and what I am doing.  Give a little local color about the scene around me.  My writing is currently wobbling all over the page because they have turned the lights out in the plane and my reading light is pointing out in the aisle - not on the tray where my book is -  and I can't see what I am doing. Nice thing about the flight is that we (NOTE: Andrew Henderson and I) don't have to stop in Vancouver like the last time we flew to Hong Kong, so if I do finally manage to get to sleep I won't have wake up and get off the plane and sit for several hours.  My video screen tells me that we still have about 6,116 miles to go. This is the part about doing fieldwork in S.E. Asia that I really don't enjoy. Miles and miles of just sitting [NOTE: I later learned to appreciate this.]  Anyway, welcome to my journal.