The nine-hour flight from London to Mumbai was the third long haul, overnight flight I was on in as many days, and I was running on fumes. After 60 hours of flying and layovers from Sao Paulo to Rio to Atlanta to NYC to London I had only been able to get about ten hours of sleep, and that had been sitting upright at 38,000 feet so my body was starting to feel it. I shut my window in darkness at midnight flying over the Ukraine, and opened it again four hours later to bright sunlight and by the interactive map we were directly over Pakistan. It was one of the most striking landscapes I have ever seen. Desert as far as I could see (which from 5 miles was pretty far!) cut by huge mountain ranges and dunes so large that I could see the shadows they cast from as high as I was. Every now and then I noticed tiny grids of villages or towns, little square plots of farmland, but not many and those were far between. It’s amazing how much land there is in the world. Nothing seen from a plane looks real to me, maybe its because no matter how many times I fly I can never quite wrap my head around the fact that I am miles, hurtling forwards at 500 miles per hour in a little aluminum capsule, but it was still incredible to see a part of the world that I have heard so much about. I wonder if it really is just chance that I was born in the wonderful utopia that is Olympia?
