Thursday, 25 October 2012
Getting a good night's sleep before a major excursion isn't as easy as you might think, and I was awake, if the old memory serves me well at one-thirty and three before I emerged from a dream involving High School acquaintances, degenerate cricketers and an Elvis Costello concert around five-thirty.
At least I slept better than Madam, who ascribed an inability to get a good night's sleep to a combination of factors you can probably figure out without actually being told. Given the number of things that could go wrong over the next three weeks you'll be running over the possibilities, and that sort of thing isn't exactly conducive to deep and undisturbed slumber.
In any case, once I was awake I was back on the Travelogue and had the prelude largely knocked over before the pre-breakfast shower. There had been some consideration of a walk to find a breakfast option away from the hotel but intermittent drizzle put paid to that theory and we headed downstairs for a Spanish omelette (Hughesy) and a bowl of fruit (Madam) before we completed the packing and the regulation reshuffle of bits and pieces.
The Ukulele Lady had kindly offered to drop us at the Airport (she was working somewhere over in that direction so it was more or less on her way) and we were downstairs around half an hour before the time she'd indicated on the off chance she might be running early. We didn't want to be keeping anyone waiting, did we?
The check in and departing the country procedures ran smoothly, producing a state of illusory well-being that was severely disrupted by an announcement around half an hour before we were scheduled to begin boarding.
Technical issues, they said, were going to delay boarding (and, subsequently, departure) by an hour and while I wasn't happy about the delay I'd rather they found things that were likely to go wrong before takeoff. In any case, with things up to date almost right on the originally scheduled boarding time it was a case of a bit of thumb-twiddling with the iPad battery around 83% and the iPod taking over the workload.
There was, however, one major departure from revealed form this time around.
Faced with the prospect of an early morning arrival back in Cairns Madam thought it might be worth investigating the cost involved and the extra benefits obtained in Business Class. The original motivation was more legroom and the chance of a better night's sleep, but an extra ten kilogram luggage allowance is a significant factor for someone who'll be looking to bring a quantity of delicacies and other odds and ends she can't buy in Australia back with her.
We were, by the way, entitled to sixty kilograms of luggage on the way over, so the fact that the scales registered thirty-five in Cairns probably means someone's credit card will be reeling by the time we make our way back.
I'd heard rumors of better quality food and drink in Business Class as well. Not that I was expecting anything spectacular in the Jetstar version thereof, but you never know, do you?
As it turned out, when the boarding call came around an hour late we were the first through the Business queue and had plenty of time to acquaint ourselves with the extras, which started with the zipper bag of goodies and the blanket to keep you warm en route. The offer of a glass of bubbles to start off before we started moving was a nice start, particularly when the glass of bubbles I started lunch with seemed awfully familiar.
Fine, but there was better to come when the menu arrived, along with the accompanying wine list.
The bean curd appetizer, with marinated Japanese leek and dressing didn't quite sound like my scene, but the chance of a glass of Jansz Premium Non-Vintage Rose bubbles with it sounded like a good way to take the edge off the tofu as far as Hughesy was concerned.
Given the rest of the lineup the Tinpot Hut 2011 Sauvignon Blanc is probably a classy drop, but take a look at what followed it on the list. Stella Bella 2009 Chardonnay, Innocent Bystander 2010 Syrah and Cape Mentelle Cabernet Merlot? Count me in.
So the entree, a choice of Chicken rikyu-yaki or Beef ginger teriyaki for the main and a chance of a bit of cheese for afters, along with very decent wine? No problems.
As it turned out, of course, airline catering is airline catering, and the food was about what you'd expect under the circumstances, but the glass of Jansz Sparkling Rose seemed suspiciously similar to something I'd tried not that long before.
Madam had gone for the Stella Bella Chardonnay, and ended up with a glass of seriously good new style Oz chardy, which was impressive, and when the flight attendant delivered a glass of Innocent Bystander Syrah I wasn't quite in seventh heaven, but I was a very happy camper.
If we'd been sitting further back we'd have been looking at a choice of an SSB or a Shiraz from some offshoot of the McGuigan dynasty, but here we were with a choice of wines you'd expect to be looking to pay around the $10/glass in a restaurant. On that basis, Business Class has got me.
The point behind all this is that on your average budget airline Economy starts with a price and you start adding on the extras, starting with minor details like luggage, meals, drinks and blankets. I'd noted the Economy wine options had kicked in at $7/airline serve bottle. The Business glasses were slightly smaller than that, but you'd have been looking at $14 for the alcoholic equivalent of what arrived gratis on Business.
On the other hand you can start by looking at the business price and start counting back the things that'd cost you. Somewhere around $20 worth of wine by the glass is a bonus on top of the extra leg room, the increased baggage allowance and the fact that down the back you're paying for the meal.
There's still a differential, but if you look at it that way it diminishes rather substantially. Of course, it helps to have picked up the seats on sale, but every little bit helps...
With lunch out of the way a predictable torpor descended over the area as we settled in for the long haul without much to look forward to in the way on scenery et cetera. I'd noted green jungle below us during lunch, and guessed we were over the Owen Stanley Range. There was a highly distinctive river system that brought the name Markham to mind, something that needed to be confirmed, and a recent check on Google Earth and the National Geographic Atlas app failed to deliver a definitive answer, but for the next couple of hours it was a case of a semi-dose with something quietish on the iPod.
Madam took advantage of the proffered iPad to watch Madagascar 3, which filled in the time rather nicely, and in terms of battery usage I'd have been better off doing something similar. As the snob in me sniffly dismissed the audio, visual and reading options available on their iPad I tapped away on mine, running down a battery that was seriously depleted by continuing to read the Neil Young autobiography.
They roused us with just under two hours to go, and I used the opportunity to sample a bit of the Cape Mentelle Cabernet Merlot, declining suggestions of more solid sustenance, which were of the noodle in a cup or standard packaged snack persuasion, looking forward to the chance to watch the passing light show once we made landfall.
Last time that had been somewhere around Kyushu or the southern end of Shikoku and there had been a run along the coast with the Seto Inland Sea visible, but we were following a different flight path this time around, and the lack of precise geographic awareness in the darkness threw me big time.
Looking at it now in the cool clear light of morning reality I can see (with the admitted aid of the National Geographic Atlas app) that we must have made landfall around the eastern end of Shikoku, probably around Tokushima, which I managed to confuse with the Kobe-Osaka conurbation around the time the final landing instructions came over the P.A. System.
They're leaving that remarkably late, I thought, under the mistaken impression we were on our final approach. In reality we were still somewhere around two to three thousand metres up and the lights on my left that would have represented a fairly large urban and industrial centre that looked reasonably close must have been an extensive conurbation that was probably twenty kilometres away.
Still, even if I didn't know where we were the lights gave something to occupy the attention once we'd been told to turn off all electronic devices.
Once we'd landed there was a lengthy around the terminal building before we reached the designated air bridge, where another of the benefits of business came into play.
I'd carefully stashed everything I didn't need except for the iPad and whatever I could fit in my pockets in the back pack, which had been stowed in the overhead locker, so once the seat belt sign went off and Madam moved into the aisle retrieving it was easy, and when the doors opened we were in among the first to disembark, which brought us to the first door on the shuttle that carries you towards the Arrivals processing area.
Moving swiftly, Madam and I had hit the lead of the pack through the temperature check and I arrived at the Foreigners section of Immigration (there was a bevy of her compatriots following Madam to the Japanese passport section) to find there wasn't a queue at all.
Straight in, hand over passport and immigration form, place the index fingers on the fingerprint machine, get the facial recognition bit done and I was through something that mightn't have actually taken an hour last time around but certainly felt like it.
In fact, that process needed less time than I took to type that last paragraph.
Things didn't go quite so smoothly in the Baggage Claim area, since the baggage handling process doesn't seem to be class conscious, but once we'd done the retrieval and whisked our way through Customs we were on the lookout for the shuttle bus and looking pretty good.
I'm not sure exactly what happened next, but having been directed to the relevant stop (#6 if I recall correctly) I joined the queue with the bags and Madam headed off to get the tickets from the relevant machine. We'd checked our bags, the bus had arrived, and the driver had refused to accept what we wanted to hand over. Instead of two tickets and two receipts from the machine we had one ticket, the requisite number of receipts, and a driver who wanted actuals rather than apparent evidence.
There was some flustered to-ing and fro-ing that ended up costing an extra ¥2000, but we ended up on the bus at 8:35, a far better result than we'd expected when we heard about flight delays back in Cairns.
Last time around I'd made a mental note to sit on the right hand side of the bus because it seemed the view of the city lights was better on that side, but this time, Madam's attempts to figure out what had gone wrong proved a significant distraction and I didn't see a lit-up Osaka Castle this time either.
The run along the freeway from the airport to downtown Kobe takes about an hour, and we were in plenty of time to catch the 9:50 shuttle to the Okura and Meriken Park Oriental Hotels. last time around we'd started at the Oriental, but this time it was the Okura for the first two nights.
Negotiations at reception proceeded with the regulation courtesies and rituals, and we were conducted to our room on the twenty-fifth floor by a bellhop who wasn't anywhere near as over the top as the Harry Houdini clone we'd encountered at the Oriental last time around.
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