I want to tell you about the sights I saw from the plane, 10km high flying Wellington to London via Hong Kong. I have been putting it off because, ideally, I would look up the names of places on GoogleEarth. I haven’t had a chance yet.


The first unusual sight is the desert. It is beautiful and naked. Thin ridges run like veins, ribs under the skin of red sand (or is it rock?) That’s about all. It is as if the creator, if you believe that sort of thing, had been in a remarkably austere and reckless mood. Rocks, sand, those weird ridges (let’s make them run due north, eh?) that’ll do. Oh, maybe some lichens, bacteria. Let’s make it red. This is real desert – utterly no sign of humans, for an hour. It seems so foreign. I am reminded of Ursula K Le Guins vision of the afterlife: that dry land…. But there does seems to be some water. We fly over patches populated by shallow salt-lakes, usually dry, but some seem to hold a pond in the center. Occasionally the ground below is marked with just-visible rashes of green.

The desert gradually melds into semi-desert. Now I start to see roads. Very straight roads. Roads like these that my father travelled. Days before I left, he told me, for the first time, the story of riding his motorbike, at sixteen, across the outback. Hitting sand dunes on the road and struggling to keep the bike upright. It’s a bit easier when you are seven miles up.

I wonder, marvel at the persistence and determination of our species. Who would live out here? Who could live out here? But people do. I notice some dwellings. We fly north-west, and as we near Alice Springs I see for the first time here valleys, gullies, creeks. The earth once again is shaped by water running off it, not just by the wind. It is something of a relief to see.

The landscape doesn’t change much until we leave Australia, somewhere near Darwin. I manage to see a few bejungled islands near PNG, and then the sun goes down. It’s a little symbolic. I know very little about Indonesia, the Phillipines, and we fly over them in darkness.

Going Hong Kong to London we pass over the mass of central Asia. Range after range of lumpy, forested mountains, then dry pointy mountains, then high, snow capped, gravely mountains. In between are expanses of land with little agriculture and settlement. I can see why. Sometimes giant sand dunes can be seen engulfing flat, arable land. Sometimes hills are terraced and farmed. Following the contours of the hills, these ancient techniques are visually stunning.

We fly over Mongolia, and then Siberia. Late spring up there and there is a lot of green. Serpentine rivers and lakes. Passing Novosibirsk, where Mel once lived, the cloud clears and I see a massive lake, but not the city.

The closer we get to Great Britain, the more homogenous the land below. Poland, Denmark, Gotland, the Netherlands. They all look the same from up here. Green pastures, intensely developed. I can imagine what the landscape looks like on the ground. My heart sinks a bit. I know that I am here, in Northern Europe, to connect with people, not monumental landscapes. I guess I’m just a bit greedy and want to do both at once. I will too, just wait.