from now this blog becomes The South America Diaries!

Monday, 11 May, 3.43am ...it begins

Ahhh, so I begin what promises to be many scatteed hours of waiting over the course of these travels. I have taken a taxi to the Skybus for my Melbourne to Sydney flight. There are now fourteen minutes to wait. Four men in dark clothes ramble the cement hall, dragging their suitcases.

I am calming down now, my anxiety turning towards excitement. In the taxi, my travel worry turned towards home, concern about A, M, Y and the flat. There is nothing to worry about, but still I turn things around in my mind.

The bus has come!

6.59am

Oh, the clouds - I´ve written of them before. I fly over a sea of roiling cloud and the wrinkled-bedsheet mountains of trees emerge. Before, farm spreading to the horizon where the sun layed down a thin pink line that is now a bleeding hazy glow. Perhaps one day it will cease to amaze me when I fly how uninhabited this earth of our is. There were brown plains of houseless farms and now green swathes of fertility. From Melbourne to Canberra it is also checkerboards of farm and rolling hills of trees.

I began May Sarton´s Journal of a Solitude. She writes ´I hardly ever sit still without being haunted by the ¨undone¨ and the unsent´. Yes! Exactly. Oh and out the window the most amazing poofs of cotton-candy clouds, dense balls of feather blowing forwards. Amazing. As far as the eye can see again, but the pink line is gone. Instead a lone puff of mountain a little higher than the rest, a cotton ball hill on the horizon.

We are disappearing into the clouds and the shiny ocean emerges, lit monotone by a bright ball sun. To read, to look out the window, to read, to look out the window, to read, to look out the window... The window is best in a plane.

The piercing screams of the ubiquitous unhappy baby tormented by painful ears is the soundtrack to the stretch and curl of Sydney´s coastline, so, so green and lush with scrub, until the city emerges, islandy and archipelagoish, all protruding boxes of various heights. I can see the seaweed under the water - to the ocean floor from the plane in the sky. As we land we pass boats - big ones and little ones - and we touch down and roll so fast.

The end, flight 1.