Pete, checking in

Here I am in Perth. Predawn after an evening chasing the sunset from Canberra to Adelaide and then into a very black and empty west. Most of that must have been over water - the Great Australian Bight, to be precise - but I couldn't see anything. The moon, the fingernail sliver of a moon had held the sun's tale down under the horizon, and there was nothing outside. How the pilots navigated us through that vast blackness is a mystery.

Inside I was happy, so long as they kept the spiced tomato juice coming. One of the music channels was playing every San Francisco song ever written and i was happy to listen. Qantas now flies into SF three times a week and this was one of their ways of marking the occasion.

Me, I was happy to relax and listen and remember that lovely city.

Spent a half hour in the wrong spot with other wrong-spotters waiting for the shuttle, and by the time I eventually made my hostel it was eleven o'clock, and that's early morning to my Canberra body, so I rolled into bed and began snoring.

Today I look into the art galler a few blocks away, meet the local BookCrossers for lunch and then have a shufti at Fremantle. Tomorrow is a day of travel back across the continent - daylight this time - and a few minutes shy of midnight I'll be catching Cathay Pacific for the redeye to Hong Kong.

So don't expect much sense out of me for a while!

Qantas B737-800 "Charleville" QF 719

The sunset is a thin bright orange band in the west. With a fingernail shaving of a new moon just above it, fresh from an eclipse which missed Australia. I'll be chasing the sun this evening and for the rest of the trip as I fly continually into the west until I come all the way around again in thirty days. And home to a new moon and the Southern Cross rising over my horizon once more.

I wish I could take a photograph of the sunset over a dark land. But all I'd get would be reflections from the bright cabin, and I must hold the image in my mind. Chasing the sun into the west.

Western Australia will be a new place for me. The first of many this trip. It's our biggest State and our most sparsely populated. Most of the few inhabitants are concentrated in the fertile southwest corner and the rest is pretty much desert, apart from a mine and a cattle station here and there. I'm looking forward to it as I sit here racing through the sky at ten miles a minute and smiling up at a pretty cabin attendant hands me a glass of spiced tomato juice, its deep red colour reflecting the lignt of the fading sun.

Qantas Boeing 737

Qantas Boeing 737,
originally uploaded by skyring.

A 737 at Canberra International Airport as I await my boarding call. This one's called Kookaburra, and you have to wonder if they roster aboard the jolly laughing jackass sort of cabin staff.