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 in the cool clear light of eality I can see (with the 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.