Friday, 16 November 2012
It seemed one moment I was pondering whether sleep was actually possible and the next I was having my arm gently shaken with inquiries about coffee and breakfast.
Three-thirty in the morning when you're passing over New Guinea mightn't be the optimal time for breakfast, but when it's on offer and you're not sure about the arrangements that were going to come into play later you tend to accept, and once you have, it's over to the iPad for a bit of a read.
What I should have done was reach for the iPod and a soothing soundtrack as well and some of what followed might have been averted.
As it was, I didn't, remaining blissfully unaware of the fact that I was sitting on the item in question and the little package holding the earbuds had wedged itself into the crack between the seat and its upright brother.
I'm not sure why I didn't go for that, possibly because deep down I knew I wouldn't have long before the Seat-belts sign came up along with the request to turn off the electronic devices, but as far as I was concerned the iPod was safely stowed in Madam's hand luggage (the Little Red Travelling bag) rather than my backpack, which was lurking overhead in the locker.
It was when we stood up to disembark that a question regarding the location of the device brought a No, and a subsequent investigation revealed where it was. I don't know why I didn't check for the ear buds as well, but there you go. I'm not sure how much of what followed could have been avoided if I had, but there you go.
We'd disembarked and were heading towards Immigration when the penny dropped, and since we weren't allowed to head back I had to wait for the cabin crew to finish doing their thing after a message was passed back. As it turned out the search was successful, but I didn't realize that was the case until they'd walked past and I doubled back to the checkpoint where I found the item in question. In any case, that got us to Immigration where I discovered that incoming couples with one Australian passport holder could go through the same checkpoint, which would have been handy, and would have delivered us to the head of the Customs queue if the iPod incident hadn't occurred.
I was fairly flustered by the whole string of events to date, and when the bloke from Customs scrutinized the relevant slips and asked whether we were carrying foodstuffs, I reflexively answered that we weren't, when I should have said I wasn't. Madam, of course, was, and pointed out that she did, and we were motioned over to the having your bags inspected queue.