They were checking in passengers to Darwin and points beyond, Kansai and Tokyo’s Narita and the area was chockers, with a hefty queue in the Japanese section, many of them seemingly representing the rump of the homeward bound school excursion parties.
You need something to occupy the mind while you’re standing in a lengthy queue, and Madam attempted to kill some time figuring out whether the welter of teenage school kids were on our flight by trying to pick up the use of either Kansai or Tokyo dialect. As it turned out they were on the 12:05 flight to Narita rather than the 12:25 to Kansai, but that didn’t mean there was much room to spare on our flight.
Once we had checked in the process of passing through immigration and security ran pretty smoothly, and we killed the waiting time by setting out in search of a merino jumper for Yours Truly. Once we’d accomplished that, shelling out a substantial number of ducats for a rather stylish number, a light brunch filled in a bit more time.
It also filled in a big of a nutritional gap, working on the principle that our arrival time in Kansai, the shuttle bus transfer to Sannomiya and the courtesy bus run across to the hotel would mean we weren't going to be having dinner.
The boarding call came more or less on schedule, and once we’d filed into the fuselage I found myself with a window seat on the left, or Cape York, side of the aircraft, which meant I would have something other than Coral Sea to look at while we ascended to cruising altitude.
I was actually looking forward to watching the coast through Cooktown and beyond, but was distracted by the arrival of customs and immigration paperwork. An attempt to fill them out and keep an eye on the passing coastline resulted in a need for another set of papers after one too many mistakes in the original lot.
Still, while I missed Cooktown and the Endeavour River I managed to catch a decent glimpse of the extensive dunes being mined for silica sand at Cape Flattery, around two hundred kilometres north of our point of departure.
News that lunch was on the way diverted my attention away from travelogue duties, and an anticipated post-prandial nap failed to eventuate. There was a further snack served as we headed past Taiwan, though we were well east of the island, and the overall result was that we were more or less sated as the aircraft approached the Land of the Rising Sun, which was, given the onset of winter, hidden by the shades of night as we neared.
As far as I’ve been able to figure out JetStar (or the aviation authorities) must have changed the flight path between our 2008 visit to Japan and the follow up in 2012. The first flight had made landfall somewhere along the island of Shikoku and run along the archipelago, but in 2012, and again on this flight we’d made the approach over the bay rather than along the archipelago, so there were no lights et cetera right up to the final approach.