By pure fluke, I managed to be paying attention at the right time to (I think) get a picture of Southend Pier.

Unlike last time, I actually remember getting through Heathrow.
(checking back to my diary of a couple of years ago, it looks like the memory loss happened after the fact)
I did spot an escalator/ramp combo running down from Passport Control to Baggage Claim which seemed familiar, and a Biosecurity Check room which matched up to a memory which had come adrift from any context.
Things went smoothly; The only thing they wanted to know was where I’d come in from, and biosecurity/customs appears to work on the honour system, as the only person in the bag-scanning hall seemed to be taking a shortcut to somewhere else.

Rather than navigate the Underground at 6pm, I’d booked in for a night at an airport hotel one terminal over, so a short train trip got me there. (The Heathrow Express to Paddington wasn’t running, so I was even more glad to not be heading into London)
Yotel Heathrow is convenient, small, and oddly purple.
Even had a violet light in the room.

It was small enough that you had to plan a move or two ahead in terms of making space to do things in.
Comfy enough for a night’s sleep though, and they have ‘free’ coffee/hot chocolate.

I stayed at an AirBnB for the next few days, working on the theory that I really just needed somewhere to be jetlagged in for a while.
Turns out that when you don’t have a convention to go to, and thus an external schedule to keep, jetlag can last a whole lot longer. The humid weather didn’t help.

The AirBnB experience was, I think, a lot like living in a haunted house.
There were other people living in other rooms in the place, but as they were mostly out, I never saw them, or only saw them once before they moved on. Essentially, it was an empty house where things moved when I wasn’t looking & there were noises in the night.
Not sure on the whole AirBnB experience; This place was clearly being run as a hostel/hotel/BnB by the owner, who didn’t live on-site, and who I’m guessing didn’t visit that often. A lot of minor maintenance issues, like a student flat on it’s way out where nobody can be bothered fixing things & the landlord isn’t contactable.
That said, the bed worked, the WiFi worked, the system for getting in worked (combination lock-box on the front door with the key in it, key to the room left in the door to said room, and a message from the owner telling you the combination & the room name – Mine was Piccadilly Circus, with a replica of the official street sign on the door), and it was close to the DLR.

The other thing it was close to was Greenwich, right across the Thames, and accessible by a walking tunnel dating back to 1902.

There’s a dome to the right of the ship, which is the roof of the access stairway/lift for the Greenwich side.
Just behind me is the Old Royal Naval College, which you can see they’ve just finished repairing after that spaceship crashed into it in the movie Thor: The Dark World.

And this is the view from the other side.
Near as I can tell, based on the road layouts & house designs, where I was staying used to be a wharf complex (the road is named Empire Wharf), with warehouses & all that, and got redeveloped into residential. All of the houses around were done in roughly the same style, even if they weren’t part of the same building, and when you crossed one of the roads running around the perimeter of the Isle of Dogs, that suddenly changes, and there’s a lot more variety in age & design.
I need, or at least want, to do some more digging into this, to see how the area developed over the years.

So, stuff I did?

For the first while, “had a bad time due to jetlag, with maybe a minor lurgh of some sort” would cover it.
Did do some tourist things, like the Museum of London Docklands (which was fascinating until they got to an entire wing dedicated to the wranglings of committees for development from the 70’s onward) and the British Museum (which I’ll be going back to, as it was just too humid a day to be in a crowded place).

After a few days I moved to a hostel in Greenwich, St. Christopher’s, which is over a pub.
This becomes important later.
This was my first ‘bed in a dormitory’ stay of the trip, and indeed my first of that type of stay in a very long time.
I’ve stayed in hostels before, but had gone with private rooms. This wasn’t an option here.
The setup at St. Christopher’s was pretty good; You enter through the bar, but there’s a prox-card door to get into the hostel proper, another to open the door to the room, a specifically assigned bed, and a locker big enough that I could have fitted Big Red in there twice over without issue, in the form of a rolling metal cage which took up half of the under-bed space, with the other half being the locker for the other bunk. I got the top bunk, and it was pretty comfy, and also under a window, which was a useful thing, because holy crapballs  did that place get hot. Even with a pedestal fan going and the windows open it was still too hot to need the provided duvet most nights, and I only closed the window when absolutely needed, such as heavy rain.
On the subject of that window … Yeah, the pub was loud. To the extent that there was a jar of earplugs in each room, provided for free, and on Friday & Saturday nights they were really needed, as the loud music didn’t stop until 2am. Rest of the time it only ran 10pm to Midnight.
This place had piped music running constantly, not at ear-splitting volume, but at a noticeable level, even at 7am during breakfast.

With no particular demands on my time, I just sort of relaxed into being in the UK.
Got a cellphone number, wandered semi-aimlessly around using the Underground, and the River Buses, and my own two feet, and didn’t really do much of great consequence or importance.

Also, there was a crow mooching about at one of the River Bus stop.

The dorm experience did mean that I met people, which was kind of nice.

• There was the Indian IT Guy in the bed below mine, who’d only just arrived and was plowing straight into work & getting himself set up
• The woman from New Zealand in one of the other top bunks, who was transitioning between holiday & working holiday
• The English guy below her, who seemed to sleep most of the day & go out at night. Maybe he was working; It’s unclear, and he was hardly ever there & awake to be asked
• The South African chef in the last lower bunk, who really did sleep all day.
• The automotive mechanic in the bed above him, who … was very confident in the things he was demonstrably wrong about, such as which showers worked, or how the complicated skylight windows were operated. This made his pronouncements on Brexit somewhat harder to take seriously.

The UK’s vote to Stay in the EU or not happened while I was at St. Christopher’s, and … I didn’t see that result coming.
Also didn’t see the four main promises of the ‘Leave’ campaign vanishing within the next day coming; It was obvious that some of them were total bollocks, but the speed with which the clawbacks & technicalities & so on happened was impressive.
No idea what the end result of that will be.

I’m keeping my eye on the Scottish Independence Movement. Having only just started to make use of being an EU Citizen, I’d like to keep making use of it, and I can’t do that if the UK exits. If Scotland goes independent & stays in the EU, however, and if I can put myself in a place to become a Scottish Citizen when that happens, it seems worth doing. 

On the weekend, Gulo T. came to town, so we did Tourist Things!
Specifically, the London Eye.

There was a festival of sorts going on, called ‘Udderbelly’ ‘Underbelly’, and in the background here is an inflatable purple cow, lying on it’s back, containing a stage. {edit: the Festival is Underbelly, the purple cow stage is Udderbelly}

 

There was also a festival happening in Greenwich, the Greenwich Docklands International Festival,

… and we saw part of one act; A thing called Block, which had people doing dance & circus acrobatics using big movable blocks to make & re-make their stage space. They were doing things like building walls, or getting people walking on top of blocks which were being put in place to make a path as they moved.

 

For this one, I’m going to start at the end, then double back to explain how I got there.

At the end of day one in Dubai, I wanted nothing to do with the place; Too chaotic, too noisy, too strange, felt like everyone was staring at me, and I really just wanted to hide in my hotel until it was time to go back to the airport.

By the end of day two? Complete reversal; I can’t claim to understand the place, or have a handle on it, or even that it makes sense, but it’s no longer scary, and I’d like to come back.

The flight was the 17½ hour direct from Auckland to Dubai.
I’d booked the aisle seat, and I’m not regretting that choice;  Being able to get up and go for a bit of a wander, even if only to the bathroom, is a good thing on such a flight.
So is free onboard WiFi, which I took blatant advantage of by feeding different email addresses into to extend the window of free access; There are certain advantages to knowing every email address on a domain, so that you don’t use one that someone else has.
Having to get up to let Middle & Window seats out is a small price to pay, though the times that Window chose left something to be desired; Such as when the food or beverage cart was in the aisle and there was no physical way to get out of my seat which didn’t involve bouldering skills I don’t have. Or when the cart was a bit further back, so that he couldn’t get to the bathrooms anyway, the way forward being forbidden, blocked by the Curtain Of Affluence*.

(* That which prevents the viewing of Business Class. It is … Forbidden … to my people)

Slept more than I expected to, but less than I’d like.

There was a lot of walking involved once I got to to Dubai International.
To the extent that I was worried that I’d missed a sign, not turned when I should have, and was heading to the Arrivals Hall in the next Terminal, or possibly the next city. The concourse, which seemed to look down into the departure & gates area, just kept going in a mostly-straight line, punctuated with the occasional annex for toilets and baby-stroller storage.

The arrivals hall, …
OK, have you seen Fellowship of the Ring?
The bit in Moria, outside Balin’s tomb, with the enormous hall with the pillars?
It looks like that, but with better lighting, more terrazzo, and a Costa Coffee kiosk.
Oh, and a bunch of baggage conveyors.

Getting to the hotel was easy enough; I bought a travel card for the Dubai Metro, as my hotel was specifically chosen to be on a transport link, and an airport worker mistook my “reading the signs and figuring it out” for “lost tourist”, was heading in that direction anyway, so guided me.
(I was a little suspicious, so paid attention to what was going on, and while the “I’ll carry your bag for you” when transferring between trains was probably well-meant, there was no way in hell I was letting go of that handle)
I probably would have figured out the change in trains at Union Station, and the change in platforms required, but it sure was easier to just follow someone who was heading that way anyway.

Finding the hotel was easy; You can see it from the station.
Note paranoid screenshotting of local map, just in case I got lost.

Despite turning up six hours early, the nice folks at Hyatt Place Dubai/Baniyas Square found me a room right away, a nice VIP one no less, possibly to get my stinky self out of their nice clean lobby.

The View, of Baniyas Square, at around 7am.
Note almost total non-squareness of the space.

The hotel were also very apologetic that they couldn’t do free breakfast today, explained that because it’s a closed-off space it’s OK to eat there during sensible hours during Ramadan, and warned me not to eat or drink outside of the hotel.
They said I’d get a fine; Makes me wonder what it’d be like if I wasn’t white.

I showered, and I slept for a few hours.

Then I took a wander around the square, felt as though I stood out like a sore thumb, and went back to sleep for the afternoon.
My t-shirt selection, which I’m realising is entirely nerd stuff and con shirts … felt misplaced here.
Woke up for a bit at dusk, found that the idea of venturing out into the noise & chaos filled me with dread, and went back to sleep.

Day two was completely different.
I’m going to assume that sleep deprivation was not my friend when dropped into a new & very different environment, and I guess I’ll be trying to plan for that in future.

My best non-jarring option for shirts was my warm flannel shirt, which didn’t seem like the best option in a desert environment, so I went for a walk to the edge of Dubai Creek, to see how it would work.
Surprisingly well, as it turns out. The low humidity meant that the heavy fabric really didn’t matter, so I was able to wander along the quayside for a couple of kilometres without issue, though I did take the metro back. It was right there, and was airconditioned.

I’d not realised that the creek was a commercial port, if a small one.
Wooden boats which were clearly motor-driven, but also obviously built with more traditional designs in mind, are pulled up there, and the cargo get stacked & loaded & unloaded right onto the quayside. Kind of a different approach to, say, Auckland, where it’s all locked away behind fences & in containers.
The loading system here seemed to be “If you crouch down, we’ll lift it onto your back, and then steady it while you stand … OK, now go”.

With the shirt situation sorted, I went out to do Tourist Things!
Well, one tourist thing in particular – The Burj Khalifa, with an observation deck 555.7m up.

There’s a lot of view.

Also, there’s a outside deck, admittedly with very tall safely barriers, but it is open topped.

In other news, I need a beard-trim.

The haze was too great, but I’m told that somewhere out there is “The World”, still under construction.
And still looking for enormously wealthy people who want to own their own geographically representative island which they’ll only be able to access by boat, and which will be really difficult to build on because you can only access it by boat.

Pretty happy with this next one, as a picture.
The building, by the way, is Dubai Mall. All of the building, because it’s ridiculously large.

Getting to the Burj Khailifa involved a Metro ride, then a walk down a very long twisty … concourse? hallway?
I couldn’t tell at the time, but it’s an enclosed air-conditioned structure, with windows & travellators, which winds between buildings & across streets to deposit you at Dubai Mall. It’s over a kilometre long, from the look of it on Google Maps.

The mall itself is enormous. Ridiculous.
It has a waterfall.

A bit lower down on the building, there are another couple of floors of observation deck & souvenir store, with another external platform. Oddly, there’s a better sense of the building from down there, but much like Olympus Mons, you’re not really aware of the object while you’re on it. It can only be seen from a distance.

Self-portrait in mirrored window.
My combination of boots, jeans, flannel shirt & hat made me look like I was cosplaying a 2000’s Rap video.

And then there’s this.
My first … involuntary souvenir of the trip, a free gift with the elevator ticket.
I have no idea what to do with a plushy building.

In the evening, I caught up with Craig O., who I worked near at AECOM.
His desk was diagonally behind mine.
He’s living & working in Daubai, and is, from the look of it, having a fantastic time.

We had dinner over at Dubai Marina, which is rather more modern & high-end than where my hotel was.
And a great deal more expensive, I’m guessing.

 

And that’s it for Dubai.
Like I said, I had a complete change of heart concerning the place over the course of 48 hours, and I’m thinking that a lot of the negative impression was just being dead tired; It’s hard to be positive about anything in that state.

I think I’ll be back.
Maybe to work, because they have money, and I do like money.
And maybe to tourist, because they have a ski slope in a mall.

That said, there are clearly some downsides to the place; It’s a good idea not to get into unpayable debt, for example.
Not sure what worker health & safety is like, but I’d not be laying good odds on a robust system being in place.

---

Baniyas Square at probably a bit before midnight. It was less blurry in real life.

And in the morning.

 

Downlighting in the closet gives a certain undeserved grandeur to my hoodie.

This is probably the first hotel room I’ve ever stayed in that didn’t have Gideons Bible.
Some of them also had a Book of Mormon.
This one … Takes another path.

This interested me, from a civic point of view.

Whereas it’s the disclaimer on this one I was drawn to.
“Bears no accurate perspective to anything” is something I’d have dearly loved to tag some work with over the years.

 

Complimentary in the sense of no charge, not in the says nice things sense.

Checking out was mostly done the night before, so it was really only handing over my key cards that needed to happen.
Naturally, I slept crappily, so my biggest challenge was to not fall asleep at the Bus Station before the bus got there.
The Christchurch Bus Station has been designed with weather in mind. Buses pull into glassed-in little bays, automatic doors open, and the whole thing is intended to limit your exposure to the outside world.
Unless you’re on an InterCity bus; Then it’s a standard pavement & roadside loading for you, so you stay in the waiting room until you see the driver open up the big luggage hatches, and scuttle across at that point.

I’ve had better bus trips, to be honest.
Also worse.
The piped music was very loud for a while, then it was turned down, and finally off. Sadly, this allowed the two elderly ladies directly behind me to natter pretty much constantly, mostly on a theme of Anything different to how I’d do it is wrong, with a slight foray into how a person’s preference for floral shirts over solid colour, combined with his encyclopedic knowledge of female celebrities, meant that he was Trans but hadn’t admitted it yet.

I spent a lot of time sleeping & listening to podcasts.

They quietened down after Kaikoura, when one of them fell asleep, gives chance for the guy at the back with what looked like a partially completed Mongrel Mob tattoo to talk himself up a bit.
Back to napping & podcasts.

The bus damn near emptied at Blenheim, and was wonderfully quiet for the run into Picton.

Tombstone Backpackers was pretty much where I left it, which was a relief.

The Complimentary Cat greeted me with a Mra! when I opened the door, which could have been “You disturbed my nap”, “Oh, it’s you again”, or Poing’s suggestion, “I ordered a petting and lap-providing monkey hours ago! Why does room service take so long in this place?”.

And that’s pretty much how my afternoon went; Providing lap services to the Cat, until the room got cold with the windows open, and I got hungry, at which point the cat was offered an exit option & I went to ‘cook’ the can of chilli I’d been carrying around since Greymouth.
At one stage I temporarily relocated the Cat, in order to put my feet under a blanket, because it was getting cold. The Cat interpreted this as “Ooooh! A Cave!”, and this was the result.

I would be interested in finding out whether anyone has done work on, for want of a better phrase, the micro-geography of social spaces.
The kitchen at Tombstone (that was an odd thing to type) is OK in the social sense; People talk, though mostly about food, access to kitchen equipment, what on earth they did to their rice to give it the consistency of bricklayer’s cement, that sort of thing.
The dining area? Dead. Those folks who were traveling together talked, the rest … nothing.
I’m wondering whether a setup of many small round tables leads to people sitting in groups with their backs to the rest of the room, because that’s how round tables work, and the smallness of the table leads to people not sharing because they’d be right in someone’s face.

It’s just a thought, but I did notice a big difference between the Picton & Greymouth hostels in terms of dining room socialness.

I woke overly early, as one does, or at least as this one does, though I did sleep pretty well once I ditched the blanket (I’d needed it the previous time, but there were maybe more covers on the bed this time? it certainly felt heavier) , so I was showered and somewhat ready to go when the alarm went off.

I was even more ready, super extra double-plus ready, when the text from Interislander Ferries saying “Yeah, we’re running about 45 minutes late” arrived, or, as I interpreted it,”Go ahead and have a second coffee with breakfast; You’ve got time”.

The Tombstone does a complimentary breakfast, which I was never awake early enough to take advantage of last time, but was determined to have this time.
As it was, at 7:45ish, it was Me & Gary the owner/sconemaker, for this breakfast included fresh-baked scones, so we chatted a bit about where I’d been in my travels, and how the hostel was going, and which other hostels I’d been to.
It was a good chat.
And a good scone.

Could have nabbed a lift to the ferry. but I chose to walk, mostly because I get bored easily.
And it’s not like Picton is very big, or my bag is that heavy, despite how it feels.
Thus, I ambled via the Awesome Playground,

saw misc boats from the ferry terminal deck,

and got increasing suspicious about the ferry setup; There’s nowhere you can be which will let you watch the ferry dock up-close (the Aratere, at least), and the Bluebridge folks make sure you’re buttoned up before docking.
What don’t they want you to see?
What was added to the Aratere when they lengthened it?
And why are there clawmarks on the pier?

Much like Arthur’s Pass Railway Station, there was a creepy moment on the ferry.

Because there’s a gangway tube thing at the Interislander terminal, foot passengers get on board well before the vehicular ones (It was the other way around on Bluebridge), and because I was sitting close to the entryway, I was the first one on, and walked into the enormous empty lounge, which lead to empty aircraft-style seating, connecting to an empty foodcourt & an equally empty bar.
It filled up quickly … actually, it never got full, even when the group of teenagers going to the/a Stage Challenge arrived & spread themselves out over the couches … but for a while I was having thoughts of the Sapphire & Steel episode with the empty station hotel all over again. “Report On An Unidentified Space Station” would also apply, I think.

Unlike the other ferry, this one had a viewing deck up at the bow, which was kind of nice.

Within Queen Charlotte Sound, and indeed Wellington harbour, things were pretty calm; Out in Cook Strait there was an interesting pitch/roll combo going on, which mostly seemed to be there to amuse small children when the ship hit a decent roller & sent spray everywhere.

Also, there was a scone trolley.

And so, in the primitive conditions of scone trolleys, foodcourts, a bar, a movie theatre showing Batman vs. Superman, (which I skipped), and a playground for the kids, (who I think were playing at shipwrecks, which seems … fate-tempting), we made it to Wellington.

Well, not the centre of Wellington, but there’s a wee bus which took me to a somewhat familiar location.