for some things there is no cure but time. Like a hangover or a broken heart, you just have to wait your jet lag out and try to live through it as best you can.
Of all the suggested ‘cures’ I think that trying to get on to local time as quickly as possible is probably the best, but doing it is so phenomenally unpleasant. Walking around on feet I can no longer feel, swimming through air that seems lit with little silvery tadpoles, the pavement lurching towards me… everything takes on a strange, hallucinogenic quality. (Mind you, if you’re that way inclined, it’ll save you a fortune in recreational drugs.)
In Australia, I had the worst ever example of this. In a pitiful attempt to recover from a twenty-four-hour flight and an eleven-hour time difference, Himself and myself thought we’d ‘do a little exercise’ and ‘walk around in the sunlight’ as soon as we arrived.
It was early evening and clutching our bottles of water (‘drink plenty of water’), we staggered about on an area of greenness so verdant that we gradually realized it must be a golf course. Bumping into each other and grumpily apologizing, like we were scuttered, I suddenly saw something that stopped me so abruptly in my tracks it was as if I’d run into an invisible wall. Through the gathering gloom, about twentyfeet away, I saw two kangaroos kicking the CRAP out of each other. They were balancing on their tail and laying into their sparring partner with such powerful
whump
s that I could actually
feel
the impacts. They were kicking each other so hard and fast it was as though they were doing kung-fu.
It was then that I got a bad dose of The Fear. ‘Please tell me,’ I clutched Himself’s arm, ‘please tell me that you see them too.’ (He said, ‘See what?’ but he was only messing, thank Christ.)
However, jet lag isn’t all bad. It’s a great excuse to go out and get pure stotious, on the principle that if you’re sick and psychotic with a hangover you won’t notice the jet lag. Or if you were planning a nervous breakdown, now’s your chance. You’ll be feeling alienated and fearful anyway, so you might as well double up. And my own personal favourite: jet lag affords the perfect opportunity to eat guilt-free Toblerones at two in the morning. Picture it – it’s pitch-black outside, a deep blanket of sleep has settled on whatever strange city you’re in, and suddenly, as if you’ve just been plugged into the mains, you’re AWAKE. You’re super-awake, you’ve never before been this alert in your
life
. You’re so firing on all cylinders that you could go on
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
and win it in fifteen minutes. And you’re also hungry. Savagely so. Your poor stomach is still on home time; it had to miss its breakfast and it’s not best pleased that someone wants to deprive it of its lunch as well. But deep in the bowels of the silent, sleeping hotel, the room-service lads have shut up shop and gone home and it’s a long, long wait until morning.
What choice have you but to shine the luminous light of themini-bar into the darkened room and select an overpriced, supersized bag of M&Ms and clamber back into bed to eat yourself back to sleep.
See? Not all bad.
A version of this was first published in
Abroad,
July 2004
.
Stack ’n’ Fly
‘It is better to travel than to arrive.’
Whoever said that should get his head examined. It is NOT better to travel. To travel is AWFUL and to arrive is LOVELY.
The only time it’s not entirely unbearable to travel is when you’re on the Orient Express, and your daily champagne allowance would fell an elephant. Or on a cruise liner the size of a small country, and you’re sailing from place to place but it doesn’t feel like it, the same way you don’t feel the earth turning at four million miles a day (or whatever it is).
Let’s look at how awful it is to TRAVEL, will we? I won’t even mention the car-clogged crawl to the airport, the dog-eat-dog scramble for
Of all the suggested ‘cures’ I think that trying to get on to local time as quickly as possible is probably the best, but doing it is so phenomenally unpleasant. Walking around on feet I can no longer feel, swimming through air that seems lit with little silvery tadpoles, the pavement lurching towards me… everything takes on a strange, hallucinogenic quality. (Mind you, if you’re that way inclined, it’ll save you a fortune in recreational drugs.)
In Australia, I had the worst ever example of this. In a pitiful attempt to recover from a twenty-four-hour flight and an eleven-hour time difference, Himself and myself thought we’d ‘do a little exercise’ and ‘walk around in the sunlight’ as soon as we arrived.
It was early evening and clutching our bottles of water (‘drink plenty of water’), we staggered about on an area of greenness so verdant that we gradually realized it must be a golf course. Bumping into each other and grumpily apologizing, like we were scuttered, I suddenly saw something that stopped me so abruptly in my tracks it was as if I’d run into an invisible wall. Through the gathering gloom, about twentyfeet away, I saw two kangaroos kicking the CRAP out of each other. They were balancing on their tail and laying into their sparring partner with such powerful
whump
s that I could actually
feel
the impacts. They were kicking each other so hard and fast it was as though they were doing kung-fu.
It was then that I got a bad dose of The Fear. ‘Please tell me,’ I clutched Himself’s arm, ‘please tell me that you see them too.’ (He said, ‘See what?’ but he was only messing, thank Christ.)
However, jet lag isn’t all bad. It’s a great excuse to go out and get pure stotious, on the principle that if you’re sick and psychotic with a hangover you won’t notice the jet lag. Or if you were planning a nervous breakdown, now’s your chance. You’ll be feeling alienated and fearful anyway, so you might as well double up. And my own personal favourite: jet lag affords the perfect opportunity to eat guilt-free Toblerones at two in the morning. Picture it – it’s pitch-black outside, a deep blanket of sleep has settled on whatever strange city you’re in, and suddenly, as if you’ve just been plugged into the mains, you’re AWAKE. You’re super-awake, you’ve never before been this alert in your
life
. You’re so firing on all cylinders that you could go on
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
and win it in fifteen minutes. And you’re also hungry. Savagely so. Your poor stomach is still on home time; it had to miss its breakfast and it’s not best pleased that someone wants to deprive it of its lunch as well. But deep in the bowels of the silent, sleeping hotel, the room-service lads have shut up shop and gone home and it’s a long, long wait until morning.
What choice have you but to shine the luminous light of themini-bar into the darkened room and select an overpriced, supersized bag of M&Ms and clamber back into bed to eat yourself back to sleep.
See? Not all bad.
A version of this was first published in
Abroad,
July 2004
.
Stack ’n’ Fly
‘It is better to travel than to arrive.’
Whoever said that should get his head examined. It is NOT better to travel. To travel is AWFUL and to arrive is LOVELY.
The only time it’s not entirely unbearable to travel is when you’re on the Orient Express, and your daily champagne allowance would fell an elephant. Or on a cruise liner the size of a small country, and you’re sailing from place to place but it doesn’t feel like it, the same way you don’t feel the earth turning at four million miles a day (or whatever it is).
Let’s look at how awful it is to TRAVEL, will we? I won’t even mention the car-clogged crawl to the airport, the dog-eat-dog scramble for
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