IanFromHKG

To my mind, there are two kinds of red-eyes. The West-to-East-US (short, don't leave much time to sleep) and the big'uns (Asia to Europe). I'm British and live in Hong Kong, so i get a lot of the latter. Get up at 7 or 8 am, fly at around midnight for 12-13 hours, arrive at 5 or 6 am. That is two long days with a flight in-between that is too long to sleep through. But I understand the short ones can be a killer too. Here is my story... It's quite long (but, I hope, entertaining for others, although it wasn't for me at the time). So if you don't have time, skip to the last line.

A few years ago my then employer had an offsite in San Francisco. In order to see family I converted my ticket to a round-the-world one, and flew to London for the weekend before flying from there to SFO.I spent the next two and a half days in a basement. Honestly, a basement! Having (literally) not seen the light of day for three days by this time, I was keen to meet up with a friend, who took me out to the "gayborhood" for the evening (which was enormously entertaining (!)). One or (ahem) two (ahem!) drinks were consumed. At the end of the evening he kindly dropped me back at my hotel to pick up my things and rush to the airport for my red-eye to NY. Having had what felt like my first human contact (as in real humans, not people attending offsites) for days, I was buzzed and couldn't sleep. Next thing I knew I was in NY, feeling wildly disorientated. i was heading there for a breakfast meeting, but my brain had just shut down. I was so jet lagged, and so sleep-deprived, I really could not think rationally. I eventually found an AA lounge and tried to inform the lovely lady on reception that although I had just flown in and therefore not an obvious candidate for a departure lounge, I was badly in need of protein. This took a while since I had apparently lost the capacity for coherent speech. Every attempt I made to show my ticket or FF status ended up with me wading through piles of crap in my hand luggage and being a complete failure - eventually she took pity on me and (perhaps surprisingly) rather than calling for gentlemen in white jackets, kindly directed me to another lounge where I was able to eat enormous quantities of bacon and started to rediscover what it felt like to be a human being with something resembling a functioning brain.

I then headed downtown for my meeting, at which (I was told later, and much to my relief) I did manage to make some sort of sense. Then, I headed straight back to JFK for my onward flight to HKG, having spent about 7 hours (including the time I spent in the arrival lounge wolfing bacon, and my transfers to the meeting!) in New York.

Great flight. Would have been even better if there hadn't been a typhoon in HK which meant that after two hours of circling HK (who knew 777s had so much spare fuel capacity?) we were diverted to Manila. And held on the plane, for a while, as they tried to find a new crew to take us back to HK. Having failed on this, they had to try to find accommodation. We were finally let off the plane after 18 hours (including flying time) on board, during which period I tried quite hard to eat and drink as much as I could since I didn't know when I would next get the chance. We were eventually taken (without going through immigration!) to a hotel in the middle of Nowhere, Outskirts of Manila. Dinner was a shambles and took hours as the hotel clearly hadn't planned for 300 unexpected guests. We didn't know when our flight would take off but were told it might be as early as 7am the next day. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much. Desperate to get home, I was calling Cathay in the small hours. No luck (we were stuck there for two days). So the following morning I tried to work out how long I had been wearing the same clothes - let's see - all of the day in San Francisco, during the red-eye, during my 7-hour stopover in NY, another 24 hours or so for the flight to Manila and transfer to the hotel.... Ugh. Now THAT, my friends (and there is more to the story, but I will end it there) is a red-eye story.

I don't like red-eyes!