Thanks for that, Walrus1948. I love it. So South American, where unfortunately my travels have been quite limited.
May I switch continents now, and tell you a story from the steppes of Central Asia?
Footy on the tarmac at OMS
One of my more bizarre flight itineraries ran VVO – HTA – OMS – SVO. Now I expect that will create quite a few puzzled, creased brows, even from some of our most experienced members. Let me remove the puzzlement. It’s Vladivostok – Chita – Omsk – Moscow. This was in July 1990. The Cold War was not yet buried, but it was definitely in its death throes. Gorbachev was still in power; glasnost and perestroika were all the go. Two days later, at the 28[SUP]th[/SUP] (and last, as it eventuated) congress of the Communist Party in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin broke ranks and stormed out of the Party.
So what was this journey from one extremity of Russia to the other all about? I (along with about 150 others) was representing you, my fellow Australians, at a mighty jamboree called the Australian Trade Fair, first In Vladivostok then a follow-up by about half of us in Moscow. It was a direct outcome of Gorby opening up the Russian economy to the world. On the Australian side, all sorts of bods, from Simon Crean (then Minister for Trade), bureaucrats from whatever the forerunner of DFAT was called, and people from corporate Australia, like myself, were part of the entourage.
Aeroflot provided the charter to carry us over seven time zones, a journey through extended night. What a wreck of a plane it was! My memories include a carpet runner down the aisle quite detached from the floor and lying higgledy-piggledy and rumbled; graffiti on the walls; the seat back in front of me with a broken recline mechanism, so that it could be flipped from flat onto the seat or back onto my lap. Fortunately there was no-one assigned to the seat, so I flipped it forward and could put my legs up onto it. Then when meal time came, the flight attendant, in her Stalinist-style uniform, announced apologetically that the oven in the galley had broken down, but we were welcome to take a frozen beef stroganoff and eat it once it had thawed.
The aircraft cannot have had much range, because we had to land for refuelling at Chita and Omsk, both in the Siberian vastness. All went fairly efficiently at Chita, but at Omsk we taxied to a holding area distant from the terminal, where we waited . . . and waited. The darkness was alleviated by the glow from gas flares from the adjacent oil refinery. Then the pilot informed us that the refueller had apparently forgotten that he was on duty, so he, the pilot, would have to commandeer an airport truck, drive into town and awaken the good man from his slumber. In the meantime, we would be free to get off the plane to stretch our legs, but unfortunately there were no stairs, so we would have to use the chain ladder. If all this seems strange, and very Russian, what followed was even stranger, and very Australian.
One fellow – I think he was from the Australian Wheat Board, but I’m not sure – announced that he happened to have his footy in his carry-on baggage, and that anyone who felt so inclined would be welcome to join in some kick-to-kick on the tarmac. Looking back, it boggles my mind why a grown business man would want to keep his Sherrin with him across Siberia, or anywhere for that matter. Maybe it was a substitute teddy bear. In any case, it was a most fortuitous possession, because soon a tribe of us were running around in the half light like over-grown school boys, booting the footy, laughing and hollering such inanities as “Up there Cazaly” and “Go ‘Pies” (You may be assured that this latter cry did not pass from the lips of Cocitus23.)
The experience was made even more surreal by the fact that the airport was shared with the Soviet Air Force, and about every ten minutes a fighter jet would go screaming along the runway with flames shooting from its rear-end.
