North East Asia / South East Asia: one crisp winter afternoon very early in 2008 I was cruising the skies of north east Asia as is sometimes my wont, on my way home from an outbreak of hot tropical love in Vietnam. I was nursing one monster hangover acrued from my antics at the Window's Cafe and Bar in Ho Chi Minh City nearly 24 hours earlier, a condition sorely compounded by those couple of extra beers I downed at Tan Son Nhut Airport waiting for my ride. I thought that if I just kept on drinking, I could drink the hangover away. Or at least keep it at bay, until I lost myself in sleep. But I hadn't factored in the infuriatingly stop-start nature of travelling in China (or travelling over China), which makes sleep -- indeed any form of relaxation -- exceedingly precarious. To give you an example, my bird (Air China) was leaving Ho Chi Minh at a ridiculous time -- 1.45am or something, and I suppose that's what you pay for when you always opt for the cheapest airliner! It was literally the last flight out, and I was the last guy drinking at the bar, downing Tiger's with ice, as our Beijingbound Air China glided in. I watched it all behind the dirty panes in the brandnew airport concourse. Presently I shuffled onboard with all the blearyeyed zombies, quite a few Germans all speaking German, and took my superdownsized seat. I was in the mood for sleep. And who knows, I might have found it (or maybe I ordered one or two more of those Chinese Olympics beers, as nightcaps!)... if it were not the fact that this was, after all, a Chinese flight. And so an hour or so into the flight, just as I had probably begun to doze off, the plane shifted into descent mode, and the stewardesses came around, waking everyone up. I wasn't surprised, since I had encountered this anomaly a few weeks earlier, on my way to Vietnam. It is not listed on your ticket or travel itineraries, but when you fly from Beijing to Ho Chi Minh City, you stop enroute at Nanning. Capital of the Guangxi Shuang Autonomous Region. There to shuffle off the plane, get confused, and wait in line for needless visa checks and passport inspections. We spent more than an hour waiting for our transit visas, and this was at 4am or something, at the end of a long session of heavy drinking (for me at least). For some strange Chinese reason only one guy (or girl) was processing passports in passport control, even though there were five or six guys/girls sitting at their desks, resplendid in their Socialist (or is that Communist) attire. This anomaly was not lost on the Germans in the line. "Eins, zwei, drei, vier, fumf..." all of them nicht arbeiten, or nicht verbeiten, or however you say it in German -- all of the just sitting there, doing nothing. What Communist inefficiency! By this stage, 12 hours after I started drinking, I was feeling decidedly green, and in desperate need for some sleep. My passport was stamped eventually. We were herded back aboard our plane round about sunrise, which revealed a rather pleasant series of yellow apartment blocks near the airport. Yellow was the color of the day, yellow and pale blue, yellow and sulphurous brown. Skysurfing southern China was a smudge of sulphuric smog, the ground barely visible, that vast agricultural heartland. I took occasional peeks out of the window, between drifts into light sleep. Peaks of cloud drifted by. Everyone on the other side of the cabin gawking out the window as we approached Beijing, seeing something I couldn't see. Maybe it was the Great Wall. At Beijing we spent more time waiting in futile lines. On the bright side, I didn't get as badly lost as I did on my first visit, that foggy carbonheavy night just because Christmas. I boarded my plane to Tokyo, Japan, and we took off in pale sunshine -- the temperature was about 0 degress C. We hit the clouds again, heading east. I think I did actually get some sleep, like an hour or so. But I was continually being distracted by the interesting scenes which opened up below, like a panorama: Dalian on its peninsula looking like a neat place to live, and finally, a little later, a dramatic metropolis emerging from the mountains, spread out like a circuitboard, or a subway map: Seoul, a city I have come to know and love, over the past six years or so...