A bit bling, but this is how to do luxury in the air
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Am I shallow for liking this, quite a lot? We flew Emirates 1st from Hong Kong to Bangkok just for the experience. Actually this sector is very reasonably priced and we were accompanied off the plane by almost all our fellow 1st class passengers when we landed at Bangkok so it's not exactly a secret. I don't know how many new travellers took our seats for the onward flight to Dubai. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did. If you're not a plane nerd (such as I am rapidly becoming) you may not recognise this as Emirates' Airbus A380. If that doesn't matter to you then you don't know it's guilty little secret. It has shower rooms on board. Yup, not just toilets you can actually stand up in but showers provided with Bulgari toiletries ffs! Now, this is decadence of a high order. The A380 is fairly fuel efficient, for a small town with wings but it still takes a lot of little hydrocarbon molecules to get off the ground. So any extra weight is expensive and produces even more CO2 to keep our little planet warm. So, did I feel like a jerk for enjoying my 5 minutes of hot wet nakedness at 40,000 feet? Nope, not a bit of it. Had a great big silly smile on my face. To return to my seat feeling (and smelling) fresh as a daisy for disembarkation is as far from being part of the travelling herd as I am ever likely to get.
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Am I shallow for liking this, quite a lot? We flew Emirates 1st from Hong Kong to Bangkok just for the experience. Actually this sector is very reasonably priced and we were accompanied off the plane by almost all our fellow 1st class passengers when we landed at Bangkok so it's not exactly a secret. I don't know how many new travellers took our seats for the onward flight to Dubai. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did. If you're not a plane nerd (such as I am rapidly becoming) you may not recognise this as Emirates' Airbus A380. If that doesn't matter to you then you don't know it's guilty little secret. It has shower rooms on board. Yup, not just toilets you can actually stand up in but showers provided with Bulgari toiletries ffs! Now, this is decadence of a high order. The A380 is fairly fuel efficient, for a small town with wings but it still takes a lot of little hydrocarbon molecules to get off the ground. So any extra weight is expensive and produces even more CO2 to keep our little planet warm. So, did I feel like a jerk for enjoying my 5 minutes of hot wet nakedness at 40,000 feet? Nope, not a bit of it. Had a great big silly smile on my face. To return to my seat feeling (and smelling) fresh as a daisy for disembarkation is as far from being part of the travelling herd as I am ever likely to get.
The Scene of the crime
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I and my wife have become part of a growing band of wandering travel bloggers of the "I gave up my job to travel and write all about it so you can live vicariously" type. Or maybe in the hope of having an audience to inspire. I have no idea how many of us there are but I find a new blog of this sort most days, mainly by following links on Twitter. Many, I think are writing their blogs in the hope of being discovered by enough people that they can make money from advertising, endorsements, freebies and the like to pay for their adventures. I am not being critical in the negative sense of this trend, I am just curious about it and a little sceptical of the likelihood of success.
Anyway, it struck me quite forcibly during this luxurious little journey that there is a sizeable body of opinion that would regard this as irresponsible and selfish profligacy. Now, whereas I don't believe it can be denied that the global temperature has been on a mainly rising trend over the past century or so - after all the annual Arctic melt is getting more extensive and glaciers in all sorts of places are retreating - I notice there is still more than one set of ideas about why this is happening and what the significance is. Let alone whether there is anything we could do about it or what and if it would be a good thing anyway. Any moment now I expect to be labelled "a climate denier" by religious zealots in the environmental lobby who suppress all creative discussion of the topic by chanting their mantras. What people ought to allow for in the discourse is that science, all science allows an element of doubt. We should be suspicious of anyone who says "there is no doubt" about anything.
By the way, sitting in the cabin of a 380 watching the view from the tail-cam as she takes of is awesome!
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I and my wife have become part of a growing band of wandering travel bloggers of the "I gave up my job to travel and write all about it so you can live vicariously" type. Or maybe in the hope of having an audience to inspire. I have no idea how many of us there are but I find a new blog of this sort most days, mainly by following links on Twitter. Many, I think are writing their blogs in the hope of being discovered by enough people that they can make money from advertising, endorsements, freebies and the like to pay for their adventures. I am not being critical in the negative sense of this trend, I am just curious about it and a little sceptical of the likelihood of success.
Anyway, it struck me quite forcibly during this luxurious little journey that there is a sizeable body of opinion that would regard this as irresponsible and selfish profligacy. Now, whereas I don't believe it can be denied that the global temperature has been on a mainly rising trend over the past century or so - after all the annual Arctic melt is getting more extensive and glaciers in all sorts of places are retreating - I notice there is still more than one set of ideas about why this is happening and what the significance is. Let alone whether there is anything we could do about it or what and if it would be a good thing anyway. Any moment now I expect to be labelled "a climate denier" by religious zealots in the environmental lobby who suppress all creative discussion of the topic by chanting their mantras. What people ought to allow for in the discourse is that science, all science allows an element of doubt. We should be suspicious of anyone who says "there is no doubt" about anything.
By the way, sitting in the cabin of a 380 watching the view from the tail-cam as she takes of is awesome!