Christchurch
Outside the airplane, the temperature of the troposphere is a frigid -45 degrees Centigrade, and the windows do not even fog up. Never mind that, I thought. The inside of the airplane was already approaching Hyperborean level itself. The muscle fibres inside my thighs tremble completely outside my volition, clashing my kneecaps together like a pair of cymbals. I clench and unclench my fist, apprehensively examining the veins stretched taut on the surface of my skin, sandwiched between bone and epithelium, now clearly visible against the dark red hue of my flesh. The cold was getting to me. It did not help that I was slightly airsick at the moment. Planted in my seat, I suppressed the urge to regurgitate the contents of my stomach all over the back of the seat in front of me. I snatched up the glass of orange juice sitting on the flight table in front of me, ignored since lunch, and downed it in one. A combination of citric and ascorbic acid seared my throat in the chilly air, flooding the pit of my stomach with newfound heat and dispelling the numbness within my brain. Uncertainty eased a little, and fired with what seemed to be borrowed courage, I looked out the plane window to the big open sea.
The sunlight was fading a little bit, obscured slightly by a cloud. But nobody needs light to sense the large monster looming underneath us. The gelid ocean is always intimidating. In broad daylight, like now, it's not that terrifying. However, once the sun sets and darkness rolls over the waves, everything changes; you cannot help but be abashed and just scared out of your wits by it. Incalculable cubic densities of water more than twenty kilometres deep in some places. Stretching to the four corners of the Earth, touching every continent and dwarfing the mighty, gargantuan land. Home to surely infinite sea dwellers; everything under the choppy surface of the water, from the diatomic to the Cyclopean whale.
Whales. Beside the great blue whale, Man is insignificant. You look at it and go, "Whoah, now that is large!". Then you finally realise that the whale is a mere raindrop in the monster known as the ocean. And in moments like this, when you're flying over this bare, puny fringe of the ocean, flying over the largest mystery on planet Earth, a person starts to get a rough idea of the power and immensity of the ocean.
It is also in moments like this, that you feel your own smallness, your own utter weakness pressing you hard in the chest like a lead weight.
It's not that the ocean is a large enemy. Its water grows our gardens; whose electric eels power our houses; whose jellyfishes fill our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (Okay, maybe none of those things do any of those things, forget I ever wrote that). Its fishes feeds you, its seaweed helps to make the oxygen you breathe, and its organisms gave birth to Man himself. But also, should you get careless or overconfident, it kills you lazily with a wave of its hand. It simply could not care less. All the above done without even the slightest personal interest.
There is nothing to be said to the ocean. It has no mercy to be begged. It has no deals to be cut. Effortlessly, it would simply smother us, crush us, and bury us forever in its own personal deep-sea graveyard, amongst the masses of black, suffocating seawater which took the Titanic on the 15th of April, 1912.
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Christchurch Airport is a lot smaller than Auckland's. Nonetheless, airliners arrive every few minutes and tourists heaving large suitcases walk by. A nearby plane was disgorging passengers from a nearby gate. Most of the arriving passengers looked querulous, irascible and exhausted. Some of them smiled wearily for their relatives and friends who had came to welcome them, probably feeling worse for the wear. It was probably a long flight, characterised by the large amount of irritable people and the fact that some of them had deep pressure marks on their faces and arms, as if they had been sleeping with their heads plastered against the window of the airplane or planted on their forearms. Outside, the air is its usual 21 degrees Centigrade, but there is something wrong. The sun burns intensely, and my skin smarts instantly. Flummoxed, I rub the stinging areas in a frenzy, contemplating why the sun was blazing so furiously. Why, it was even stronger than the sun in Singapore! I began to discreetly doubt the fickle climate, that is, until the usual cooling wind blew down my neck, soothing the burned places to reassert the norm.