And so it begins again...

Getting there isn’t half the fun, I hope.
Our great new adventure started prosaically enough on February 6 with a cab ride from Yarker to Kingston airport and then a flight to Toronto. After a short layover we embarked on a brutal 13-hour flight to Nerita (Tokyo), with no time off for good behaviour.
We flew over the trackless North, mostly tundra and frozen muskeg. About three hours into the flight we saw endless snow-covered mountains, treeless, pristine and forbidding. Between them were occasional rivers of ice that glistened in the brilliant sunshine. Later, the Bering Strait, completely clogged with ice, gave way further south to pack-ice, and the frozen coast of Kamchatka. There was a faint stirring of distant, disquieting memories of a KAL flight shot down here during the Cold War, 30 or more years ago, for encroaching on Soviet airspace. Then, over Japan, cloud rolled in, and we could see nothing until our rainy landing at Nerita.
The airport was little different than other international airports, except premium sake and exquisite Japanese baked sweets were for sale in the shops. People wore face masks against pollution, or perhaps the infectious crowds of foreigners, bringing who-knows-what diseases from exotic places like Yarker.
Our brief 2 hour stop ended too soon, with a seven-hour flight to Bankok in tiny, confining seats, a barely endurable ordeal. We stumble through customs and into a cab, exhausted and numbed, and head for our hotel. A quick and surprisingly good meal from a street cafe, of fried cashews, dry-curried chicken, tempura prawns and green mango salad, then 12 hours blessed oblivion at the hotel, helped restore two very tired travellers.