20th March: Doha, Qatar to Exeter, United Kingdom

Interestingly, we had another security check after departing the plane before re-entering the departures area in Doha. Looking at the departure boards, our connecting flight was on time, so we had around 3 hours to wait. You really can get anywhere from Qatar. Flights were scheduled to depart to destinations as diverse as the Seychelles, New York, Baghdad, Osaka, Moscow, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Munich, Kigali, and Adelaide in the next couple of hours.

I went for a walk to stretch my legs around the terminal but was already hilariously tired. It was a real job not to walk into people. We were only halfway into the journey home! An hour before departure, check-in opened, and we moved through to the lounge area. Yet again, I was picked out for a random security check and had to have my laptop and camera meticulously checked and swabbed for explosives.

Our second flight was a giant A380. It was the first time Kaja had flown on one of these behemoths. Around us, the plane was very quiet with enough room for each person to lay down on 3 or 4 seats if they wished. It was also quiet in terms of noise, as well as occupancy, compared with the earlier flight. It was possible to hold conversations and to relax without the usual uncomfortably loud engine noise. We tried to sleep a little, although I think I only drifted off once or twice for a few minutes each.

As we jetted west, twilight very gradually grew brighter over our right shoulders. We were brought breakfast and tea, as I finally gave in to the urge for caffeine to see me through this second part of our longest day. As we were chased by a new dawn, snows sat below on the mountains of Bohemia and Bavaria. Over the Ruhr valley, the giant machines of the open coal pits could just about be made out from 40,000 feet.

The familiar landscape of Belgium and the Netherlands soon appeared below, with the docks of Antwerp in the foreground and the great deltas of the Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhine stretching north before emptying into the North Sea. As we descended towards the east cost of the UK, we dropped into a cloud layer at 4,700 metres just off the Thames estuary, before exiting this 1,000 metres lower.

As we entered a random loop over southeast London, which planes often take on the route into Heathrow, we saw the red orb of the sun under the cloud layer to our east. A new day was dawning. We passed over the familiar station and residential towers of Croydon, with the city of London just about visible to the north. There must be an easterly breeze today, because we headed out over Surrey before looping back to land from the more unusual westerly direction into Heathrow. As we did so, the moon glowed beyond the tip of the right wing. The A380’s disconcertingly loud and clanky flaps and landing gear were deployed and we touched down on a new chapter in the UK. Pretty much on time and, thankfully, to a sunny day. I think it would’ve been tough to face the usual grey London weather!

Walking across the air bridge it was immediately chilly, however, at around 6C. One final passport check, and we were officially home. Kaja checked her tracking app, and our bags seemed to be here too, and indeed they were on the belt. No issues this time around! We’d pre-booked a train from Reading back to Exeter for a few hours’ time but still had to get there. Heathrow and Reading are only 35 km apart, but the train fare was £25 per person. I thought back to China and how this would have gotten us 600-700 km on comfortable high-speed trains. Welcome back to rip off Britain! Thankfully, the Elizabeth line does at least make this journey fairly convenient, with more trains available for the change at Hayes and Harlington.

It was a lovely sunny morning as we passed commuters heading the opposite direction into Central London. We had a couple of hours in Reading, which was a buffer in case of flight delays. Fortunately, we could spend this in a café instead. It was odd watching street life in the UK after so long in Asia. The midweek scenes were unmistakeably of town centre England, typical of places up and down the country. Old people pottered about, with little to stimulate their senses in the identikit high street. Groups who looked like they’d never left the town paced quickly past. Shifty looking characters in suits pretended to look busy and important. Young mothers with prams navigated them all, attempting to look for hope in the future of this doomed land.

A coffee, hot chocolate, and a couple of pastries cost more than we’d have spent on food in a day at any time for the past 6 months. We took the short walk back to Reading’s impressive (by UK standards) station to board our final train of this trip. It was non-stop to Exeter and, after an hour and half of fields and rolling hills, we arrived back in the heart of Devon. The trees still carried the brown hues of winter, but the first tiny green buds hinted at spring and new beginnings to come.