The Worst Journey in the WorldAspley Cherry Garrard was the youngest member of the Scott Polar Expedition when he and two others lost their tent to the winds of a night-time snowstorm. They spent hours in temperatures below -70°F stumbling about the ice floes hoping they'd bump into it as it was their only hope of survival.
OK, so that was bad, but we reckon you've had worse. We know how hard you lot are.
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chthonic, Thu 7 Sep 2006, 12:40)
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In 1984, my family and Imoved over to the UK from Australia when I was at the tender age of seven. Dad goes booking tickets and (so I'm told) gets home with a bit of a guilty face saying he has good and bad news. Good news, we'd get to spend a week in Singapore and it was really cheap. Bad news? Well, we fly to Singapore on BA but then have to finish the journey with PIA (Pakistani International).
The journey between Singapore and London was in two legs, one on a rather shabby DC9 that smelt and is the only aircraft I have ever been sick on, the other on the dodgiest 747 I have ever seen. It must have been one of the original models of 747, smelt like a plastic bag full of turd and was tightly packed with an assorment of different patterned, well worn seats (suggesting that they'd all previously been fitted to about five different aircraft - possibly the actual ones from those 1970's air disaster films).
The flight boarded. Headsets and programmes were handed out (Paul McCartney was on the front of the programme, I don't know why) and then they heaved the fucker off the runway.
When the 'No Smoking' signs beeped off, the air became a thick grey. The audio system refused to work, so the programmes and headsets were a dead loss. They showed the first ten minutes of a pretty violent film (something to do with a violent armed bank job)which upset me and my brother (we were only seven and nine at the time) before the fucking projectors broke down. We stopped at some ungodly airport where there were scary beggars in the fucking foul toilets (almost as bad as the ones on the plane). Stopped again at Paris (why fucking Paris? It's only about another fifteen minutes to London) and then
The highlight of the whole trip!
Coming into Heathrow, there was a queue. The pilot begins to pull white knuckle 50 degree turns (hand luggage is rolling around the cabin) at the corners of the stack making everybody hang on for dear life. One of the final turns was so steep that it fucked up something in the planes waste system (I don't know what) and blue water with toilet roll in began to stream down the aisle toward the tail. I still feel sorry for anyone who was back there.
None of us would ever travel PIA ever again. Not even if it was the last flight out of Iraq.
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The Togaboy The world will end on, Wed 13 Sep 2006, 15:02,
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