A Deliberately Slow Start to our Slow Travel.

It is worth remembering (I think, anyway) that when you travel from Australia to Europe you stretch time.  Each step westward from one time zone to the next takes you back 1 hour, meaning you have spent n hours to advance n-1 in real time.  In those terms, we were stretching time by 9 hours by travelling from eastern Australia to Central European Time.
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We elected to spread that ‘time stretch’ over the course of three full days of travel.  In practical terms, that felt like we had three 27 hour days in airports and planes.  At the time of writing, we have been in Rome for just under a full day, which is enough time I think to gauge the effects of that slow progress on our body clocks.  I feel fine, and completely absent of jet lag.  I woke this morning at around 5am and my body clock feels completely in synch with the movement of the sun across the sky and the rhythm of the city.

Once we left Melbourne we elected to stay ‘airside’ (that is, within the airport transit zones) and to stay in transit hotels within those zones.  At the end of each day’s flight leg (no more than 8 hours flying) we were able to access a shower, a proper bed and a decent meal, and start the next ‘27 hour day’ relatively refreshed.  Rooms in the transit hotels are not cheap, and I reckon the strategy added about $500 each to the cost of our journey from Devonport to Rome.  Thats around 25%-30% of our airfares.  When compared to an upgraded service like Premium Economy (add about 100% to the economy fare), that seems to me to be a pretty good balance.  At least, it worked for our particular circumstances.

I’m a convert to the theory of slowing your travel progress.  Of course, the ‘cost’ of the strategy is that it diminishes the time you have to experience the places you are travelling to.  Everything is a balancing act, and I think we got this one pretty right.