Brisbane → Singapore → London → Copenhagen
The long way to the top of the world.
We left from the coast, the way we always seem to now, with sand still turning up in the bottom of the bags.
The whole family came out to wave us off. We watched them get smaller in the rearview mirror, the whole crew standing there until the road took them for good. That part never gets easier. We want them with us all the time, in every airport and every strange city, and they can’t be, and you feel it most in the first ten minutes of driving away. But we knew exactly what we were leaving them to. Fishing up a storm. Beach walks. Sunsets that don’t quit. They’re on the vacation of their dreams down there too, which is the only thing that makes the rearview mirror bearable.
The first leg is the one where nothing has changed yet. The phone still works. The inbox still pings. You’re the same person you were at the desk, just strapped into a different chair at altitude with a head full of everything you didn’t finish. I had a list. Dee had a different list. Neither of us looked at either one.
That’s how it always begins. You don’t leave all at once. You leave in stages, one time zone at a time.
The Good Lounge, Finally
Here’s a confession. We fly a lot for work, and the one quiet dividend of spending half your life in airports is that the airlines eventually take pity on you. Enough years down the back of enough planes, and a little card turns up that occasionally opens a better door.
In Singapore, this trip, it opened the door we’d only ever walked past. The Qantas First Lounge. We are Business Lounge people by habit, so getting waved through to the First Lounge was a small and slightly ridiculous thrill, the kind you’re a bit embarrassed to admit to and fully intend to enjoy anyway.
My Oura ring spent the entire lounge reporting, with enormous confidence, that I was deeply relaxed and well rested. So I was holding a Singapore Sling at an hour my body couldn’t identify, and chose not to argue with it.
And then a 14 hour flight later…
The Hunt for Smidge
London at six-thirty in the morning, seen from inside the airport, is its own small heartbreak. Because we love this city. We’ve spent more time here than we could count, years of it, visiting the people we love. My brother, Matt lived here for a long time. Mum and dad met here and fell in love at twenty-one, and not long ago we followed their whole love story back across the city for their anniversary, one corner at a time. London is about as close to a second home as a place gets without you actually living in it.
This time, we didn’t leave the terminal. We’d landed at dawn and weren’t due out to Copenhagen until the early afternoon, a generous slab of hours by anyone’s measure, easily enough to slip into town and back. But we had somewhere more urgent to be than the city we love. So we waved at one of our favourite cities on earth through a departures window at dawn, the way you wave at family across a crowded room, and went hunting for a small bottle of liquid instead.
Smidge.
Here’s a fact about Dee. To a midge, she is the most exciting human ever to wander into the northern hemisphere. Other people get bitten. Dee gets feasted upon, ceremonially, the way you’d receive visiting royalty. And we were on our way to the two places on the planet that take midges most seriously. Greenland has them. Scotland has them in clouds thick enough to end friendships. The one repellent that genuinely works is a Scottish invention called Smidge, and it’s sold more or less nowhere outside the UK.
So the layover became a heist. Two jet-lagged Australians working the Heathrow pharmacies with quiet focus, asking increasingly hopeful questions of increasingly patient Boots staff, hunting down the small bottles that were the only thing standing between Dee and a month long buffet.
The hunt came up empty. Every Boots gave the same verdict. In June and July, Smidge is apparently one of the most popular products in the whole country, and the shelves had been stripped bare by everyone else heading north with the exact idea we had. Sold out, all over town.
No matter, because Dee does not travel into midge country unarmed. The backup is the nets. A head net for a start. And a full-body net that my dad ran up as a joke, which now looks less like a joke and more like the quiet saviour of the entire trip. Worn together they make a person look like a beekeeper who has misplaced the bees, or possibly someone reporting for work at a reactor. She will look deeply strange in every photo we take, and I’ve promised to take a great many. But she will be uneaten, and on this one subject Dee gave up caring how she looks a very long time ago.
With the hunt lost and hours still to fill before Copenhagen, we were treated to the British Airways First Class Lounge, and this one earned every word. Showers that actually refresh you. Cooked breakfasts, made properly, not held under a lamp. The whole thing a clear step up from the business lounges we know so well. This was not a seen-one-lounge-seen-them-all affair. It was the best possible way to wait and wash off a night in the air, and it leaves us with an awkward question we’d rather not answer, which is how we’re ever supposed to go back.
The Country You’re Not In
Nobody warns you that the best part of the long way is the part where you stop being anybody.
At home we are the people things happen through. The planners, the fixers, the names on the email, the ones the whole day leans on. There’s a version of that we love and would never give back. But it means you are always someone. Always reachable. Always on the hook for the next thing. You forget there’s any other way to exist.
An airport at the wrong hour quietly undoes all of it. Nobody in Changi at two in the morning knows what you do, and not one of them cares. You’re just another tired body holding a passport, shuffling toward a gate, exactly equal to everyone else in the line. The relief in that is enormous and badly underrated. For a few hours you are no one, headed nowhere anyone needs you to be, and your shoulders drop a full inch without being asked.
Underneath all of it there’s a deeper thing, and it’s about time. Cross enough zones and time stops being a line and turns into a loose suggestion. You lose a whole day somewhere over the planet and never see it again. Your body swears it’s the dead of night while the window insists on afternoon. For two people whose working life runs on the clock, on the exact light and the exact timeline pinned to the minute, there’s something close to holy about a long stretch of hours that belong to no zone at all. The calendar can’t reach you up there.
That’s the real luxury of the long way. Not the lie-flat seat. Not the shower, lovely as it was. The luxury is that somewhere over the top of the world the signal dies, the inbox goes quiet because it has no other option, and for the first time in far too long, nobody alive can find us.
The Coloured Mile
And then you land, and the world goes solid again.
We came down at Kastrup, which turns out to be one of the oldest airports on earth. It opened in 1925 with grass runways that were kept trimmed by a flock of sheep, herded off the field before every takeoff. The very same year, on the other side of the planet, Brisbane opened Eagle Farm. Two infant airports at opposite ends of the world, both quietly turning a hundred last year, and here were two of us landing at the Danish one, Brisbane being about as close to a shared hometown as the pair of us has ever managed. The symmetry meant nothing to anyone but us, which is generally how symmetry works.
Copenhagen at five in the afternoon has the light other cities save for midday. This far north in summer the day keeps going long past reason, the sun loitering off to one side and gilding everything sideways for hours. For two people who chase light for a living, it’s almost rude how easy it is here. You don’t hunt the good hour. The good hour just stays. Back home we’d have called it golden hour and chased it across town for twenty frantic minutes before it vanished. Here it simply appears after lunch and refuses to leave.
We dropped the bags and went straight back out, because the only cure for too long in the air is to walk until your legs remember they’re legs. Fifteen minutes from anywhere central is Nyhavn, the row of narrow houses in toy-box colours leaning over the water, the most photographed canal in the country, on every Copenhagen postcard ever printed. Bikes everywhere, more bikes than cars, the little bell doing the work that a car horn does at home except somehow politely.
Here’s the thing about those famous colours. They weren’t chosen by a committee with taste. The houses were painted in different bright shades so the sailors who lived in them could find their way home in the dark, mostly from the taverns directly across the quay, where they’d been for several hours. The prettiest canal in Scandinavia is, at its heart, a navigation system for the profoundly drunk. We loved it more for knowing that, not less.
And on this exact canal, for eighteen years, longer than he lived anywhere else, lived Hans Christian Andersen. He published his first fairy tales here, The Tinderbox and The Princess and the Pea, at number 20. There’s a particular rightness to a man writing fairy tales on the prettiest, drunkest, most invented-looking street in the city, as if the canal had been colour-graded specifically for him.
The Danes Eat Early
The Danes eat early, and tonight so did we.
What we were after was smørrebrød on the quay. One slice of dark rye, open-faced and never folded, loaded with pickled herring or roast beef and crisp onions, eaten properly with a knife and fork, because the Danes have rules about this and the rules are correct. A cold Carlsberg beside it, well earned, having crossed three countries to reach the first one.
Asking around for the good version, the proper smørrebrød and the right Carlsberg, we got pointed a few streets back from the canal to a place called Restaurant Palægade. From the door it looked like smørrebrød was a lunch-only affair. It turned out the restaurant sits in the Michelin Guide, run by the same people behind a Michelin-starred kitchen across town. We only felt like something light after all that travel. We ended up sitting down to a proper meal instead, completely by accident, and grateful they found room to squeeze us in at all.
We ate outside, on the footpath, in the streets of Copenhagen, the golden-hour light doing what it does here and refusing to leave. Conversations drifted past in three or four languages. We just breathed, properly, for what felt like the first time in days after being sealed in an aircraft for most of them. It was an incredible meal. So good it reset the whole trip. A superb introduction to Denmark, and to everything waiting ahead of us. We almost turned it down because we were too tired to sit up straight. We are so glad we didn’t. It was a favourite night. New favourite food.
Afterwards, ice cream, because there’s a Danish original that has been made the same way for the better part of a century, and it would have been rude not to.
We took the long way back, past the old Hong Kong Bar down the quay, one of Nyhavn’s original sailors’ bars, still lit when the rest of the row goes dark. The name has nothing to do with China. It’s a leftover from the age when the way you reached a faraway place was to sail to it for months, and then name a bar after the dream of arriving. We didn’t go in. Some things are better as a frame on the walk home than as a round of drinks. I took the shot. Dee took the history.
The Other Tasmanian
Here’s the thing that gets you, sitting beside a canal in Copenhagen, a few doors down from where a man wrote fairy tales for a living.
The Queen of Denmark is from Tasmania. Dee is from Tasmania. They were born the same year, a couple of months and one small island apart. Two girls from the bottom of the world.
One of them met a man at a Sydney pub during the Olympics, had no idea he was a prince, and ended up Queen of the exact country whose canal we were now sitting beside. The newspapers called that a fairy tale at the time, which, given the postcode, was at least geographically accurate. The other moved to Tokyo, built a life out of other people’s weddings, and turned up at the same canal decades later as a tired tourist with beach sand still in her bag and a second beer she had no intention of apologising for.
The same start. Wildly different maps.
You’d think a canal, a crown a couple of suburbs away, and a long day’s exhaustion might tip a person toward what-if. It didn’t. Because the two sit at opposite ends of a single thing, which is how recognised you are. A crown is about the most recognisable a life can get. Always known. Never off. A whole country that would pick your face out of a crowd.
And we’d flown all this way to be unrecognisable for a few weeks. Nobody, in the nicest possible sense. Nobody’s appointment, nobody’s emergency, nobody a single soul would glance at twice.
Pyt
The Danes have a word we couldn’t stop turning over. Pyt. You say it like a small sigh, and it means, more or less, never mind, let it go, no use minding. You reach for it when something minor has gone wrong and isn’t worth the energy of caring about. The phone dies. The taxi’s late. The gate gets moved to the far end of the terminal. A Dane says pyt, and the moving on starts at once.
It won the country’s favourite-word vote a few years back, beating, among others, the word for being ready to take offence. Some Danish classrooms keep a physical pyt button on the teacher’s desk, an actual button a child can press when something hasn’t gone their way and they are choosing to let it go. It plays a little pyt pyt pyt in a small voice. Danish children learn to push it before they can spell it.
We are not, by temperament, pyt people. We are the people who fix the thing, chase the reply, refresh the tracking number at midnight. We do have a word for letting go where we live in Japan. Shoganai, it can’t be helped. It’s the heavier one though, all endurance and acceptance, where pyt is the lighter cousin that just sets the moment down. After two decades of the heavy word, the light one felt almost suspicious. But there is one situation pyt was practically built for, and we were standing in the middle of it. The body convinced it’s seven in the morning when the clock says afternoon. The day you crossed a date line to lose and will never get back. The whole disorienting tax of having travelled half the planet in a day. The Danes didn’t invent jet lag. They just invented the correct response to it, which is to shrug, eat your ice cream, and let the hour be whatever it wants to be.
Pyt, it turns out, is the Danish word for the precise thing we’d flown all this way to relearn. You cannot reach us. Let it go. Push the little button. We’re working on it.
North in the Morning
Tomorrow we fly again. Smaller plane, fewer people, the last leg before the one that actually counts. North, until the map starts running out of names.
We’re in bed early, because the Greenland plane leaves Copenhagen in the morning and the day after that is the one we crossed the world for. The canal will still be there on the slow way home, when the city hands us a lazy Sunday and we finally climb the Round Tower and do all the things tonight was too tired for. Tonight bought nothing it couldn’t pay back. That felt like the whole point of the day.
A queen gets a country that knows her face. We get a few weeks where nobody knows ours. From the same island, in the same year, that’s the fork the road took, and tonight, beside her canal, with a beer we’d earned three countries over, the second option looked like the better deal by a mile. For us, anyway.
There’s ice waiting up there. We’ll get to it in the morning.
