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Around the World: Hong Kong, Singapore and ...

It all started in Charleston, the day after Thanksgiving. We left Charleston about 6am for Chicago - then took the noon United flight (UA 895) for 15 hours - over the north pole. Note the GPS tracks - we passed within 60 miles of the north pole and crossed 13 time zones in about 20 min. We then flew south over Siberia, through Mongolia and China and into Hong Kong. We learned a new way to measure the duration of a flight - by the number of movies. This was a 6 movie flight. The flights continued to Singapore, then Chennai, then Bahrain, then Muscat, then Dubai, then Frankfurt, then Dulles (Washington) and finally home. The surprise - the total distance was 23,357 miles - something less than 25,000 that I expected from my early education. The total flight time was 47 hours 58 min.

Flight with Routes highlighted

The GPS-predicted flight path - great circle routes

Flight tracks

The GPS tracks, acquired while balancing the GPS with one hand in the window (try getting window seats for each segment of an around the world flight - United Airlines did us right!!!).

Right click and "Save Link Target As" to download the Garmin GPS tracks

Flight from Chennai to Bahrain to Muscat

This was a very interesting flight (GF 069) - We call it our miricle day. Five hours late leaving Madras - due to fog at the Chennai airport, we reached Bahrain 5 hours late, approximately 2:30 pm - thus experiencing a virtual miss - the connecting flight for Muscat was scheduled to depart about 11am. When we arrived in Bahrain at about 14:30, Gulf Air and effenciently changed our Muscat flight from an 11am flight to a 9 pm flight. But, our original connecting flight, GF 064, was also 5 hours late arriving from Bangladesh. We noticed on the departure monitor that our flight; GF 064 was scheduled to depart at 15:30. So we went to the gate and Gulf Air worked a miracle: they found our checked luggage, and put us on our original flight. Thus, in this case, a virtual miss did not translate into a real miss. We arrived not 12 hours late - but only 5 hours late - quite a miracle!

Click for trip segment:

To Hong Kong

Hong Kong (Nov 30)

To Singapore

Singapore Intl. Biomedical Engineering Conf (Dec 2)

On to India - and IITM (Intian Institute of Technolgy - Madras)

Chennai (Dec 8)

A Symphony of Motion: Parallel processing mixing, transporting and pouring cement (Dec 11)

A walk to the internet cafe and visit IIT (Dec 12)

Studies of a motorcade and traffic police (Dec 14)

From the Classified Advertisements in The Hindu, Dec 15, 2002

Explore altered expression of horn genes (Dec 16 - 18)

Last days in Chennai - waking up with TTK Road (Dec 19 - 20)

To Oman

Muscat, Glen's Prawn Hatchery, Shopping and puppies (Dec 24)

Christmas and Christmas dinner (Dec 25)

Walking along the beach near Ghubbrah (Dec 30)

An evening walk along the beach (Dec 31)

New Year's day with the Omani fisherman (Jan 1)

Chasing the evening sun on New Year's day (Jan 1)

A trip through the desert to Seifa (Jan 2)

Last Day: Fishing on a rock at Qantab (Jan 3)

Copyright 2002 C. Frank Starmer