Day 10 - 16th September - [sniff sniff] Farewell Cambodia

With our plane due to depart at 9am, and with Chomreun's suggested travel time to the airport of around one hour, we arose before 6am to make sure we had breakfast and time to spare when we arrived at the airport.

We arrived plenty early enough - even before our flight check-in opened. So after a short wait, we were ready to leave.

There was some good souvenir shopping to be done at Pochentong (the old Khmer name for the airport) before our flight left, perhaps at more inflated prices than we were accustomed to, but the quality of stuff was good, and in the early hours of the morning on a day when we were leaving a place to which we had all become very attached, none of us cared...

The short flight to Singapore, which took around two hours, was fine except for one thing. This flight was filled with people who for some reason felt the need to sniff continuously.

As we passed over Malaysia, I decided to count how frequently these sniffs occurred. It was not from one or two people, mind you - almost every Asian traveller seemed either to have a runny nose, or some superstition to do with flying and nasal noises...

So, counted seconds, and restarted the count each time I heard a sniff. I did this for a period of around five minutes, and I never reached ten. Someone within earshot of myself sniffed more than once every ten seconds! In the words of our long, lost saviour - "Crikey!".

Think about it this way. At least one sniff every nine seconds. Our flight lasted 135 minutes - which is a total of 8100 seconds. AT LEAST one sniff every nine seconds (8100 ÷ 9) means that there were more than (considerably more than, actually) 900 sniffs during the flight that I could hear. You could easily double this, as sometimes sniffs were simultaneous, and other times they were only two or three seconds apart.

There was one guy quite close who was a snorter - you know, that deep nasal, pig-like sound that some people make when they laugh? I think his should count for at least two sniffs...

So I believe, and this may not be quite statistically sound, that I had to endure the sound of around 2 000 sniffs during a two and a bit hour flight...

Who knows how many there really were..

Get it?

Who 'KNOWS'?

Who 'NOSE'?

Hmm... you didn't get it, did you?