Day 0: Chasing the Sun Survival guide to the 36 hour day

For the second month in a row[1], and the second time in my life, I find myself in South East Asia.  After the standard 24 hr flight in which the sun did not set  I landed in Phnom Pen Saturday around midnight.  I have taken these 24 hr double digit time zone change flights enough times to have a few rules:
1.     Try to go to sleep 1 hr after dinner.  It is tempting to do a lot of work or watch a couple movies, since it is around 4:00 pm by the time you should be going to bed (and the sun will never set on the whole trip), but if you are going to get 6 hours of sleep, you need to force it.
2.     Try to get a flight that gets in in the evening.  It is terrible to get in at like 10am and try to gut it through the day.  If you get in at night, you can just crash and you have a good start to kicking the jet lag.
3.     Don’t get old.  Nothing has deteriorated with age more than my ability to bounce back from sleeplessness.
I am teaching a river modeling class for the Mekong River Commission with my college Cam and my boss Jeff.  I’ll have more to say about that later.  For now, it’s worth noting that we traveled on Jeff’s birthday, which is kind of cool, because he had a 36 hour birthday, but is kind of lame because he spent it on a plane.
__________
 [1]I did a brief post on last month’s trip to Bangkok.

No comments:

Post a Comment