Jet Lag: A Necessary Evil?

I am tired. So very tired.

It’s 18.30pm local time here in Sydney, and I’ve just woken up. Before you start; no I’m not a lazy little shit, my body still seems to be adapting to the different time zones.

When we got to Singapore, I was more than a little smug that I spent almost half of the 12 hour flight asleep. I don’t usually sleep well on planes, so I took the opportunity to tell pretty much everyone I walked past in the street just how great a sleep I had. The problem with that though, is that despite having set off at 8pm GMT the previous day, we arrived at 7pm local time. In a few hours it’d be time to go to bed again.

After a Singapore Sling and a few pints of Tiger, I actually managed to get to sleep about 1am. I woke up after that feeling extremely fresh and ready tackle the first full day in Singapore. There was only one problem.

It was 4am. I’d had three hours sleep.

One benefit of jet lag…you get to take pictures like this!

Fast forward to today. We flew into Sydney and sod’s law would have it that I got a grand total of 0 minutes sleep on the flight. What was I saying about being smug? I’ve been determined since our arrival at 7am this morning to stay awake. I want a good kip and to be ready for the stag do tomorrow. However after reading two pages of my book (ok…Kindle…whatever) I found myself waking up two hours later feeling a little fresher, worrying that I’m now back to square one and will be seeing 4am again.

Going back to the title, I guess jet lag really is necessary evil that you have to work around if you want to see the world. It depends what you want out of travel I guess. If you don’t want to venture too far from your own doorstep, then it’s not really an issue (although I did once hear of someone claiming to be jet lagged from Ibiza. Not sure if that’s a code word for “coming down”).