The benefits of long distance travel

For anyone who travels a lot for their work, the thought of a long distance plane flight is probably the low point of any gig.

As we head off from the office at 5:30am a few years back for a site visit in China, the foremost thought in my mind is who (or what) am I going to be unlucky enough to find myself getting seated next to for the next 10 hours (and what in the karma scheme of things could I have possibly done to deserve it!).

So onto the plane we go and as we make our way further and further towards the back of the plane and closer to our seats (ah the benefits of a Qantas Club membership?) you start to scan those around you who you might be bonding with for the next 10 hours – the mother with already upset baby, the sweaty looking guy with a 1 kilo bag of beef jerky, the one reading the bible in ever so slightly audible tones? … but wait … can it be? … you arrive at your seat and next to you is nothing but empty space … thank you karma!

You settle in and no one comes, you will the plane to start pushing back, scanning the isles, watching and waiting and all seems good, but of course one last minute arrival bursts into the cabin -  a family looking very flustered and slightly angry and there is only one place for them to possibly go.

And this is how I came to meet Mick – literally a guy from the back of Bourke – and how I came to spend 10 of the most interesting and enjoyable hours of my life.

This is Mick’s story.

Mick sat down and immediately started talking, in that distinctly Aussie country farm bred drawl. We decided the best way to pass the time was with beer for him and Bloody Mary’s for me … it seemed like a good idea at the time.

We quickly discovered a universal love of tractors and Mick impressed me no end with his run-down of the inventory of awesome machines back on the family farm – a little plot literally just out the back of Bourke, roughly aggregated to about 200,000 hectares – I could feel a little man-crush coming on.

I’d then found out the Mick, his wife and kids had moved to rural Northern China to run what Mick soon finds out is the third largest cut flower operation on the planet – strategically located at a point in Northern China that is almost equidistant between Amsterdam and Tokyo – the two biggest flower markets I the world.

Were are well into the flight by this stage and have kept to our drinking schedule pretty well and some point Mick confides in me that he has often had ‘anger management issues’ To deal with the problem back at Bourke he took up Professional Bull riding as a way to release his tension anger and after a weekend on the bulls, all would be good for a while.

But in rural China there were no such outlets and Mick was struggling with his demons, until he found a small martial arts gym in the town near where now lived. Mick took to martial arts like a duck to water and given his size and strength quickly became unbeatable in the ring.

So one day his trainer comes up to him and asks if he would be interested in something a little more ‘serious’! Always up for a challenge Mick says yes and come Friday night, finds himself being hidden in a truck and smuggled across the border into Thailand to take part in illegal bare knuckle cage fighting tournaments.

Within no time, given his prowess in the ring Mick is fighting 6 people at once (and still winning most of the time) and for Mick, anger management was a thing of the past.

So this is how I came to meet Mick – the flower farming cage fighter from the back of Bourke - one of the most interesting people on the planet, so don’t despair next time you find yourself trudging down that long isle to find 54A, with that sense of dread as to what awaits you in 54B. You might just find a Mick!

Oh and we do occasionally still send each other an email – last time I heard from Mick he was running the second largest ‘something or other’ plantation somewhere in the middle of Kenya, but he didn’t mention how he was dealing with his anger management there!