Psychotactics Blog

Do you know that safety video on planes, that most of us seem to ignore?

I'd watch it, not carefully, but one point stuck in my head on Singapore Airlines flights. They seemed to emphasise that if a phone slipped and fell in between the seats, you should not try to retrieve it. Instead, they suggested, you should call a crew member. I don't know why that point stuck in my head, but it all boils down to the power of lithium batteries.

One of the things that aviation safety authorities lose sleep over, is a lithium fire.
Normal fires need oxygen and once you smother them, the fire goes out. Lithium batteries are quite different. They produce oxygen internally through a chemical reaction, so you can't easily put out a lithium fire. You may try to cover the battery, but it doesn't stop the chemical reaction.

And let's get a teeny bit technical here.
When lithium batteries ignite, it creates an unstoppable chain reaction. This chain reaction is called a thermal runaway. One battery cell tends to overheat, which in turn triggers the next cell, and so on. It starts as a cascade that begins to accelerate and there's no way to slow it down, or interrupt it. You can cool it temporarily, but inexplicably it can reignite hours later.

This fire burns at around 600°C.
And you can't use water to put out the fire. Lithium reacts aggressively with water and creates even more chaos. A standard fire extinguisher doesn't achieve much, either. It may quell the fire for a little while, but the internal thermal mass is still alive, trapped at hundreds of degrees. Almost without warning, the chain reaction can erupt hours later. In the confines of a plane cabin, an uncontrolled fire can become catastrophic in barely 20 minutes.

Now, none of this matters very much if you are in economy class. Economy seats move by mechanical action. A button releases a ratchet, and then your body weight does the rest. There is no motor or compression force, so a phone that is wedged in the seat tends to get lightly pressed but doesn't usually cause much damage.

Business class is different.
Business class seats need actuators to operate. An actuator has enormous mechanical power, so much so that it can puncture a lithium battery without much difficulty. It's not a sudden, jerky reaction, but a slow, relentless movement that compresses the battery. It's the slowness itself that's the biggest headache. The slow movement crushes the device with hundreds of kilograms of force, thus creating not one, but multiple short circuits.

I was having a nap when I set my phone down on the seat to fish around for my headset. The phone disappeared. I knew exactly where I'd left it, so it was clear that it had just slipped over the edge. If I hadn't known, it would have vanished in thin air.

That's when I remembered the safety video. Instead of fiddling with the seat controls, which is what I would have done normally, I stopped and went and found one of the cabin crew. The moment I told him what happened, his face went grim. “This is one of the last things I want to hear,” he said. I thought he was joking. It was just a phone stuck on the side of the seat.

But his face stayed serious.
He carefully dug through the side, and voilà, we had my phone back. If I hadn't known the phone was there and had simply pressed the recline button, there was a decent chance that the actuator could have crushed it. We had taken off from Auckland, and instead of landing in Singapore, we would have been on an emergency diversion back to Sydney or Darwin, or perhaps Jakarta.

But that wasn't the only drama on the flight.
Shortly after retrieving my phone, the same crew member was called to economy for an emergency that took the better part of an hour and a half. When he returned, he looked relieved but still unsettled. The plane landed, and we would soon be on our way to our hotel and dinnnnnner.

As we disembarked, the pilot announced that we were to move to a restricted area.

We looked outside on the tarmac. There were two or three ambulances, a fire truck, and at least one civil defence officer in full gear and a mask. No one told us what was happening.

Were we in the middle of a contagion?
Was there some crazy crisis?

We never got to know. We were kept in the waiting area for about 60 minutes and then allowed to leave.

That was the start of our trip to Athens, Greece. Where something went a bit off, and Renuka didn't sleep a wink.

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“I've been to 42 countries,” said the taxi driver.

Did he mean 42 countries, 42 cities, or 42 places? I wasn't sure, and it didn't seem worth debating as we made our way through Friday traffic in Athens. It was the last day of school before the summer break, and the normally busy day, had just gotten a tiny bit worse.

But we weren't concerned. There was nothing to do on this trip but eat, drink and sleep. Except, Renuka couldn't sleep. The moment we arrived in Athens, both her nostrils were completely blocked. It was probably an allergy, something in the air, but she could only breathe through her mouth. She had allergies before, but this was strange because no allergy had affected her in over a decade. We didn't know if it was pollution, pollen, or something else entirely.

And so it began.
Every day that we were in Athens, she walked around with a stuffed nose. At night, however, it got a lot worse. Her breathing was troubled. She'd prop herself up on a couple of pillows, and yes, she started snoring loudly. In a house, this would be a minor problem. I could always escape to another room, but in a hotel room, choices are rather limited.

We guessed it was just something in Athens that had caused this sudden allergic reaction. In a while we'd be headed to the island of Syros. The air would be clearer, the pollution a lot less. Even the rooms would be more spacious.

But no.
The allergy hopped on the ferry with us and to the next destination. Both of us were getting no sleep at all. And since I'm a light sleeper, the only recourse is another room. And yes, I did find another room: the bathroom.

It was a luxuriously large bathroom, but what made it special were the heated tiles. I have no problem sleeping on hard surfaces, as long as it's not freezing. This bathroom made the perfect bed.

I slept. She slept. Yes, we were still a bit groggy, but maybe things would get better as we moved to our next destination: Mani.
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The best way to describe how we travel is to imagine a saucer.

The centre of the saucer is the main city, Athens, for example. We will try to find a place that's on the circumference of the saucer and move around that circumference. Hence, instead of just going to all the tourist spots (which we hate) we head out about 100km away from everything.

And we were headed to Mani, hours away from Athens. It's a rustic southern part of mainland Greece where Greeks occasionally go to escape Athens.

There were several things that were making me nervous in New Zealand. We drive on the left-hand side of the road, and now we had to flip sides. I don't usually have a problem driving on the right-hand side, but I get it wrong from time to time, just for a fraction of a second. That was not my main anxiety.

We were landing at 3:30 in the afternoon, and the drive was supposed to take us four hours. That would get us there at 7:30 p.m., with some light, but it would still be getting dark. We had been warned that the hotel didn't have any parking, and we would need to arrive with time to spare.

The bigger worry was, yet again, that the iPhone's GPS running drains the battery quickly. I suspected that the car we were going to hire might have a USB connection, but most cars have USB-A, and my phone is USB-C. That's just a different connector, but with a dead phone, there is no navigation, and we have all become a bit hopeless at dealing with maps.

This meant that we would have to drive in unfamiliar conditions on the “wrong side of the road” and arrive in the dark only to find there was no parking. That's when I remembered the iPad. I'd forgotten I brought it, but here it was, and it was going to serve as a good backup. I could keep an offline map loaded, run the phone for two hours, switch to the iPad, and we'd still have Renuka's phone in reserve. Yes, we planned for three devices just to make this simple journey.

Timing was everything.
If we managed to move quickly, we would get there and still have some light, but Greek ferries don't necessarily care to be on time. By the time we landed at the airport, we were already an hour late, and we dashed towards the arrival gates to catch a taxi. Anyone who travels knows that the worst place to catch a taxi is right outside the arrival gates. Drivers know that you are tired and need to get somewhere. The better move is to walk 500 m, find a taxi, or use an app, but we were pressed for time, so we went straight to the taxi rank.

You probably know what happened next.

Once the bags were in the boot and we were ready to go, the driver insisted on €20. The distance was barely a kilometre or two, which was about a five-minute drive. Without luggage, we could have hiked it in about 10 or 15 minutes. With the pavements being what they were, and time was not on our side, we grudgingly gave in to the hostage demands. Not that this speeding up helped us in any way.

When we got to the rental car company, we had to join a queue. There was a loud American who insisted on having things her way. She went on and on about how she had points and wasn't going to pay an extra €60. On the other side, there was another client who wanted explicit instructions for every left and right turn, despite already having a GPS on board.

We had rushed madly about for nothing.
But then our luck turned for the better. The car rental guy gave us a USB-A connector.
We didn't have to bother with the phone anymore because it was connected to CarPlay for the entire drive. The weird moment was when we discovered that it wasn't a four-hour drive. It was barely two hours, and we arrived with lots of daylight to spare.

Parking was a bit inconvenient, but not too bad. There we were at our next destination, a lot less frazzled than we thought we'd be.

It was time to relax, take a shower and get that dry skin moisturised.
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I have particularly dry skin. This has been a problem since I was a child, which means that I need a specific kind of cream after a shower.

Before we left New Zealand, Renuka made a decision. We were staying at good hotels, and these hotels would have cream. There was absolutely no point in lugging another large bottle halfway around the world. Renuka is very fussy about packing. Our bags are extremely light, because anything that's not wanted is left behind. She's asked me more than once: “Do we really need these rubber bands?”

Ok, so I left my cream at home.

In Athens, the hotel cream didn't work on my skin. I had to use a lot more than usual, but I assumed it was the climate or maybe the water. When we moved to the island of Syros, it was the same problem: a much better hotel, but with the same result. The cream seemed to sit on the surface of my skin rather than sinking in. By the time we reached Mani, which was pretty much the last stage of our Greek trip, I had resigned myself to indifferent cream.

At each stop, Renuka would still ask me, “Is the cream working today?” One morning I said yes. I told her it had worked exceedingly well.

She took me back to the bathroom and showed me what I had used. It was conditioner. I had rubbed conditioner all over myself.

And with that, our trip to Greece was more or less done. Next stop, Frankfurt and the meeting with Keanu Reeves.

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