For $20 more I could’ve flown direct from Doha to Colombo. But I’ve already got a bunch of flyer points with this other airline, you see, so I flew with them instead, saving myself the price of five lattes and copping a ten hour stopover in Dubai.

I’ve become a bit of an expert at the old transit stop in the past year or so. Eleven extended (over two hours) sit-ins at international airports in the fourteen months, if memory serves. This was number twelve. And I reckon I’ve come as close as possible to perfecting the art of transit zen. The first step is accepting that it’s going to suck, and nothing you do is going to make it unsuck, so the best you can do is try to make it bearably suck.

With the UAE offering a free visa on arrival there was no way I was going to not leave the airport. Straight off the short flight from Qatar, I battled the immigration queue and hopped the shiny new metro into town. Burj Khalifa — the world’s tallest building — was visible off in the distance for the whole trip from the airport, and beside it, low against the horizon, was the setting sun, burning large and orange and shimmering behind the haze.

I alighted a couple of stops before the Burj so I could take a walk in the pleasantly fresh Middle Eastern winter air. After a few months living in Doha the streets of Dubai were a revelation; I imagine Doha today is what Dubai was ten or fifteen years ago. As I approached the massive skyscraper I stopped occasionally to look up at it, struggling to fit the whole thing within the bounds of my glasses. It really is huge. Like, totally fucking massive. Four-fifths of a kilometre high needs to be seen to be understood.

I strolled around the Dubai Mall and artificial harbour for a while, people-watching and marvelling at the over-the-topness of the whole place. Every half hour the tiled harbour erupted in a sound, light and water show, choreographed to a range of classical and operatic tunes. (Check out a video on YouTube.) The whole thing was a bit surreal, to be honest.

Back at the airport, four or five hours successfully killed, I enacted my transit zen strategy. This involves alternating one hour periods of mind-numbing activity with twenty minute walks around the terminal. I find that activities must be mind-numbing because I’m usually too tired and/or wound up to concentrate on anything substantial like reading; my attention span is simply too short. So, things like listening to music and surfing aimlessly on the Internet are perfect. The walks are essential because they jolt you out of stupidity and get the blood flowing now and again.

Do you get the sense I’ve thought about this too much?

Anyway, fast forward four hours in Dubai airport and four horribly un-asleep hours on a plane, I finally arrived in Sri Lanka. Despite my extreme fatigue I couldn’t wait to get outside the airport and smell the air. Seriously, that’s all I could think about. For me, smell is the most powerful attachment I have to most places in my memory. For instance, the Middle East smells like grilling kofta and fruit-scented shisha; India smells like incense, two-stroke, sewage and roadside snacks. My first deep breath outside the arrivals terminal was intoxicating – thick tropical air with hints of smells that conjured images in my mind of gloriously chaotic streets teeming with activity. My skin relished the warmth and even the sensation of breeze against my face set goosebumps on my arms. After three months in the relatively neutral air of Doha (much of that time spent inside, thanks to the nature of the place) it’s hard to adequately describe the thrill I felt.

My initial plan (formulated on the plane) was to catch a bus straight to Kandy, but I was so tired I doubted whether I had the ability to endure another four hours on an overcrowded Tata bus. I headed instead to the nearby coastal town of Negombo and took a room on the beach, in which I peeled off my festy clothes, had the best shower of my life (one more in my long list of best showers of my life), and fell fast asleep until mid-afternoon.

At the start of every trip there’s always one moment at which you finally let go of the mindset you brought with you and realise properly that you are where you are. That moment for me came when I woke up, pulled on shorts and a t-shirt, and walked along the beach, amongst the men mending nets and boys playing soccer, as the sun dropped low in the sky, stopping occasionally to talk about cricket. After sunset I ordered a meal from an immaculately dressed seven- or eight-year-old girl at a small restaurant who solemnly repeated my order back to me — wegetable curry and Lion beer — and wrote it slowly on her notepad in perfectly-formed English letters, an intense look of concentration on her face. After dinner, relaxed and content with the world, I walked along the streets watching people going about all sorts of business all around me, until I got back to the hotel where I collapsed on my bed inside a mosquito net, under a ceiling fan, and passed out cold for twelve hours.