Yesterday I flew across a continent.

Brisbane to Perth is about 3600km (2200m) as the crow flies. But we didn't fly in a straight line. From Brisbane we flew south west over northern NSW into South Australia and then turned directly west over the Great Australia Bite and headed into Western Australia.

The flight takes around five-and-a-half hours and about halfway through I had my head buried in Sean Williams' wonderful The Changeling (stay tuned for more on this). I had my earphones in and was lost to the outside world.

We must have been over South Australia when I looked out the window to see the ground below covered in white. In all directions the desert was filled with white - as if someone had just spilled a billion buckets of white paint on the ochre landscape. I presume it was Lake Eyre because it was massive and even from 36,000 feet almost blindingly bright. I sat for a moment - transfixed - lost in its beauty and then my iPod started playing Sarah Blasko's cover of Flame Trees (a great song, whoever is singing it) and a strange moment of happiness came over me. Reading Sean's book that was describing similar desolate sights, listening to a great Aussie song and flying over such a sparse and strange landscape I revelled in the Australian-ness of it all. It was a unique conjunction of events.

I'm not a jaded flier. But give me a good book, my iPod Touch, my 900 gram ultra-portable laptop and I'll happily lose myself in one or all of them for the bulk of the journey. But this happy coincidence restored my faith in the randomness that can sometimes come your way thanks to a well-placed window and looking up at the right time.