Bendigo to Dubai (Friday 1st September 2017)

It’s Wattle Day in Australia and our backyard and all the bush around Maiden Gully is blooming magnificently with the green and gold of our national flower. It is a wonderful sight this year, much better than I recall from recent years. Perhaps due to the good rains over winter or the many frosts we’ve had.

This morning we woke to minus one in Bendigo (probably minus 3 in Maiden Gully) but the sky was clear and the sun warm. A great day for traveling. We’ve decided to go the whole way under our own steam, despite the kind offer from our neighbors, John and Margaret, to drive us to the station. So just after 8:00am we made our final checks, locked up the house and wheeled our bags down to the bus stop on Pioneer Dve. A brief detour down Bath Lane to the travel agent was required. She rang up in a panic yesterday afternoon because she had forgotten to hand our formal travel documents to us. It was never a drama for us as we knew our booking number for the flights and we’d received all the car hire documentation from Renault Eurodrive months ago. Everything else for the trip we have organised ourselves and is under control. Booking the car through the travel agent was a good move as it saved us a couple of hundred dollars compared to what it might have been if I’d done it myself. A Bendigo Bank staff discount essentially.

Another bus up to the Bendigo station saw us on the platform in plenty of time for the 10:37am train to Southern Cross. Our 2017 European Adventure is underway!

As a side note, Emily has arrived safely in Paris, having left two weeks ago. She spent the first week in a hostel (St. Christoper’s) in the Montmatre district and then moved into a studio apartment in the 13th arrondisiment. She’s sharing the apartment with a young man from Lima, Peru. Ricardo Amaya Anaya is also studying law at Sciences Po for the same semester as Emily. We’ve been in regular contact with her via WhatApp. Just as she’s done since she left home after Year 12 she calls us every second night. How good is that! Free phone calls from the other side of the world – all we both need is a wi-fi connection.

We’re slowly making our way down to Melbourne where we’ll catch to SkyBus to Tullamarine. We’ll be in plenty of time to catch EK405 at 18:00 to Singapore and then Dubai.

As I write we’ve just left the Australian continent. We’re traveled 2333 miles with 1522 miles to go. We’ll be in Singapore just before midnight. The flight left just a couple of minutes after 18:00, unlike last time when it was an hour late getting into the air. The seats we reserved (for a fee) are great – Row 51, only a dozen seats from the front of the aircraft. We reserved two seats in the middle section at the back of a small cluster between two bulkheads. There is no row behind us and only ourselves to climb over of we need to get out. There are no seats to our left, just the emergency exit and the hostie’s seats. Dinner was very nice, washed down with a couple of glasses of French red wine. These days all Emirates A380-800 flights have on-board Wi-FI. The first 20MB lasts for two hours and is free. After that you can pay. Nevertheless, it is just mind-blowing to think that I can sit here, 38,000ft in the air above outback Australia and talk to my family and friends on WhatsApp, send and receive emails and browse the web. How far things have come since our first trip to Europe in 1986 when it was astounding that we could see a flight information.

I took the time to watch a moviie called “A United Kingdom” which tells the story of how Botswana was freed from British colonialism to become an independent, democratic republic. Thankfully, like Australia, it was achieved without bloodshed. Kerry watched the highly-regarded Australian movie “Lion” about the “orphaned” Indian boy adopted by Nicole Kidman and Peter Wenham who went I search of his real family. Both movies are based on a true story and are excellent viewing.

There was a 1hr40min wait in Singapore for the continuance of our flight to Dubai so we for a bar and had a beer and a lime and soda. It was 2:30am in Melbourne (about 00:30am in Singapore). We both got some sleep on the next leg, arriving in Dubai at 04:30am. Now we’re got 4 hours to kill until the third leg leave. Time for a coffee!