The 30 hr flight
Trip Start
Oct 01, 2008
1
81
82
Trip End
Dec 30, 2009
Sydney,
New South Wales,
Australia
Monday, December 29, 2008
The girls are in good spirits and excited about the next stage of their journey. Claire is happy to be reunited with her phone again. We present them with a lamp for the van then leave them to it.
Our flight back to the UK goes via Sydney and Singapore and with stops is due to take ove 30hr so we know that we are in for the long haul. Our luggage is booked right through from Auckland. When we arrive in Sydney we find that the flight that our schedule shows as leaving for Singapore 3hr later is now not due to leave for a further 4hr after we had expected, giving us a 7hr stopover. I go to the transfer desk as there is another flight on the same route leaving earlier. It is fully booked. We try to put be positive: if you are travelling for 30hr, what is an additional 4? Experience suggests that getting upset at these common travelling hiccups doesn't help.
We go to check emails. There had been no notification of the change. I check our trip details on the Qantas website. It still shows us travelling on the Singapore flight at the time that we had originally expected but flicking down the page, I see that it also shows us travelling on a different flight to London at the same original time, but via Bangkok. That flight leaves in just under 1.5hrs. We rush back to the transfer desk where we speak to a different person. He checks: yes, we can take that flight. Our bags are already booked through on the later plane so as he spends time sorting that out, we chat. He notices that I was born in Barnstaple. He has been researching his family tree and his great grandfather was a vicar there. His great grandmother on the other side lived to be 135 in Iran where longevity is apparently common. He has several theories to explain it: v healthy high salad, low meat diet and very high saffron intake. He passes us over our new boarding cards and I see that they are for the business cabin. Janice hadn't noticed and was surprised at the degree of my gratititude when we left the desk.
We nip up to the business lounge for a bit of light grazing to fortify us for the next leg. It takes about 11hr to reach Bangkok where we have a stop over at about 0600 New Zealand time. We have now been awake for 24hr. Janice and I have passed through this airport four times in this trip. Just about everyone else in the business cabin gets off here and when we reboard, only about a quarter of the seats are taken. Apparently economy and first class are full. We manage to get a few hours sleep on the flat beds wearing our Qantas issue pyjamas.
