So glad you got there in one piece. Long haul trips - not for sissies. Reminds me of Cape Town - Tokyo....
no matter how many times you go away, you will not sleep the night before
You are so right and I've traveled a lot on business, sometimes as frequently as once a month domestically. Always suffered from that afliction. Every time - even when I lived 30 minutes from the airport!!
Also, travel is not the same easy thing since 9/11.
Look forward to your next installment!
Absolutely not for sissies! Cape Town to Tokyo sounds like a nightmare as well! How long did that take?
It felt like forever. It was CPT-JNB-SIN-NRT. I think it was 48 hours all told if not longer with re-fuelling stop - on the tarmac in Mauritius. On the way back we had a 6-hour layover in Singapore, which we used. Not to the best - my colleague was looking for Thai boxing shorts for her son. So we did Orchard Road and shops. My best memory is a wonderful market not too far from Raffles.
Be grateful that you had a screaming child and not a smelly Bangladeshi sugar worker en route to Maruitius who stole the cutlery as a travelling companion - that's what I had - in the middle seat from SIN and he had the window seat. He was a shrimp of a man, and slept spread out like a spider. Not sure which is worse, the snivelling, griseling child. Oh and then he was illiterate, so I had to help him fill in his forms for entry into Mauritius!
Worse though, but not as long was CPT-JNB-JFK. Packed in like sardines - both ways - and with compulsory fuelling, crew and passenger stops (also on the tarmac) in Dakar, Senegal where, actually, I'd love to have stopped for at least a day - great music and interesting country. I was ill on the way back. To add fuel to the fire, it was my birthday which happened somewhere over the Atlantic and I landed in Cape Town at around 22h30. I was literally delirious. Urgh! Memorable for all the wrong reasons....
Oh, and on Australia being a big country - it is - it's a continent! Interesting, they tend to think South Africa is small and then learn the hard way. That's a story for another time....
BTW, if, by some chance you come across two of my school/uni mates, Di Sherman and Colleen Roberts who live in Melbourne, you know what to do.... #juststaying ;)