21.12 - Day 341 - Bangkok, THA to Sydney
Saturday 21st December - Bangkok, Thailand - Sydney, Australia (via China) (Day 341)
Time to head back to Sydney after 48 weeks on the road. Sienna and Seb are keen for a repeat of the breakfast street food of the last couple of days; fried pork, fried dough and yoghurt. Meanwhile Kate and I set ourselves up for a day of travelling with a visit to the buffet breakfast downstairs at our Lancaster Hotel.
I really hope my stomach is settled for a 3 hour and a 9 hour flight because I gorge on, in no particular order yoghurt and muesli, 2 coffees, orange juice, guava juice, 2 poached eggs and bacon on toast, steamed fish, 3 pork dim sim, smoked marlin and stilton on focaccia. It feels a little glutinous, and it is.
The hotels golf cart shuttle runs us to the train station for our first flight with Xiamen Airlines - no, I’d never heard of them either - which leaves at midday. Shock, horror there’s no seat back TVs, but the iPad helps Sienna and Seb through the journey.
A long 5 hour layover in Xiamen airport - it offers free wifi if you allow them to scan a copy of your passport, but then you can’t access Whatsapp, google, gmail or BBC so is somewhat redundant. Until I realise China probably care less about cricket so I can catch up on that via Cricinto which does pass the sensors.
There are games of Uno, wandering around shops and marvelling at the vending machines where payment is simply done with facial recognition. It's all efficient but a little unnerving - like when a man on the flight wearing a suit jacket with large camera attached to it walks up and down the aisles; everything is recorded here. Indeed when we collect our luggage in Sydney we discover various pockets unzipped and one of the two padlocks missing from the suitcase - nothing inside is missing, but you certainly want to be on your best behaviour and aware of what you've packed.
Time on the Ipad is offset with games in trolleys, pushing each other around in front of the mostly amused passengers.
After a year of near faultless successes on transport, our final flight is of course delayed by 2 hours. Thankfully, in a way, we're already on the plane which gratefully has TVs this time around opening up some viewing pleasure to pass the time.
Sunday morning, we arrive back into Sydney and a short taxi ride later we're opening the door to home to be greeted by Dexter and Pickles, who are happy to see us, in the way that dogs are happy to see anyone whether you've been gone 11 minutes or, in our case 11 months.
If a journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step, then ours started with a giant leap into the unknown and bounded on and on through new countries, cities, towns and villages, sharing chapters of the journey with family and friends on the way, until we circled the world and arrived back where it all began.
