Saturday 14 July
Here they go again! Perth-Dubai-Milan
We couldn’t decide whether to go Europe/USA cruising again
or to go cheap and bum our way round Asia for 3 months. It was only a bare week
ago that we chose cruising, followed by a frantic full time internet
search/research/buy frenzy.
Highlights will hopefully include eastern Mediterranean
cruise featuring Israel with stops at Haifa and Ashdod which gives access to
Nazareth and Jerusalem; cruise round Spain and Nice; fly/train to Paris,
Hamburg and Copenhagen; cruise the Baltic featuring St Petersburg, Helsinki,
Stockholm, Tallinn (Estonia) etc; fly to Gatwick, 8 frantic hours sucking the
juice out of Royal London and Monopoly London; 7 day Transatlantic cruise to NY
on Cunard’s Queen Mary II, fly to Vancouver, cruise to Alaska and back,
featuring the glaciers and fjords of the Inside Passage; cruise to and around Hawaii; a week on Waikiki
beach, fly to Hong Kong on 2 October and get home from Singapore on 18 October.
We will be posing by appointment in front of the Waikiki
Beach live streaming camera and perhaps on the deck of cruise ships. This is
primarily for the benefit of grandchildren but . . hey if you are REALLY bored
. . .
We were lucky enough to avoid leaving yesterday (Friday 13th)
and Warren drew the short straw or stepped up to take us to the airport. By
checking in online we bought an extra 90 minutes of sleep so the alarms didn’t
go off until 2.30 this morning. We got
to the airport just ahead of 4.30, dropped our bags and went straight upstairs
– much quicker than the checkin queue.
With the time constraints, we had opted for the safe, quick
and comfortable option and forked out $1650 each for Emirates. Given extra time
we could have saved a few hundred dollars each by getting ourselves to KL and
Tehran or taking South China Airlines to Paris.
But it is really comfortable and relaxing to get all the way to Milan in
one day with the massive library of onboard movies that Emirates offer. And we
couldn’t carry the risk of getting stuck somewhere on route and missing the
first cruise.
The first leg to Dubai took about 11 hours which passed
totally painlessly. We watched Sherlock Holmes, Hill 60, Mission Uninteresting,
J Edgar Hoover and The Lomax (J), plus endless episodes of 2.5 men. And here we
are in Dubai for 4 hours, sitting very comfortably in the huge transit area
(160 departure gates). The leg to Milan
will take about 5 hours InsAllah. There are a smattering of Arabic women in the
veils with a half inch eye slit and a few men in the white robes but generally
it is thousands of people in Western garb.
We landed straight in off the desert and couldn’t catch a
glimpse of any of the famous highrise buildings on the coast. Our sneaky plan
to reserve a window seat and an aisle seat, leaving a seat free between us
failed to produce the desired outcome that we might get a spare seat. But the
man in the middle was very happy to swap for the aisle seat so that we sat
together. Most of our recent flights have been half empty and we have
invariably had 3, 4 or 5 seats between us but this one was full.
Later – the next flight was only half full and we could have
had 4 seats each at the back. We sat and watched some TV, ate, dozed etc.* (J) I
had the window seat Dubai – Milan and enjoyed pretty clear skies the whole
way. I did see the tallest building in
the world, the Burj Khalifa through the murk/dust of Dubai. We were the wrong side of the plane to see
the ‘world and palm tree’ land reclamation sites. Maybe next time. There is so much beauty in the desert and
mountain scapes as you travel over the Middle East. Then the beautiful blue of the Red Sea as we
flew over, I was clearly able to see Aqaba, Jordan and the short strip of the coast
where Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Egypt meet. It was such a treat to see the country scapes
that we drove through a few years ago from above. Then the Suez Gulf and canal loomed into view
with a large amount of ships waiting to go through the Canal. The fertile green of the Nile Valley with
miles of farmland and small villages with the blue Nile snaking its way through
it all. We crossed the coast above Alexandria and it wasn’t long before the
Greek Islands loomed into view. I had a
fantastic view of Athens and then the coast and mountains, which were bathed in
the late afternoon glow as we tracked alongside Croatia and then into Italy.*
We had no trouble getting into Italy (longish wait for the
luggage) and we hopped onto the train into Milan Central, which took about 45
minutes. We chose to walk from there and reached the hotel in time for a shower
before midnight. This was also the first opportunity to go through the famous
ritual of HeyDidWePackTheLaptopPowerCord?
We were very happy to find that I had the new black tracky
pants I had bought the previous day to match my black Egyptian Tshirts with the
Dayglo pictures of pyramids and tropical fish. In the rush to get out this
morning (so long ago so far away) I had taken them off to put on my cargo pants
for the plane and thought they might be strewn around the bedroom somewhere. It
felt wierd to be walking through the streets of Milan towing suitcases on
wheels – weird because it feels as though we have been doing it constantly for
9 months – almost as though we hadn’t just been home for 3 weeks. In these big
old cities street names change regularly as you traverse the one straight
stretch of road, which can be confusing.
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