May 2nd Getting Home

Leave Sri Lanka at about 1am, land in Sydney about 7pm and get back to Canberra about 11pm.

That pretty much says it all.  We were intrigued that most monks were allowed on the plane before the rest of us, although the one sitting next to us was a late arrival.  The flight was packed and uncomfortable: inter alia because none of the seats reclined!  I got about 30 minutes sleep.

After a 2 hour stopover in KL, where I slept sitting up for two hours, we discovered that the phone seat reservation service dude had been a pelican.  The plane was a 777 which operates on a 2-5 2 seating pattern.  For some reason hae had given us 4 seats of 5 and then allocated to 5th seat to someone, although there were plenty of rows with only 1 or 2 folk in them.  The flight was survived and I suspect I got a couple more hours sleep.

On arrival in Sydney Frances and I did the Smart Passport routine which is based on photo-recognition.  The problem with this is that one has to take off your glasses so I can't see what is going on.  I needed advice from Frances on when to grab my card after being recognised.  then to quarantine where the main action was to find a small round object.  This turned out to be a mandarin buried in her backpack and forgotten about!  They were not all fussed about the (obviously commercially prepared):

• several packets of tea;
• several packets of spices;
• carved wooden hands or
• bottle of vanilla essence.

The car was picked up and I worked out how to use the essential controls and headed off.  The drive wasn't ideal as we kept diving into rain squalls, but it took almost exactly 3 hours to get to Rob and carol's place in Weston where they had kindly offered us a bed for the night.  This was much much more pleasant than driving another 50km through a wall of kangaroos to a cold and miserable house.

The next day we left bright and early as Carol took off to work.  We went to pick up the small dog from her holiday home.  She seemed to be in good form and was obviously liked by Joanne.  Since getting back home on Thursday morning I have developed a nasty cold but now (Saturday) seem to be over the worst of it.