April 16 From Carwoola to Colombo

The plan for today is to meet our friends on the outskirts of Canberra and drive to Sydney airport.  We then catch a flight to Kuala Lumpur (aka KL) and transfer to a flight to Colombo.   The essential part of this plan is to spend less time in aircraft than is involved in going to Europe or South America!

The trip started well with a meet in Bungendore and a steady drive to Sydney. It looked as though the tunnel might be jammed, but it cleared once people stopped gawping at the other lane. So we got to the airport on time. There we spotted what Rob called the first leopard of the trip.

This was actually a  female human wearing very tight leopardskin pattern pants. In one swoop she captured awards for

• Pattern of the day
• Bird of the day and 
• mammal of the day

She also added "bad taste of the day" to the list of categories. Frances, to whom the pattern category belongs, has said the winner of that category shoould be the uniform of the Malaysian female cabin crew.

The Malaysian check-in system worked well as did immigration and security. One guy was doing a lot of talking at security as he was a courier taking human stem cells back to Germany. I found the Tax refund place to get my GST (~VAT) back on Frances's bins. The amazing thing was that half the people in the queue didn't meet the rules- too long since purchase; not $300 in one purchase etc etc..

The flight was quite reasonable: only about half full. Some good scenery was seen as we crossed the centre of Australia.

The second of those images shows some very red hummocks somewhere near the Kimberlys.  If any of the Hancock family ever fly this route it must be like a shopping trip!

A surprising aspect of the arrangements was that the information given by the trip monitor site included the heading (tail or head) and speed of the wind. At one point it changed from 60kph tail to 80kph head within 5 minutes. A little bit bouncy at that point, but generally a smooth flight.  There were some interesting late afternoon clouds as we got close to Kuala Lumpur.

The business in transfer at KL was generally OK although many of the prices for duty free were a little harsh ($A250 for a bottle of fancy Scotch). We got cheaper. The flight to Colombo was full at least and pushed back from the gate with about 12 folk still trying to find room for their carry on. Flight a little bumpy but given it took off at 2am body time was not too bad. We landed on time and everything happened reasonably well. Getting the ATM to deliver cash and return my credit card was a little fraught (as they had an unexpected category "Cash advance from credit card" which I initially didn't spot) but that happened OK in the end.  See my main blog for some downstream stuff on this.

By then it was the next day so read on.