We are now in the tropics!

Well, 'one of the wettest places on Earth'. Which means it RAINS all the time! Fortunately the weather has been not so terrible so far, hopefully that keeps up.

The morning started off a couple of hundred kilometres away on the shores of Waikiki, for a final-day sunrise opportunity over the tall hotels of Waikiki Beach. There were several other tourists out on the pier waiting for the sun to rise, and it was pretty spectacular too:

Spectacular sunrise over Waikiki

Then packing. We will be spending the next week or so on the Big Island, and had booked ourselves on an afternoon flight to Hilo, on the north shore of the island and where all the rain supposedly ends up.

But first we had to get there! Cue a considerable wait for a shuttle, a stretch of roadworks holding up traffic, a huge queue outside the terminal for TSA security clearance, and what we thought was an enormous queue for the bag drop. Much squawking from my mother later, we arrived at the gate with plenty of time to spare.

Hawaiian flies 717s all around the islands, so I'll be getting used to these birds over the next few weeks. They're really, really skinny compared to their length, hence being known as one of the 'flying pencils' of the skies:

A regular fixture in Hawaii, the 717

Our takeoff runway was the 'Reef Runway', right out on the ocean. This meant a sharp right turn on takeoff and spectacular views out of the window towards downtown Honolulu:

Takeoff over Honolulu

Once that was complete, came the rest of a 35-minute hop to Hilo. As is customary on Hawaiian inter-island flights, there is a water or juice offering, which can be sat on your tiny tray table:

Hawaiian's tiny tray tables

Following was one of the fastest touchdowns I have ever seen, there must be a premium put on time for these short flights.

A couple of hours later we had a car, had gone to our hotel, a nearby supermarket and topped up on supplies. Tomorrow the weather looks to be decent and we should be heading out to some parks and waterfalls. Ciao!

Felicity says:

"Plenty of time to spare"???!!! Ten minutes is not plenty of time, it took me that time to get my blood pressure back to normal, I was convinced we were going to miss that flight. The only thing that saved us was the huge bag queue (100+ persons) was for mainland agricultural inspection... we found a much smaller queue for the inter-island flight. You don't think you have just a tad too much plane geek stuff in this blog Matthew? And you should be saying "Aloha", not "Ciao".

Trip Report: JQ5

An upgrade to business class on this trip! Was keen to see what Jetstar had to offer up the pointy end, they spruik it as "business class", but us realists see it for the premium economy that it is.

Starting off with a quick trip to Qantas' International Business Lounge. It looked a bit dated, but was in reasonable enough nick, and with most flights having already left it was pretty empty. Some obligatory passport/boarding pass/food photos from the lounge:

Life in the Qantas International Business Lounge

With only minor hold-ups, we were soon in the air. The hold-ups getting on enabled me to grab some snaps of our Boeing 787 Dreamliner. I later found out the plane was less than 6 months old - almost fresh out of the box, and the newest in Jetstar's fleet!

Jetstar's newest equipment!

Less than an hour after take-off, and with the gentleman in front of me's seat fully reclined, dinner was served. Three courses seemed about par, but the food was surprisingly decent compared to what I was expecting. I took a menu photo, but all that needs to be said is a couple of pastry entrees, chicken, and chocolate tart:

Jetstar's 3-course business class fare

Settling in to sleep for a while, awakening only to mum watching one of 4 movies she watched on the trip, I awoke shortly before breakfast. Too hungry to take a photo, I promptly dove in. Also a great selection! Food is a winner for me on this sector.

As we neared Hawaii, we were treated to some typically spectacular scenery. The sunrise was just fantastic, and the scenery on final approach into Honolulu was also nothing short of brilliant:

If this scenery keeps up, I'll be very happy!

Props to Jetstar's crew, and many thanks are due for letting me into the cockpit post-flight to examine the inner workings of the Dreamliner:

Cockpit view of the 787

That about does me, I'll be traipsing around Waikiki as the weather looks great!

Felicity says:
Plane geek overload here... but I concur with Matthew's compliments to Jetstar, the staff were great too. No sleep for me but at least I caught up on 4 recent movies. 

Trip Report - CX103

Back home! Woohoo! Now a review of the second segment of our flight back home - Cathay Pacific from Brisbane to Hong Kong, via Cairns.

I pick up where I left off in Hong Kong Airport, where we made the transfer from the arrivals to the departures area and waited for boarding. During that time, I took some plane geek photos. There were quite a few A380s, as well as an area where you could see the planes right as they touched down:

Plane geek photos in Hong Kong

We were introduced to the new liquids rule for flights into Australia - now it's identical to the US, you can't even refill water bottles after security, as there is a second check at the airbridge. I have no idea why, that's the whole purpose of security screening is it not?

We got access to a small priority queue as premium economy passengers, although we were basically lumped together with everyone at the liquids checking area halfway along the airbridge. The Cathay flight was on an A330, so a bit smaller and a few less people to deal with. The flight left late, but we managed to 'make up time' by the time we arrived in Cairns and then Brisbane. They are on time 80% of the time for a reason...

Our ride back to Oz

They served dinner - the only meal offered on the flight, despite the fact that we would arrive a few hours after breakfast. The food was a vast improvement on Air France's offering:

Dinner on Cathay

I know that people don't always like Asian food when they have just spent two weeks on Asian food, but it was quite nice having come from European foods. Bok choy and chicken with rice and Haagen Dazs was just the ticket! Cathay was much better and came around much more frequently with drinks and the like.

We arrived in Cairns a bit before 4:30. The airport was completely dead, but the security staff were surprisingly perky, and were up for a good chat while we waited for all the people in front of me to empty their bags of their stuff like amateurs. Dad made the observation on the way over that all the Asian tourists seemed to go to Tropical North Queensland, and indeed the flight was decidedly more empty after the Cairns stop.

Just after departure in Cairns, I managed a really nice photo of the sunrise with my phone. It never ceases to impress me:

Sunrise over the Pacific Ocean

Our entertainment system from Cairns to Brisbane consisted of watching the entertainment system being reset, and watching the Linux OS start up. Not so amusing for several other people, but surely you don't need entertainment on a less-than-2-hour flight?

Entertainment

In fact, I lie. We got a small breakfast pasty. Quite delicious too. They even came back with a hot chocolate after they said they couldn't source me one. They shouldn't have bothered - it was hot but it wasn't chocolate - it must have had a quarter-shot of chocolate in it.

Arrival in Brisbane, and fast forward to, well, fast-forwarding through the ePassport section and bag pick-up. Again, our 4 bags were literally in the first dozen to come out. My luggage has shown up early for the entire trip!

Trip Report - AF188

Greetings from Honkers, the midway point of our journey back Down Under.

This is my first time flying somewhere other than the back of the bus (economy class), with my upgraded return sector to premium economy so I could fly with dad. With Air France's premium economy comes several priority accesses to queues, including check-in and passport control.

Our experience began interestingly at the first of these priority queues, at check-in. As you know, check-in typically opens 3 hours before. We asked the 'greeter' at the priority queue if we could check in before then, and she said "yes, yes, the economy check-in queue is over that way". Ah, you don't even want to ask if we have a priority ticket? I may never travel premium class again, but really?

A quick check-in process would have combined with an even quicker passport control, had the priority passport control access not been seemingly blocked off. I said to dad, "let's see if it's open". We were allowed through, by ducking under the temporary barrier. So Air France gets a very low mark so far.

The priority access was very quick though, once we figured it out. We had a couple of hours to kill, but decided against €25 each to access the premium lounge, which is a compromise - you can buy access, which economy passengers can't do.

Eventually boarding time rolled around. It took near enough to 40 minutes to cram the 500 people on to the A380. We made our way to our seats, once again at the back of the upper deck:

Premium economy

They say first impressions are lasting impressions, and it was about what I expected. It was a decent amount of extra space, but not amazing. Food and drink service was reasonably plentiful throughout the flight, although it wasn't that much more frequent than what I experienced in economy on the way over:

Dinner and brekky

Here you see Air France's two meal offerings. The dinner was quite reasonable, with a pineapple upside down cake and a bit of stale bread (stale bread seems to be a thing on Air France, judging by internet reviews). Breakfast was worse. A sausage with some beans and eggs that didn't even look like eggs. More stale bread. Even the hot chocolate wasn't that great. And to think this was on the A380, which Air France spruiks as the 'best of the best'. I don't think I'll be back.

The flight was on time though, so I guess that was something. A quick look around at Hong Kong Airport, before we board our Cathay flight back to Oz!

Au revoir, Europe!

Well, we made it to the airport safely! Now all we need to do is make it home.

You can see some photos of today on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157645709737341/

After getting mum to the train station well before 8, we headed to the Port of Dover, where we drove onto our ferry to Calais. This particular route is one of the busiest large ferry routes in the world - there are many, many crossings each day. The 90-minute crossing was fairly uneventful, although I did capture a couple of wicked photos of the white cliffs as we left:

The White Cliffs of Dover

See you later, England!:

See you later, England!

There was a complete absence of border control of Calais - you literally just drive off the ferry straight onto the motorway. We decided to go along the road nearer the coast, rather than just using the motorway. Our planned route took us past some spectacular scenery and over the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer. We wound up in Abbeville, where we had a brief look around:

Abbeville

After we found out the nearby Chateau was shut, we soldiered on towards Paris. By complete accident we went past Chateau de Chantilly around sunset, which was just magnificent:

Chantilly

After another hour or so, driving through some dense forests and sparse farmland, we made it to Charles de Gaulle Airport - the Renault lease car drop-off point, to be precise. It’s some distance to CDG, transport to which is provided free of charge with a transfer van.

I’ll upload a couple more blogs detailing our whole airport-airline experience until Brisbane. Au revoir until then!

Crossing the channel

After two days of hectic travel, we have arrived in the UK. It's nice to be back in a country that speaks English again! It means I can purge all the foreign languages out of my system - for the time being at least.

For the last two days, I've added quite a few photos to the Flickr driving set:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157645709737341/

First up on the first morning was a quick whiparound of Avranches, the small town where we're staying. It's a fairly small town, but it's got a decently-sized tourism office because it's so close to the Normandy-Brittany coast. In the town there's an obligatory enormous cathedral, a ruined medieval castle and a memorial to General Patton, who broke through a German frontline in the Great War, which ultimately resulted in the liberation of France in just two days!

A whiparound of Avranches

From there it was a loooong drive to Le Havre. Mum had previously wanted to stop by some D-Day related stuff, like Omaha Beach, but we ended up just driving through a couple of towns near Le Havre. They are collectively known as Deauville-Trouville, and are well-known for their seaside location and old buildings. But 'The Parisian Riviera'? Get a grip! They're not that impressive.

Deauville-Trouville

We eventually made it to the Port of Le Havre, and queued up to check in. Just like boarding a plane, you have to check in with your car at least 45 minutes before the scheduled departure time. We were ushered onto the car deck just over an hour before a scheduled 5:00pm departure on our ship, which was called the Seven Sisters.

For those that haven't used a car ferry before, you basically have to get what you need from your car - you can't access the car decks while you're sailing. Once you've done that, you head upstairs and try and snare a seat. I found some seats that were quite comfortable, but they were right near the playground area. Run away! We went up a deck and found some identical seats with no kids. Great!

We actually left Le Havre about 15 minutes early - probably because the decks were less than half full - not before I got some good shots of the waterfront of Le Havre. Good thing about a nice camera - the shutter is too fast to worry about the ship's list:

Le Havre waterfront

We settled into a five-and-a-half-hour journey. Mum's a poor sailor, yet she managed relatively well - she said afterwards another hour might have been pushing it though. We actually found a cabin of sorts fore of where we were - it was very dark and quiet, with next to no people in it. It seemed to be a 'quiet zone' - nobody was talking at all. It was marvellous.

We hadn't had lunch, so I headed down to the restaurant at about 8. I decided to try a British fish and chips - the prices were quite reasonable for ferry and ship standards, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. The fish and chips was typically British - the fish was lots of batter and not a lot of fish, the chips were almost crispy.

About an hour before arrival in Bournemouth, the sun started to spectacularly set behind some clouds. There were a lot of people out on the decks, but I managed to find myself a quiet spot and started snapping:

Sunset from the Seven Sisters

Our overnight tonight was a hotel just off the main East-West motorway, surprisingly quiet so close to the motorway. Free WiFi, free parking, less than $100 a night. Sold! We found out the next morning that there was a mill museum next to it. Not that we could go, because it was closed for the entire month. Slackers!

Our initial plan for day two was to make quick stops in Torquay and Plymouth. I hadn't read much about them personally, but mum wanted to go to Torquay and dad wanted to go to Plymouth. It became inherent after about an hour on the road that that wasn't going to happen.

OH MY GOD THE TRAFFIC IN THIS COUNTRY! Evidently we got the worst end of a bad Saturday afternoon, but all the A Roads, as they're known here, were stupidly busy. We made multiple detours on back roads to beat the traffic.

We cruised along near the coast for quite a while. We quickly drove through a couple of towns, including Dawlish, but decided there wasn't enough there to warrant a stop. Frankly, I thought the countryside looked much better than the towns:

The Devonshire coastline

We crossed through a couple of nice towns and made a lightning-fast stop on the beach in Torquay. Enough to get a few photos:

Cornish coastal towns

Eventually we made it to Plymouth, where we looked at a railway bridge named after Isambard Brunel, an English rail baron and one of Britain's most influential entrepreneurs. To put it in perspective, he was named second in the '100 Greatest Britons' survey, behind only some insignificant guy named Winston Churchill. The bridge wasn't that amazing, but it was a fantastic legacy to a great man's work.

Eventually we made it to dad's friends' place. They live in a tiny suburb in the town of St. Austell. It's pretty central in Cornwall, making it easy to explore in any direction - except for south, it's almost right on the sea. We'll be staying here for four whole days. We'll probably go down to St. Michael's Mount, but the rest is up in the air. Catch you next time!