Day 1 & 2 - Melbourne, Australia to London, England via Hong Kong, China

---

Saturday August 19th
Day 1 & 2
Melbourne, Australia to London, England via Hong Kong, China

My trip didn't start the best. My flight was delayed for over 2 hours as the plane we were supposed to be going on was redirected to Darwin because of mechanical problems so they had to fly a spare one down from Sydney for us.
So, instead of leaving Melbourne Airport at 11:00pm on Friday, we left at 1:10am on the Saturday morning.
We arrived at Hong Kong airport at 7:45am (Hong Kong time) and departed there at 9:00am. It was quite hot there and so very humid.
The food on the plane was okay, thought I must admit, the first meal we were given didn't quite agree with me...not pretty!
The in-flight entertainment was quite good, I didn't have to pull my iPod out once. They had so many movies to choose from and CD's too. I ended up watching 'Over the hedge', 'Hoodwinked' and 'High School Musical' (yes, they were all kids movies).
The flight was okay. We flew over China which was really cool, I managed to take some photos out the window. We also passed over Kazakhstan, Russia (just below Moscow), the Baltic Sea, Germany (just north of Berlin), Sweden (just south of Stockholm) and then just north of Amsterdam.
We arrived over Heathrow Airport at approximately 2:45pm on Saturday but didn't land until 3:05pm after circling around for 20minutes.
When we did eventually land we were advised not to leave our seats as the Local Authorities were boarding. They came in, asked a guy for his passport and escorted him off the plane, leaving us with the question of 'why?'. We never did find out.
After collecting my bags and going through customs, I met my friend Kate at Arrivals and she escorted me to the shuttle bus to catch the Tube into London City.
The train we were catching was delayed due to a problem with a passenger. Kate explained to me that this meant that there was someone killed or injured at one of the stations.
We made our way to the bar that Kate was working in called 'Potion Bar'.
It's a really nice cocktail bar which she also lived above. I dumped my stuff, had a shower (in the bathroom that is shared by about 8 other people living there) and joined Kate downstairs for some 'Welcome to London' drinks. I did run out to buy a Chicken Caesar Salad at one stage (for only £1.79 from Tesco’s) for dinner which was pretty nice then decided that the jetlag was getting too much so I went to bed at about 10:30pm. Completely exhausted.

---