Singapore - Melbourne

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Note: We are home as of Thursday, 3 November, but only just managing to post the last day of our holiday today!



I had hoped to sleep (rest/doze) a bit during the flight seeing as we were due to arrive in Melbourne 6.10am (now re-estimated for around 7.40am) so that I wouldn’t be too tired to make it through to bedtime. That was not to be.

There was a young child seated behind me and a parent behind Bernie with the co-parent seated at the bulkhead with another child in a bassinet. It wasn’t too bad when mum was sitting with the toddler, she was a little bit grizzly, but not too noisy. OMG, at some point when I was trying to doze, mum and dad swapped and the child had a complete meltdown. Wailing ‘I want mummy, I WANT MUMMY’ repeatedly and SOBBING her little heart out. Young Delia worked herself into quite a tizz. Dad just wan’t cutting it in the parenting stakes at all. His only strategy seemed to be to offer Peppa Pig but, only if she stopped crying. When she wasn’t noisy she was kicking and jostling the back of my seat. On the bright side it was ‘only’ a seven hour flight to Melbourne and not a 14 hour flight to London. Of course when we landed Delia was dead to the world … when I had to be wide awake to get my arse off the plane!

We made up half an hour in the air and touched down about 7.40am. The e-gates at Tullamarine recognized Bernie so we made it through Immigration pretty quickly. We then waited A-G-E-S at the baggage carousel for our bags to come through but, when they did, they came out one after the other! Definitely the longest wait of the holiday at the baggage carousel.

We filled in our arrival cards during the flight and decided that we had to tick ‘YES’ to Question 10: Have you been in contract with farms, farm animals, wilderness areas or freshwater streams/lakes etc in the last 30 days? Yes, pretty much all of the above! Rural villages that had a cow or several in every front yard and chickens running around everywhere. Phnom Kulen. Definitely a wilderness area that involved a river and a waterfall. We always err on the side of caution and let the customs official decide if our footwear needs to be cleaned before we enter Australia. So, into the red lane we went.

A customs officer who noted that he was born the day before Bernie asked us about where we had been and whether the shoes we had worn still had dirt attached to them. We told him Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore including Mount Kulen in Cambodia where we visited a river. I was honest and said I really didn’t check the tread before I packed my walking shoes. He must’ve thought that if they weren’t dirty enough for me to notice while packing then they couldn’t be too dirty because he waved us through without us having to find the shoes and present them for inspection. Hopefully that was solely because he wasn’t concerned and had nothing to do with (almost) being Bernie’s birthday twin? Ha, ha. I think if we had been in Indonesia the response would have been different due to their ongoing outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

Messaged Kerry again to let her know that we were finally processed and ready to be picked up. We made our way over to the pick up-zone near the hotel. So many numpties parked there with their passengers nowhere in sight. Kerry had been in the holding zone for her allotted half an hour and then cruised by to pick us up on her third circuit through the pick-up zone! That may not be the most convenient way to do it, but at least it keeps things moving rather than having the collection point clogged up with parked cars.

A short drive to Preston, mostly against the peak hour traffic, and we were home. After last week’s weather in Melbourne being like mid-winter, it wasn’t too bad this morning and the forecast for the week ahead is positively summery. Our luck with the weather continues. Thank you Melbourne for welcoming us home with great weather. Thanks also to Cathy and Steve for their company on this trip. We have shared many great experiences with them and have already had some discussions about where we might travel next.

In the meantime though, Bernie and I are off to New Zealand in 24 days time to visit our former next door neighbours on the South Island. Before we left on this trip the airfares to NZ had been ridiculously expensive and we had decided we would wait until next year to visit Robin and Sandra. While we were in Ho Chi Minh City a reasonable JetStar fare to Christchurch came up so Bernie booked it. Now that we are able to travel again we want to take advantage of being retired and get away when and where we can!



Steps for the day: 10,064 (7.03km)

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