CAPTAIN'S LOG: day 1

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I'm at Sydney airport. And have been for the last 5 hours. I finally managed to get the free wifi to behave itself, so things are looking up for the remaining hour before we jet off to Japan.

The first day of the journey got off to a rocky start when we discovered that josh and Mel (tom's lovely cousin and partner who kindly lent their floor and couch for the night) had only trim milk, vastly reducing enjoyment of our breakfast wheatbix. This setback is sure to be one of many trials on our journey, and we handled it admirably, with hardly any tears and a minimal amount of swearing. We set off, full-tummied and determined to put the incident behind us, into the rubble strewn streets of Christchurch.

Christchurch has become a strange place, with an oddly relaxed atmosphere and an eclectic mix of locals and tourists, equally likely to be entranced by building demolition and construction.

The trip to the airport and from there to Sydney was relatively uneventful, apart from a couple of aging men waiting for the toilet on the plane who didn't seem to fully grasp the concept of not resting your crotch on a stranger's arm (will now avoid aisle seats), so I'll check back in when something of note actually occurs. Adios all, missing plenty of people already.

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