London to Sydney

---

My flight from London Heathrow left 15 minutes late.

I was sat next to some guy from Brisbane. He was about late 30’s and he had visited France, Finland, Scotland and England, and was on his way back to Brisbane via Singapore.

As it was quite a long way to Singapore, about ten hours, I thought I’d make some good conversation.

He was on his way back from this ‘business trip’. Hey if that’s a ‘business trip’, then I wouldn’t mind a bit of that! His name was Glenn. I asked him about his time abroad and he said he’d had an excellent few weeks, but was very keen to get back home to the heat!

I told him about my holiday plans for the next few weeks, about how I love the Australian way of life, attitudes, etc. and he agreed that ‘Oz’ is so much more relaxed and easy going, especially compared to somewhere like England, with all it’s ‘hustle and bustle’.

Then we got onto New Zealand, where I told him about my tour and my skydiving plans. Little did I know was that I was sitting next to an ‘old hand’ at this, and that he was a veteran of some fifty odd jumps. I explained the choices I had: either 9-, 12- or 15,000 ft skydives and he said it’d be best to do 15,000 ft as you’ll get much more of an opportunity to enjoy the views and the experience, whereas on a 9,000 ft jump it would be over too quickly.

I didn’t want to sleep on any of the first leg of the flight, and planned to all my sleeping on the Singapore to Australia leg of the journey. I tried to read my ‘Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ book, but I just couldn’t get into it.

The meals on the flight were ok-ish I guess. Dinner, an hour into the flight was a chicken red curry, and for breakfast it was an omelette.

Anyway, we got to Singapore at 6pm their time, where I said my farewell to Glenn.

I had an hour or so to kill, so I decided to have a quick stroll around the airport. It was quite a nice airport, and was surprisingly quiet. One of the airport staff’s lounges had the France v England Rugby World Cup semi-final, so I watched that until it finished. England had comfortably won the game.

Take off from Singapore was delayed a further twenty minutes, due to apparently windy conditions in Sydney. They delayed the flight to avoid us having to circle Sydney for a long time waiting for the landing conditions to change. The night meal I forget what we had, but it was more than likely another spicy meal!

I had some sleep on the eight-hour flight, probably around three hours worth, and in between I watched Terminator 3 on the video screen, but didn’t enjoy that so either flicked through the twenty odd channels we had, or listened to the music channels.

Breakfast was croissants, fruit cocktail and yoghurt, which was nice and light, as it was a very early 4:30am breakfast.

---