24 hours on an aeroplane - touchdown in the city of Sydney

The reason you spend 24 hours on a plane.
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"Welcome to Sydney!"

So says the banner from Kingsford Smith airport and pull onto the motorway into town.

The stress of passing so many people through made the check-in staff a little charmless and I was in a foul mood when I boarded the plane to Shanghai.

This is the big one. The most expensive trip. Costing not less then £600 to get here and from an island off Western Europe to the South Eastern tip of the continent of Australia takes 24 hrs including stopovers. This is the longest journey I have ever underataken in my life.

The CBD from Darling Harbour
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It begins on Saturday afternoon - it is now Monday morning. I have spent nearly the whole weekend on a plane. Rewind to Saturday the 3rd and taking a train from Acton Mainline station into Paddington and then the new Heathrow Exprfess down to, you guessed it, Heathrow. It takes all of thirteen minutes. Terminal 2 Heathrow is just has horrific as I remember it (roll on Terminal 5) and a wait until 6.00pm when China Eastern Airlines opened their booking office.

The airline staff were slow and chaotic and frayed nerves affected the passengers before they got on the plane. The stress of passing so many people through made the check-in staff a little charmless and I was in a foul mood when I boarded the plane to Shanghai. Then was our 12 hour trip to China with a sweet Chinese girl sitting next to me. We also had a girl who couldnt sleep and passed around a petiton against the check-in staff at three in the morning.

The glittering city of Sydney
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we crossed the enormity of Eurasia in the night. Mongolia came into sight about 6.00am and the Peoples Republic of China was with us until 3.40pm when we reached the Japan sea and started to descend to Shanghai. We changed planes at the uber modern Pu Dong airport. I was glad I got a Chinese visa beforehand as passport control was hundreds of metres long. Two English girls and I were swept with the crowds to the "foreigners" section and let into "transit". it is horrifically confusing and Pu Dong is too big to be intimate. At one point I had parked myself in the outside check-in area, nowhere near the departure gates and had to go back through immigration, X-ray etc to get to my departure gate. This place beats Congonhas in Sao Paolo for being confusing.

Then the twelve hour flight to Sydney. It was overnight and I managed to get 4 hours sleep which I can live with. We crusied the coast of China, passed Hong Kong, and onto the South China sea. The Phillipines passed us and I woke up as we flew over Indonesia and its millions of islands. Then the monstrous continent of Australia was approached from the north, flying over Kakadu, Arnhelmland and it was still another four hours to Sydney. We followed the Queensland coast all the way down to New South Wales and adjusting our clocks approached Sydney at nine on Monday morning.

Looking through the window we soared over the city from the north and saw the harbour with its glittering water. We were then descending down to Botany Bay. Our ears popped, the engines screamed, the plane bumped.

And then after twenty four hours we were finally in Australia.