Up early to finish packing and complete the many tasks we had left undone due to arriving in Brisbane over the weekend, when all of the required shops were closed. I had to cut Ian's hair first thing, once he had made a poor attempt to remove the red wine from the carpet and consequently decided to permanently remove the tea towel from the room, along with the wine bottle that should not have been consumed in the room in the first place. Downstairs I exchanged my tatty book purchased from Katoomba for an equally tatty book from the book exchange.
After discovering that the YHA luggage store was well and truly full of backpacker gear we dumped our hand luggage in the boot of the hire car and trudged the 500 or so metres to the transit centre where we secured a locker for 24 hours, or part thereof, purchasing a copy of Lonely Planet's South East Asia on a shoestring on the way. We had a slow breakfast from the YHA cafe on returning to collect the car and then set off for a car wash. We found one, much to Ian's annoyance, 8 kilometres out of town on the way to Ipswich. The BP superwash made a poor job of cleaning the ground in flies from the bonnet and windscreen. We then returned the car to Hertz with 30 minutes to go and wandered through Brisbane dealing with our various tasks.
The first was to collect some post that Mark had kindly forwarded to Brisbane for us from Waverley. The second was to return to the cyber cafe so I could complete the uploading of my journal to 8 February 2003 thus enabling me to send my second completed journal home. The third, to send a further twenty seven rolls of completed film home to England which took a while and didn't fill me with confidence. The fourth, to send some books and maps back to Mark in Bronte that we had borrowed and collected en route. The fifth, to relax for 30 minutes and have a hot chocolate and a spot of late lunch. I began to read my next novel. Then we parted company and Ian went to a Sony shop then on to the cyber cafe. I went into the city and found a fabulous Boots type shop, bought some essentials, then went looking for a journal book. I couldn't find one but did stumble across a supermarket although it didn't want to sell me some washing powder suitable for travelling. Then I found a post shop, bought a stamp and went hunting for a greetings card on which I could affix my stamp. I found it eventually, along with my replacement journal book. Satisfied with my purchases I returned to the cyber cafe to join Ian and wrote my journal of the last two days while Ian fiddled with his journal online.
Having caught the airport train to Brisbane International Airport, having retrieved our backpacks from the locker, we checked in with much ease and proceeded through to the departure lounge. We attempted to reclaim the GST that was applied by FedEx on the import of the two dive computers and were disappointed to find that we couldn't because the computers were less than twelve months old. We bought some sandwiches and beer from the cafe and soon enough it was time to board the aircraft.
Our flight bound for Singapore, on a 777, departed ahead of schedule at 00:11 and was quite empty. The flight lasted 7 hours 9 minutes, arriving in Singapore at 06:20 local time, 22:20 GMT. The flight was our most turbulent flight yet!
Copyright 2003 Helen Fuller. All rights reserved.