Arrived safely

As you can see from the blip two days ago, I managed to squeeze in a final safari at the stream, shooting pics at 06:30am. There really wasn't much to shoot until the sun came over the hill and lit up the paddy fields, then the dragons started to appear to warm up in the sun. The rice stalks were covered in dew drops which caught the light and looked quite spectacular through the close focused viewfinder, so it was an easy job to choose an angle to make the most of the display.

An amazing response to the dragon blip of yesterday, so many hearts, stars and comments. Really brightened up my journey, thankyou.

I packed my bags the night before, which allowed me to post the blip, but comments would have to wait. The car arrived early at 09:30, this is always a relief, as a late car just raises the stress levels as you try to through together an emergency plan. I have used this driver many times before and he is very reliable.

Traffic is always a problem here. It took thirty minutes to get on the freeway; empty roads would have taken five minutes. Two hours to ride the freeway to Jakarta and then about 90 minutes of heavy traffic to get to the airport. The freeway is great, very smooth, but what is the point if you just jam it up at the end and throw away all that time saved with insufficient pay booths.

A lengthy wait in the airport, but I found a café with a connected computer and so passed the time catching up on my comments and hyping up on caffeine!

The flight was full, it seemed as though there was some religious festival going on, with lots of groups wearing the same posh shirts and hats and carrying the same shoulder bags. Sat on the plane, the guy next to me pulled out his Koran after only a couple of minutes and started chanting the prayers aloud. This continued for about an hour, through the safety demonstration by the Etihad staff and take off.

I have respect for other people's religions but this just seemed wrong, especially through the safety brief and especially as it turned out that this was the first time this guy had ever flown, as he popped his seatbelt off as soon as the wheels touched the ground. I even had to stop him filling his bag with the blanket, pillow and anything else that wasn't screwed down!

After seven hours of flying, we landed at Abu Dhabi, again with a couple of hours to kill. I found about forty computers, but I just could not get any of them to work, most disappointing.

The onward flight to Manchester was eight hours, sat next to a guy who was all knees and elbows, but I was just too tired to fight for the room and slept most of the way. Both landings were very smooth, all the equipment worked and the Etihad staff was amongst the very best in my opinion.

We landed on time, at 07:25am. First job after collecting my bag, was to find a bathroom and change into something a little more thermally retentive, the T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops were just not cutting the mustard!

My son, John arrived and we headed for home. It was all just as I remember it, drizzle and cold, well, a bit colder than I remember!

Dave