Cos I’m leaving- on a jetplane

Well, I’ve made it about halfway to Barcelona! Update from Singapore.

I was rather naively hoping to find time to do a blog post before I left. I’ve been pretty slack in the last few weeks- obviously the physical tasks of packing and saying goodbye to everyone took precedence over writing about said activities!

But now I’m sitting in Singapore Airport waiting for my 14hr flight to Barcelona (the flight is actually on its way to Sao Paulo- a 27hr flight!) so I thought I’d write something while I can.

One quick note- I’ve added a Google Latitude badge to the top of the sidebar on the right-hand side of the blog. This should have the last place I logged onto wifi- I’ll try and keep it updated. We’ll see how it goes- I think it’s a good way of showing where abouts I am. I’m hoping to have a few maps around the blog.

Going somewhat in reverse- I stayed up all of last night finishing off my packing and watching movies before getting picked up by the airport shuttle at 5am. I did this deliberately as hopefully it’ll help force my body clock out by 12hrs to Barcelona time, and also to make me so tired i’d sleep on the planes. Anyway I got to the airport and had mixed luck with my bags. Firstly my checked in bag was ~24kg, which is over AirNZ’s 23kg limit (who were checking me in) and well over Singapore Airline’s 20kg limit (who i’m flying Christchurch-Barcelona on). But luckily the nice lady just checked it in without worrying about it being over. The bike was a different story and she sent me to their excess baggage desk (where the woman was rather grumpy until i told her about my trip). I knew that the bike (including racks & fenders) was pretty much 15kg, but when we weighed it in this morning once it was all nicely packed it tipped in at 20kg! Now the AirNZ lady didn’t seem to care what Singapore Airlines policy was (even though thats what she should’ve been charging me), and told me it’d be $NZ40 per kg. I did some quick maths and worked out that this, while still being $NZ800 was $5 less than what Singapore would’ve charged me ($US360 for the first 15kg, then $US60 per KG after that).

Anyway, I paid the money, flew to Christchurch, hung out there for a while, then flew for 10 hours to Singapore. So far it hasn’t been too painful, even though I didn’t end up sleeping as much as I was hoping to. The plan for the coming 14.5hr flight is to stay up for a few hours, then try and get as much sleep as I can so that I’m rested when I arrive in Barcelona at 7am their time!

Singapore Airport’s pretty amazing- I’m almost disappointed I probably won’t be passing through here later in my trip (if the ship comes through). There’s free wifi, a butterfly garden, and free massage chairs I think!

I took the opportunity of the free wifi to book my flight from the London to Tokyo. This flight is on September 4, and I’m flying Virgin Atlantic because they let you take a bike for free on top of your other allowance. I’m quite happy about this- it gives me an end date in Europe to plan around, and should give some certainty around the rest of the trip.

This has turned into quite a long post, and I was planning on talking about the wrap-up in Wellington, so I’ll write a separate one to keep the posts short..

DC out.