Breakfast is fairly nice but unremarkable except for the crockery.
Aftwards we walk down Queen Street to see who’s in port, it turns out to be the old “shopping trolley” Grand Princess although since they removed the handlebar high above the stern of the ship she has lost that title. The area is teaming with passengers, all identifiable by their smart-tags and lanyards, about 3000 of them, ten times yesterday on Odyssey.
We pick up on our harbour walk and continue round further until we walk back into town from the other side and do a little shopping as we walk back, mostly of the window kind.
At midday Ross and Sue pick us up for the Airport run, we make our goodbyes and start the long journey home. We have 11, 14 and 4 hour flights ahead so it’s going to be a long day – quite literally a day as we’re scheduled to depart at 15:00 and arrive home at 15:00 the next day, with the time-zone changes adding 13 additional hours.
Frustratingly, we’re informed by the Cathay ground manager that a passenger has checked in but failed to board (this happens quite a lot – I’ve never understood how someone can present themselves to the airport, hand over their bags and then fail to get on!) Later the captain tells a similar story but there are now two people. Of course the ground crew can’t find the bags and have to empty the whole hold to search for them.
This fiasco cost us 80 minutes delay, quite a worry with only a 100 minute turnaround in Hong Kong, however we make up some time on the journey. We manage three films, two good meals but don’t sleep on this leg of the flight as it’s mostly during daylight.
Resisting too much food-porn, I’ll just highlight prawn tandoori, duck soup, cheese, chocolate pudding and later on chicken pie.
Eventually we land in Hong Kong with 41 minutes to find our next flight – a bit of determination and bombast pushes us to the front of security, then it’s some serious speed-walking to cover the two miles of terminal, and we board with five minutes to spare at 22:55.
For a while our airtags report our bags are still two miles away, and only at the last minute does one report it’s onboard – we can only hope the other four are too, and are just so far down the aircraft they are out of range of contact.
This flight is 14 hours but we manage to sleep half of it, just catching two films. There’s a great photo opportunity over Kyrgyzstan, the mountains in bright moonlight. Our route is quite a zig-zag as we wiggle firstly around the Himalayas and later avoid Russian and Ukrainian airspaces.
Concord greets our return to LHR, a sight almost good enough to forgive the 1 degree temperature! Our bags all turn up thankfully. Annoyingly the Elizabeth line is closed so we have to take a bus round to T5, with only a shirt for warmth.
Happily the next time we emerge from a plane the temperature has gone back to mid twenties. A taxi home takes just 20 minutes and exactly 24 hours by clock, 37 hours in real time we’ve flown halfway around the world.
