The flight from Johannesburg to Sydney was our first encounter with Qantas airlines. I only know them from adverts in my youth which featured Dame Edna and a koala bear. 

 

The adverts didn’t say anything about allowing you a much lower weight allowance for your carry on bags than any more civilised carrier. As we only have carry on bags and no luggage going in the hold it doesn’t seem overly fair that an overly-zealous book-in lady decided to weigh our bags when we checked in. 

 

Ella was, of course, just under her 7 kg allowance as she had bothered to read the blurb and had come prepared in case they adhered to it. My bag was a mere 13 kg. (It seems to have got heavier as we’re travelling but I really don’t know how as I don’t think there’s any more in it.)

 

The lady told me I would have to get my bag down to 7 kg. Ella tried not to give me an “I told you so” look. I’m not sure she fully succeeded. I helpfully made the point to the lady that if I checked my bag into the hold it would be free and would also have the benefit of the added excitement of wondering where it would end up when we were looking forlornly at an empty baggage carousel in Sydney. She reminded me that for carry-on the weight restriction was 7 kg and could I please make my bag lighter.

 

There then followed a wonderfully pointless exercise in moving things from inside the bag to outside the bag in order to make the bag weigh less just so that I could put all the things back into the bag as soon as we were through the check in. So, out came a sweat shirt that I tied round my waist. Slung another top over my shoulder. I stuffed tee shirts and shirts into the arms of my jacket and carried that over my arm (although this made the arms of the jacket stick out as they were stuffed solid and it looked like I was carrying a torso). Bag back on scales – just under 8 kilos. Need to get to 7. I asked her if there was a bin into which I could throw my least wearable shoes and she said: “oh, don’t do that, just put them on top of the bag – it doesn’t really matter that much.”

 

Through check in. 20 yards down the corridor: stop, stuff everything back into bag. Proceed to boarding gate.

 

We had booked the rearmost seats on the plane. We thought they looked like a good choice when we had selected them during the online booking process because there were two of them alone, together – and it looked from the diagram that you’d get a bit more space and wouldn’t have anyone pushing past you to get out to the loos. And the theory was good. You did get a little bit more room. 

 

Well done us, we thought. 

 

Til we were way out over the ocean and at the mercy of the winds in the roaring forties (if that’s where they are, I think they are) and every single one of them roared.  

 

A whole torrent of turbulence that threw the plane around for what seemed like an age. The heavy food serving trolley went flying during one severe dip and fell onto one of the passengers. Fortunately the arm-guard took the brunt of it or his legs would have been squashed. As it was the stewardess who hadn’t secured it properly had egg on her face and the passenger in seat 74E had egg absolutely everywhere.

 

Way back in the tail we seemed to be suffering the worst of it and in recognition of that the chief steward came along during a slightly calmer moment and asked if we would like to move closer to the middle of the plane for the remainder of the journey. Promotion to the dizzy heights of Premier Economy! Only a flapping curtain’s width from Business Class!  Near the wings – a lot smoother ride – with far more fancy seats and stuff to play with and way superior plastic cutlery with which to breakfast.

 

We felt like royalty. 

 

Albeit slightly minor royalty from an obscure East European country with too many consonants.

 

Touching down in Australia we had jumped forward 9 hours and although we hadn’t slept at all and to us it was 5.30 in the morning it was actually mid afternoon in sunny Sydney.

 

Our hosts for the first night were Steve and Grace. Grace is Korean and we were taken that evening to an amazing restaurant where we battled with chopsticks and had a traditional Korean spread of about 20 small dishes of food which gave some palate punching combinations of flavours. We sat next to some black-belt chop stickers who made us feel a little inadequate. Strange cabbage stuff that’s normally stored underground to keep it tasting funny and what can best be described as a crab which had recently stepped on a land mine were two of the stand-outs. Very tasty. 

 

We spent the next morning exploring Sydney and the early afternoon sleeping in a park trying to catch up on the jet lag.

 

Must mention the exceptionally excellent trains they have – double deckers with air conditioning and seats that you can move to face both ways! The upright back section has cushioning on both sides and it pivots (the seat bit you sit on stays where it is) and you move the upright to instantly turn a three seater bench from forward facing to backward facing. Handy indeed if you are the sort of person who likes to travel facing forward. The trains are clean, air conditioned (did I mention that already – and are you listening Transport for London), with excellent communications and less than half the price of London Underground too.

 

Anyway, that afternoon we embarked on what will most likely be one of the most scary and memorable evenings of our whole trip……