In the air (UK -1): Sydney etc

As the travelling home takes up some 28 hours (1300 to midnight is 11 hours + midnight to 0600 is 6 hours + 11 hours time difference = 28) I couldn't possibly not say something about it, especially a how once you start rambling to a general audience it seem difficult to stop.

Our first leg from Christchurch to Singapore was OK, all in daylight and with a clear view of stuff all the way. This is Sydney...



(Dad, if you click, you can look at the photo bigger...)

It seems odd that Sydney was only a three hour flight away from Christchurch (and a very cheap one) and we didn't really have time to go. Seeing Australia will be on an entirely different scale to seeing NZ, but seeing Sydney, (if only from up here...) has made me want to do it.

The flight path took us directly over Alice Springs and Uluru, which is a character in Star Trek, but I obviously wasn't looking at that point and didn't see them. What I did see was huge expanses of peopleless, featureless and almost certainly pointless bits of Australia. Bits which exist purely to make it more difficult to get from one useful bit to another. They look a bit like this...



...or, as a complete contrast, this...



...and sometimes have big bits of rock and lakes...



I like to think that on the last photo, we are so far up that the horizon shows the curvature of the Earth, but I suspect it was more to do with some refraction effect of the (reassuringly thick) aeroplane window.

More exciting was this cloud-piercing Indonesian mountain, somewhere near Bali...



...although, quite frankly, it's not even snow-capped, NZ-style.