Day 2 - Heading for Doha (Sunday 14th April 2024)

After a bit of a sleep-in we enjoyed breakfast in the Hotel restaurant (also quite cheap at $15/head) and then walked over to the Skybus terminal. We had plenty of time up our sleeve, arriving at the Departure lounge about 5hrs before the flight. No check-in luggage dramas this time like we had for last year’s trip to India. Everything went “smooth as” this time. We learned a good lesson from our India travelling companions about “travelling light” on the luggage front. When we saw how much they had bought with them, compared to what we had taken to India, we made a commitment there and then that we would follow suite on our next trip. Well, I’m very pleased to report that we have each just one 42l suitcase and one backpack. That’s it for eight weeks of travel. Kerry’s sister Annemarie confirmed it could be done when she and Garry travelled for about the same length of time through Europe 12 months ago. Emily provided guidance on the specific luggage we acquired. Called July Luggage, it’s designed and made by a small firm in Collingwood. She bought some a couple of years ago and swears by its quality and ability to handle some rough treatment. It is such a pleasure to have only a small suitcase to wheel around and just one other bag. I’m loving the decision already. The other significant change we made was to leave our well-travelled Sony DSLR behind in favour of a new Google Pixel phone, bought solely for its ability to take good photos. For us, we didn’t buy a phone that takes photos, we bought a camera that can make phone calls. Once again, we’ve been guided by the experience of others in that choice. When you’re travelling light, not having a DSLR and its charger and another lens or two makes a difference.

Kerry’s been swapping travelling stories with the 74yo lady in the next seat while I’ve been writing. She’s heading to Nepal to get close to Everest (in a helicopter). Good on her to be still so adventurous. It’s our ambition to be the same in ten years time.

I put the blog down for a while to watch the movie “Oppenheimer” – the story about the chap who developed the first Atomic bomb. It won many awards during this year’s “award season”. That killed 3hrs 8mins of the flight – no pun intended. I’ll probably have to watch it again at some stage to appreciate the subtleties of the story. I continue to be frustrated that in these amazing, multi-million dollar flying machines the quality of the sound coming out the headphones is so shite! Why can’t I get even half decent audio in the 21^st century? It baffles me.

After 14 hours we arrived at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar. Very tired. It was 10:30pm Qatar time so about 5:30am AEST. The walk from where the plane docked to the transfer gate is very, very long but a good walk was required after 14 hours of sitting. No dramas getting through security, just the usual bag check for mine which always caries a lot of strangely shaped odds and ends. In the centre of the massive International departure hall, Hamad International has a very large green space where one can go to while away the time between flights. The area somewhat resembles a jungle with a real tropical forest dissected by winding paths, little huts dotted here and there for people to escape into, park benches, fake lawn, a real waterfall and the recorded sound of forest birds calling from on high. The lighting is quite subdued making it all a very pleasant place to be. At the end of a given winding path you might find yourself walking from these pleasant forest surrounds directly into the harsh lighting and harsh reality of a departure lounge or the food hall. It’s a top job done by the airport to give the weary traveller some respite from the hardness of international travel.

 

The final leg of our flight to Budapest left at 2:25am Qatar time. This flight was about six hours, flying directly over all those Middle Eastern states who are having fun throwing rockets at each other presently. While checking in at Melbourne we learned that Iran had started to do just that at Israel in retaliation for a recent attack on an Iranian government building. I did notice on the in-flight screen that, thankfully, the route took quite a wide berth around the most troublesome spots closer to the Mediterranean Sea. Earlier in the day, Qantas had abandoned altogether their Perth-London flight over that area.