Day 1 - Brunei

After a rather easy and pleasant flight we've made it to Brunei International Airport. By International Airport standards, it's a tad small and simple with a distinct lack of interesting shops. In fact it has a distinct lack of almost any shops.

There's a snack shop, three souvenir shops wherre the vendors follow you around and tell you the price of everything and you get the distinct impression you could haggle for the goods and a handbag shop selling goods from a company I've not heard of. Not even a duty free shop let alone an electronics type shop.

This of course was where I was hoping to buy an adaptor as all of ours are in our checked lugage and we've just been told that the flight from Auckland is late and it's connecting with our London flight so now it's late too. So instead of about an hour in transit we've now got three hours and the laptop battery ain't going to last that long.

Anyhoo, the flight was great. Flying business class really does make all the difference. Big plush seats, food on demand and on real crockery with real cutlery (except the knives, of course) and real glasses that you could easily glass someone with and cause just as much damage as a knife. Go figure. And the loos! Bigger, wider, deeper. Well not deeper but you get the idea. And everything was gold - solid no doubt!



So this was my main, a macadamia encrusted chicken breast - quite tasty...





And this is Lisa and I looking very happy with ourselves in Business Class. Can you tell we don't do this very often yet?



Lisa's so happy as she's managed to take 159 photos since we've got on the plane. This one was just as we're literally leaving Australia on the Gulf of Carpentaria coast.



And I'm clearly not so happy about being delayed for two hours at the Brunei International Airport.

Day 1 Brisbane Airport

Well, we're finally here sitting the Brisneyland Qantas Club Lounge with just under two hours until take off.

There's been quite a bit of planning gone into this trip and it's so close now we can taste it. Or is that the Lukin and May double chocolate chip cookies we just had that I can taste.

Check-in was a breeze. Of course once the Next Generation Check-in is up and running it will be like a tornado. Even got the fast route through security. We were wondering what the lounge situation might be and whether I should try and blag my way into Qantas Club despite not travelling with Quaint-Arse but we got an lovely invitation courtesy of Royal Brunei so no blagging required.

So there was a few hairy moments packing when our combined bags were well over the already generous 60kgs allowance but we finally managed to get it down to about 58kgs in the end. We're taking 4 bottles of wine and one bottle of vodka so it's maybe not quite as bad as it seems but it's still pretty tragic. How we're going to fit in all the mugs, snow bubbles and fridge magnets that we buy, I'm not quite sure.

Anyway, here's us arriving at the airport with three bags, 2 backpacks and 1 laptop. God help us when we actually start shopping!

Next stop Brunei.