Our son, Philip will be looking after our house and the dog while we are away. He arrived before noon and got the usual enthusiastic welcome from Milo. Philip has just got home yesterday from a work trip to the USA and arrived with a large bag that he hasn't had time to unpack. He looked as though he was leaving overseas today too.
Today was the first time that I'd used the 13cabs app to book a taxi. It worked well. The taxi arrived on time at 12:40pm and we were at the international terminal less than 30 minutes later.
The economy queue for Singapore Airlines was long and hardly moved. Many of the people in the queue were Rotary exchange students. They had green jackets covered in badges.
Security is much better organised nowadays. However I had problems with the machine matching my face to the passport photo but it worked on the second attempt.
This would be the first time I've flown on an A380. It's a very large plane but the boarding was smooth and the plane left on time.
They served us a meal soon after take-off and a second meal later in the flight. By this stage I wasn't feeling hungry. Suzy watched two movies and I read newspapers on my iPad.
At the Singapore airport, we caught a shuttle bus from terminal T3 to T2. Despite our concerns about the short gap between the flight, the timing was OK. By the time we boarded, we had met two other couples that were on our tour of Sri Lanka.
The second leg from Singapore to Colombo was on a smaller plane, an A330. They served us yet another meal after take off. Suzy managed to get some sleep.
Once again the plane arrived a little early - just before midnight Sri Lanka time. We were relieved when our bags arrived OK - they had successfully made the connection from one flight to the other. The immigration queues were confusing and slow.
After passing through customs. we were met by Neil from Inspiring Vacations. He said he would be looking after us for our entire tour.
The next task was to get a local SIM for my mini WiFi. Despite the fact that is was the middle of the night, there were several counters selling local SIMs. Neil suggested I go to the Dialog counter. However, they had a long queue whereas there was no queue for Mobitel who had been my original choice based on the research I'd done online. Eventually I gave up on Dialog and bought from Mobitel. I paid 2700 rupees ($A21) for 50GB of data.
It turned out that our entire tour group was on the same plane - 15 out of 15. This was an opportunity for Neil to take a photo of our group.
The bus trip to our hotel took almost an hour. Neil gave us an introductory talk. During the talk he gave contradictory advice about times. He also introduced us to our driver who would be with us for our entire tour. In addition, there was an assistant who sat on a fold-down seat near the door of the bus - next to the driver and in front of Neil.
We were in bed at about 2:30am local time (8am Sydney time). It had been a very long day.
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