And ... Home (Views Over Asia)

So now - at last - all the photos from our three-week, thirtieth-anniversary holiday of last October are up on my Flickr photostream.

The last day of the trip - an extended version of the 29th of the month - involved a 4am start (which is no great fun), a drive through the small-hours but nonetheless well-illuminated streets of Hong Kong, and the discovery that even Hong Kong airport doesn't really get moving that early. It took a little while for the catering to open up, but eventually we managed to find breakfast, and decided to try some local paper-wrapped rice-based thing.

Hmm. Possibly an experiment too far. Let's just assume that it's a taste which locals acquire from childhood, shall we?

So we boarded our Qantas 747, and spent the next few hours largely on a route that Marco Polo might, I guess, have regarded as familiar (assuming, modern theories notwithstanding, that he didn't just make stuff up), just a few miles higher up, in much greater comfort, and with some watching of movies and TV on the back of the seat in front. Were those the Tian Shan mountains down there, and if so, where was Shangri-La? And was that the Taklamakan desert? Not sure, but anyway, does flying over count as going in?

Ah well, those are not modern concerns. Modern concerns are things like Qantas grounding their entire fleet for a few days due to a large-scale row with their air crew union, which we only later discovered happened while we were in the air. Hmm. Dodged a last-minute problem there.

Which brings me ... back to where I was months ago.