Sunday, April 22, 2012

A Long Trip

Well we have arrived safely in London! After about 32 very long hours, including an 8 hour stopover in Ho Chi Minh City Airport, we landed at London's Gatwick airport at 7 this morning.
It first started with Michelle's flight from Canberra being delayed by two hours. This meant she got to the international airport ten minutes before our flight out of Australia boarded. Fortunately the Qantas staff member who checked André and me in was very helpful and got Michelle checked in as soon as she arrived. (Our Vietnam Airlines flight was code sharing with Qantas and Michelle's flight was also with Qantas).
This then set us off on our nine hour flight to Vietnam. They fed us two hot meals, each meal consisting of the warm dish, a bread roll, a salad, a dessert, a drink, tea or coffee and wine. The seats were not terribly comfortable when upright but when reclined were fine. The lady who checked us in arranged  our seats so that we had four seats between the three of us which was great. Michelle and I were able to snooze a little and watched some movies (Abduction and Puss in Boots).
After eight hours in Ho Chi Minh City airport, we left on our next flight at midnight. Again Vietnam Airlines gave us a warm meal before we spent the next ten hours attempting to sleep. I think I may have got about six hours total. Breakfast was yoghurt, fruit, bread roll with jam, cold meats with salad, juice and tea or coffee.
Overall I was pretty happy with the service on our flights. The interior of the planes was a little shabby, with some non-vital items duct-taped together. But the food was good, the staff were friendly, the flights ran on time, and the seats were reasonably comfy.
Once our plane landed, we got through passport control, collected our baggage and got the train into London it was about half past nine. We found our hotel with no problems (two minutes walk from King's Cross Station) and were able to drop off our bags even though we were too early to check in. So we took a train into the city and spent a few hours looking through St Paul's Cathedral. There are a lot of steps to the top of that dome! We then found a coffee shop for lunch and headed back to our hotel to check in (but not before spotting two squirrels in the park!) So now we are in our hotel planning for tomorrow and taking much needed showers!

3 comments:

  1. Hahaha, several times you mention michelle, but you don't mention leah. for instance, what you did on the flight, you mentioned that you and michelle were able to snooze/ watch movies, what did leah do? :P

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  2. It was Leah writing the post. I think André's phone automatically logged him in :P

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  3. Obviously missed the bit that referred to 'André and me' :P

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