Next stop: Sydney

I'm writing this on an iPad in Sydney airport.

Nice bit of kit despite some minor annoyances. I miss Swype for the keyboard, for example. The kid next to me has been showing his grandmother how to use it for reading eBooks, and they can't seem to make the fonts big enough for her to read comfortably. But this isn't the place for a technology rant.

Back in the vastness of Bangkok, I was chatting with a chap in a purple Buddhist robe who turned out to be from Texas, but has been living in Burma (isn't that Myanmar now?) for the last nine years and is flying home to see his parents for the first time in tearly a decade.

The woman sitting next to me on thpe plane is a school teacher from Sydney, flying home from England where her husband was playing cricket, and their daughter lives. We comparg the Irish and Australian education systems. They seem to have a lot in common, probably because they were both set up by the British.

Landing in Sydney, it seems a much more sensibly sized airport, tough there could be a few more terminals hiding somewhere. A nice chap with anyellow "helper" badge directed me to the transfer security check. I wandered around the duty free area for a while before setting up camp in the Apple store.

My last flight of this leg leaves in an hour. Then I have another couple of hours in the air, and a couple more time zones to cross. I don't think my body knows what time zone to think it is, so hopefully I can persuade it to just keep going in this one until it's bedtime here.

I'm really looking forward to arriving in Wellington so I can say the trip has properly started.

See you soon!