Heading from Perth to Europe in search of sun
For those of you that have seen the photos on Instagram (explore_with_fran) and Facebook, you will know by now that we have recently been on our winter (from home in Australia) holiday. Heading up to Europe in the hope of warmer climes. It turns out that we had Italy to thank for the weather. England did the usual. Called itself summer and yet it was Autumn that showed up. Thankfully, we had managed to pack for all eventualities.
The world’s shortest trip to Bali
From the outset, it was quite the adventure. And this was only day one. In a quest to save money, and we saved a packet, we started our long journey back to the UK with a flight from Perth to Bali. A Jetstar flight was a small inconvenience considering what was to follow. Why an inconvenience? If you are Australian you will be familiar with the “no frills” airline, Jetstar. If you are in the UK, think of Ryanair or Easyjet. You get the picture.
Bali is a short hop from Perth. Even closer than a trip to Sydney. Yes, by quite some distance. But, it did feel weird to us to collect our bags at Denpasar airport, scurrying past all the taxi hawkers, “taxi, taxi?”, and back into the airport heading for Departures. Our shortest trip to Bali by quite some margin. That said, we still had to have our visa on arrival (VOA) and our customs declaration form. A bureaucratic necessity that we will also had to do 5 weeks later. Bali also now has a tourist tax, but this was something we could skip this time as we were only transiting through the airport.
The heat and smells of Bali are so familiar to us. We were there at Easter trying out a new part of the island. The humidity hits you as soon as you get off the plane. You will never know how tempted we were to jump in a Grab (Bali’s version of Uber) to Canggu and spend a blissful 5 weeks in one of Bali’s excellent villas or hotels. Alas, we will have to save this holiday for another time. Xmas, perhaps? Right then, we had places to be. And right now, sweating in the heat of Bali, we were checking into our flight to Dubai.
Living as wolves
I should explain why we were in Bali. And why we were heading to Dubai. Flying long haul is hard work. Hard on the body. And it gets harder the older I get. Being cramped in economy is no way to fly halfway around the world. So, this being our first visit to the UK in a couple of years we decided we were going to treat ourselves to business class. This was before we saw how much the prices had escalated in just a couple of years. Eye watering.
Then, rather fortuitously, a colleague of Victoria’s mentioned that if you flew to Bali and connected to a flight there you could make a big saving. We checked. And yes, the saving was indeed huge. So huge that we dropped a chunk of our savings on return business class flights from Bali to Europe with Emirates. It was to be our first experience of their business class offering. How would it compare to my all time favourite, Qatar? I will report back in part 2 of this travel blog.
I have previously said I would rather live one day as a wolf, than one hundred days as a sheep. It was time to be wolves. And as we landed in Manchester, after a very long travel day, and jumped into the Emirates provided chauffeured car for the drive to Halifax, we were happy, if tired, wolves.
Memento mori.
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