The Longest Day

We have made it to Lisbon. 37 hours 10 minutes from leaving the front door of our apartment until walking in the front door of our hotel. Everything went pretty much like clockwork and it always seems like a miracle when you check your bags in at Wellington and the next time you see them is in baggage claim in Lisbon. It is so easy getting from Vivian St via the Airport Express Bus to Wellington Airport compared to when we were leaving from Paraparaumu Beach.

Qantas left 5 minutes early from Wgtn and must have arrived early off Sydney as according to the flight tracker we went up the coast and back for about 20 minutes and still landed on time. We did have one funny ‘situation’ on this flight. Barbara was seated next to the window, I was in the middle and a lady was on the aisle. About half an hour into the flight Barbara kept asking me what the funny noise was. I had head phones on watching a movie and wasn’t hearing anything. Other people nearby also started to look in our direction, aware of something. We then noticed the aisle lady had a tablet and was playing backgammon. The noise was the rattling of dice in a cup and then the scattering of the dice across the board. The lady had ear phones and was listening to music. The dice were being thrown about every 15 seconds and after a while this was driving everyone crazy. Eventually Barbara spoke to her and she was very embarrassed, not realising she did not have the game on mute.

Emirates were 50 minutes late leaving Sydney, it takes a long time to load 500 plus passengers onto an Airbus A380-800. This leg, Sydney to Dubai was long – 14 hours, but there are 750 movies + tv shows + music + games, so plenty of entertainment. I watched David Lean’s classic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, all 3 hours and 20 minutes of it. Still a great movie 62 years after it was made but definitely needs to be seen at a wide screen cinema, not a 10inch screen 400mm from your nose. There are absolutely no female rolls in this film. Also watched the black and white 1942 film Casablanca (Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and a great supporting cast). I had an ear worm of its theme song “As time goes by” for ages afterwards.

When the eyes are tired, dry and heavy from lack of sleep then I listen to the music channels. Listened to Chris Rea, “The Road to Hell” Album, which I thought was appropriate for travelling cattle class on a full plane for 14 hours. The flight from Sydney to Dubai was also a little remarkable in that we left Sydney in Darkness, flew east ahead of the sun for 14 hours of darkness and arrived in Bubai about 5.30am still in the dark.

We didn’t catch up any lost time before getting to Dubai so a layover of about 3 hours was reduced to 2 hours. Then a relatively short leg of seven and a half hours to Lisbon. This time on a Boeing 777-300ER with about 400 passengers. Lisbon Airport, Humberto Delgado Airport, was a bit different in that it seemed to have very few planes connected by air bridges to the terminal. There must have been 50 planes out on the apron with stairs. Passengers being loaded and unloaded from buses.

The lay overs are very easy these days. No need to go to baggage claim, no passport control, customs or biosecurity. Just go through security and into the departure area. Lisbon airport was very busy with long lines to get through passport control (where we actually got a good old stamp in our passport) but very quick at baggage claim. Before leaving home we had bought Lisboa cards online so we had to go to the airport tourist office to swap our vouchers for plastic cards. These are 72 hour tourist cards for unlimited travel on trains, the metro, buses, trams, elevators, funiculars and access to 50 museums, galleries, churches, castles etc. Then we met Marcio our shuttle driver who drove us to our hotel about 7 minutes from the airport. We shared the shuttle with a lady of our age who was from Sydney but grew up in Karori and lived just a couple of streets away from where we lived in Donald Street.

The hotel is a standard Ramada by Wyndham which you find all around the world. There is one 50 metres along the road from where we live in Wellington. Does all the basic things well and you know exactly what you will be getting. We tend to like boutique hotels which are a bit quirky and have some character even if the plumbing is lousy, they are noisy and beds are not very comfortable. The hotel is also located a bit out of the city but close to the airport. There is a metro station over the road so we will be using our Lisboa cards a lot. The metro station is very modern and colourful, see the photos.

We are not going to do anything for the rest of the day. Just a shower and crash and try and catch up on some sleep. 21 degrees in Lisbon this evening and supposed to get up to 30 degrees tomorrow.