Our journey begins at Melbourne International Airport, which would manage a miserably low score of about 2/10, and the 2 is for speed through customs, the rest, forget it!
The whole place is under renovation, except Hungry Jacks, which should be!!
Seriously folks, the most diabolical excuse for a hamburger EVER!! The queue went for ever, courtesy of being about the only joint open, and the end result….
This was Liz’s first Hungry Jacks experience, next time we’ll just slap two bits of cardboard together with a sliver of grease.
To wash the horror out of our system we went searching for a drink, with limited success. Every promised offering was “coming soon”!
Finally a beer was secured in a random bar, then thank God, our flight boarded.
Thanks to changed layover times, we had 12 hours to kill in Kuala Lumpur which luckily included use of the airport hotel for the day.
Man, the bed looked enticing, but why catch up on no sleep when you can schleep around town for a few hours?
After airport Starbucks coffee (I know, all credibility crumbles), we caught the express train into the center of town.
Now would be the perfect time for a sermon on Melbourne’s pathetic excuse for no airport train service, but I’m sure hundreds of government officials, State and Federal are presently coming up with all manner of feasibility study to dissuade any nonsense around joining in on world best practices!!!

KL is huge and time was short, so we headed straight to the most noticeable monument, the Petronas Towers, which is spectacular and has brilliant city views from the sky deck on the 86th floor. Or so we were told, as the next available time to validate said claim was at 4.30pm, so we missed it.

A quick lunch at that most Malaysian of restaurants, Nando’s, and we headed back to the airport…..just in time to confront the elephant in the room.
Sigh…….as some of you may know, Rachael loves the Tigers, who just so happen to be playing off for a place in the Grand Final…..NOW!
ALF live, No.
FOXTEL, No.
TV, No.
Nothing, except spotty commentary thru a radio app, listened to on dodgy wi-if!
Anyway, we managed to keep up with the scores for the first half over beers at an airport bar, then we headed back to the hotel for a couple of hours to let Rachael pace in peace.
I might have nodded off for awhile, and was woken up to find Rachael at the foot of the bed, in tears as her beloved Tigers romp home to book their first grand final appearance since 1982.
The Grand final next Saturday is on day five of our trek, and we run out of connectivity on day four!!!
Oh, the humanity!!!
Rachael is being a great sport…..but I do feel pretty guilty.
And to think that next year we are meant to be in Europe for the whole of September! I guess I’ll have to revise that itinerary!
Anyway, the good news was our flight was on time, and we got into Kathmandu at about midnight, after about 36 hours….three very tired travellers.