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Day 0: Sydney, Singapore, Dubai, Istanbul Getting Ready We got up early and did our packing then. None of this "pack in plenty of time". That's for prepared people. We spent the night before washing and drying the clothes we wanted. So we packed in the morning. At the last minute, I decided to do something that I had neglected for years. I wrote my will. Dragged in the same neighbours I dragged in last year a few hours before Anne left for America. They witnessed my will and were vastly amused by it. Kristin arrived and we did a quick whip around, showing her where things were and what to do. Not that it did any good. Phoned for a taxi, and one arrived. He was a bit strange. Complimented us on the orchids growing around the base of the tree, and then decided that he didn't have enough room in his boot for our bags. He proceeded to take his large containers of pool chemicals out of the boot, and left them near the tree (with the orchids) and declared that he would come back later and pick them up. Very strange. We assumed all sorts of sinister things on the way in to the airport. We imagined that he would go back that afternoon and steal all the orchids. Or just take a few. Or worse still, knowing that we were flying off on an international flight, he would come back and empty the house. But he saw us leave Kristin behind. We chatted during the ride, and made it very clear that the house was going to be fully occupied while we were away. Call it paranoia. We're firmly in the grip of it these days after the 1996 burglary. Interestingly, nothing came of it. Kristin reported nothing untoward; his gear was picked up; no orchids went missing. Must have been an innocent affair, and we are just paranoid. Sydney Airport We were early, arriving at the airport at midday (flight due to leave at 3:30). We were the first of our group at the airport. Also the first ones in line for seating. Richard arrived soon after we did, and we formed our little threesome. We were very interested in the seating arrangements. Anne had declared that for international flights, the best seats were the ones at the emergency exits. Anne had a friend who worked for Singapore Airlines and she had made arrangements for us to get the emergency exit seats. When we rolled up nice and early for our seating, we checked this, and sure enough, we were booked into those seats all the way. It proved to be of mixed benefit. Jenny and Sedat arrived at the airport, laden with luggage. Sedat had a huge overnight bag stuffed with shoes and sneakers that he was taking back for friends and relatives. Jenny told us the story of the shoe salesman attending them, and referring to Sedat as Jenny's son. This amused Sedat no end, and he was still occasionally calling Jenny "Mum". Great amusement all round, and even Jenny was laughing at it. Jenny also had a large heavy bag full of our tour notes. As soon as she could, she started distributing these. They were great notes, well presented with tons of information, all designed to whet our appetite. Some of the others started to arrive, and make their way through the seating allocation. We weren't really familiar with other at this stage, still strangers, so we didn't clump together. Richard and Anne and I wandered around a bit, and settled down and had coffee. While Anne and I were in line getting coffee and snacky things, Richard met up with one of his friends from tennis and had a great chat with her. Then we wandered up to our exit gate, and had a little look through the duty free shops. This was our first spending splurge. We bought a packet of twelve films, and I was aghast. Twelve films? Did we really need this many? It was the cheapest way to buy film, and as it proved, yes we did need that many film. In fact, we could have used another couple of rolls of film. I also bought another wallet. I have a problem with wallets. I can never find one that is exactly what I want. I used to own a lovely solid little three-fold wallet, and it fell to bits after use. I found a very nice kangaroo-skin threefold wallet at the duty free at an inflated price and I bought that. I'm still not completely satisfied with it, but it served me well throughout Turkey. And we got a large bottle of nice perfume for Erika's birthday. This was planning ahead. Erika had her birthday while we were staying at Pamukkale. So we all gathered in the waiting room at our exit gate. We were starting to recognise the others in the group, and starting to exhibit our clumping behaviour. Sydney To Singapore Our flight left on time at 3:30. Our threesome had tons of space. We sat with the food preparation area on our left, and the emergency exit on our right. We could stretch out our legs, and even stand up and walk around a little in our little area. Anne was on the window seat, Richard on the aisle where he enjoyed the sensation of lovely Singapore Airline hostesses brushing past him, and I was wedged in the middle seat. But with the extended legroom came a drawback. The plane was equipped with Krisvision, the Singapore Airlines entertainment package. Everyone got their own little video screen on the back of the seat in front of them. Except us. Ours were in a complicated arrangement of fold outs in our armrests. Whereas the others could look ahead and watch the movies, we had to open our armrests, pull out the contents, unfold them, turn sideways, unfold again and then we had our screens. Richard and Anne had no problems with theirs, but me being the size I am found it a little difficult to reach around and down and pull out my Krisvision screen without knocking Anne or Richard with my elbows. We eventually got it settled and then discovered that if we wanted to get up or eat, we had to fold away the Krisvision and unfold the table and then repeat. Once we worked out the logistics and got good at it, it wasn't such a problem. The leg room more than made up for it. Once we were underway and had worked out our facilities, we set our watches ahead to Singapore time. And then spent ages with the Krisvision fiddling with the flight information, trying out the games (that only kids can play) until the films started. I watched Liar, Liar and had a good laugh, while the others went for the violence and watched Speed 2. These flights quickly turned into an orgy of film watching. All in all we saw about ten films on the plane flights there and back. We saw Fifth Element, Breakdown, Ulee's Gold, The Saint, and some oldies like A Funny Thing Happened On THe Way To The Forum. This Krisvision stuff is a Very Good Thing. At one stage, in between films, I was bored and I pulled out the Singapore Airlines magazine: Silver Kris. It was pretty interesting for an airline magazine, and I found a few things to keep my attention. I got to the page called Harper's Index International, which listed all sorts of funny stats about different countries. Amusing things like Number of seats in US President Bill Clinton's new hot tub: 7, and Number of civil servants in France compared to the number of civil servants in the US: 5:1. That was fine, but my face fell when I read Chances that an Australian adult is primarily dependent on welfare: 1 in 3. I don't doubt the figures, but it sure is embarrassing. During the flight, we did stand up and walk around and exercise. We spotted the others sitting behind us and occasionally went and had a chat with Jenny and Sedat. One of the stewards had taken a shine to Sedat and couldn't do enough for him. Richard didn't like the stewards, but he certainly liked the hostesses in their lovely Singapore Airline uniforms. Changi Airport, Singapore As were coming into Singapore, we all smelt smoke. Not electrical smoke, so we weren't really panicking and screaming about the engines, but bushfire type smoke. It turned out to be the massive amount of smoke in the air from the fires burning out of control in Indonesia and Malaysia. The farmers had started clearing their land a month before in the their traditional way, by burning the forest. The traditional way of controlling the fires was to wait for the annual rains to put them out. But El Niño has gripped the area and the rains didn't come. The fires burned out of control, and immense amounts of smoke filled the atmosphere. It was so thick coming into Singapore that it penetrated the aircraft. We didn't realise how bad it was until we stayed in Singapore on the way back. We got off and wandered around a bit in Changi Aiport at Singapore. It was muggy. Lots and lots of shops, even an Internet shop. We didn't have a great deal of time, so I didn't stop in and send email. There was lots of software for sale, lots of games, but no bargains. All clean and legal. We had to wait till the trip back and a bit of a hunt to find the software bargains. Singapore To Dubai Then we boarded our new plane. It was the same size as the first one, still a Boeing 747, but it was an older model. We got to sit on the left side this time, but still with the exit seats. But this time on our right, were the toilets. This proved to have good and bad points. We didn't get exclusive use of our little area, as it often filled up with people queuing for the toilet. And there was occasionally that earthy aroma of eau de toilette. But we didn't have far to go ourselves, and we always knew when the toilets were vacant. We set our watches back four hours and did our time calculations and settled in and watched films. The mix of our fellow travellers had changed. We had a lot of Asians travelling from Singapore to Dubai, which was our next stop. I think they worked there. They proved to have very small bladders and were constantly visiting us. There were also some Turks, presumably on their way home. Two of them gave us a preview of life in Turkey. One was sitting up ahead of us, and one from behind us. They met in our exercise area and proceeded to hold a very long and animated conversation, compleat with grandiose gesturing. The aggressive one was tall and solid, and the other was tall but slender. Both were dressed in an aggressively masculine style. Lots of gold chains, open shirts, chest hair, tight jeans, thick belts with huge buckles. We couldn't tell what they were arguing about, but they argued and argued for ages. Someone must have complained, because a small steward arrived and asked them to sit down. The big one insultingly waved one hand in the steward's face and said in English "Soon, soon" and then continued with the discussion, completely cutting out the steward. He left. They didn't. A few minutes later, a larger steward appeared and demanded that they sit down. They moved. They moved a few feet into the middle of the toilet area and continued their discussion there, blocking toilet access. This caused a bit of mayhem and they finally broke off and sat down. Very interesting. By this time, we were nearing Dubai and at the end of the flight, the toilets were getting quite whiffy. The Asians were really queuing up, and we saw some of them coming back every few minutes. Many of the women were going into the toilet in Western style clothes and coming out dressed in chador. Looked like they were going to work in Dubai. Dubai We landed in Dubai, and got off the plane. The airport was very flat and all the planes parked away from the terminal. There were dozens of planes all parked. It looked like a huge carpark with the white park areas marked out on the ground. We got out of the plane, and it was hot, hot, hot. And very humid. And it was 2:00am! Came down and got into these strange large flat buses. They were stand up only, but thankfully air-conditioned. They drove us to the terminal. While we were driving along, we noticed many guards, well equipped with guns and machine-guns and pretty scary looking weaponry. No cheeking the guards here. The terminal was pretty big. It had some huge murals on the walls. And it had toilets, both varieties. Western sitdown and Eastern squat. We were soon to become very familiar with the Eastern variety. And there was a giant duty-free shopping area. One thing we noticed was the cigarettes. No laws about cigarette advertising here. Billboards everwhere. Smoke this and you too can be a man and drive these fabulous cars. That sort of thing. And people were smoking everywhere. We don't see much of this in Australia. Our airports and other places where lots of people gather are all smoke-free. We wandered around and looked at all the stuff for sale. Lots of alcohol at very good prices, and we made a promise to ourselves to buy some on the way back. I found a CD shop. Lots of Western pop music, the bland unexciting modern kind, even some Australian pop. They also had specials on Desert-Drive Discs at the front. There was lots of electronics, lots of watches, even some really expensive cars, and there was gold. You could buy the gold in lots of different formats. Watches. Jewellery. Ingots. Bars. Or even Australian gold coins. The big koala gold gongs were for sale, plus lots of the smaller ones. Dubai To Istanbul We only had a short stay here, one hour, so we boarded again, going past lots of well-armed guards, out to our strange flat buses, and driving back to the plane. And then we were off on the final leg of our trip, to Istanbul. We set the watches back one hour and did our usual fiddling with Krisvision and checking our flight details and working out when we were going to arrive and whether to sleep or watch films. By this time I was tired and I was smelly and I was sick of being wedged in my seat, and my coccyx was very sore. I learnt new techniques of arching my back and popping my spine to afford me some relief, and of ways of sitting that didn't aggravate my poor coccyx. This is the part of my spine that was injured in my school days when I went to sit down and some arsehole pulled the chair out from under me and I came down very heavily on my coccyx on concrete. It's caused me a lot of problems over the years and it flared up on this flight. Half-heartedly watched a film then tried to sleep. Spent a fair bit of time dozing, so I wasn't too bad when we landed at Istanbul. While everyone else was sleeping, and the noise of the plane was enough to drown me out, I dug out my Turkish phrasebook and started practising. I learnt yes and no and please and thank you. Said them over and over again until I was happy with them. And then moved onto other phrases, and counting. It was good to be able to say them out loud and get familiar with the words. Best of all, no-one else could hear me over the plane. Istanbul Airport It was early morning when we landed, and we had been travelling for ages and ages. But we weren't going to get to the hotel and go to sleep. Oh no, we were going to adjust to local time, and that meant we had a whole day ahead of us before we got some sleep. First things first, we had to get through customs. This was no problem at all. Got our bags easily, nothing lost. Then we waited in the queues. Elizabeth was sick and she held back and tried to recover. I think it was a bit of motion sickness. She was very white and she looked very unhappy. Sedat was very happy and lively. He was excited to be back home. It didn't take long to get through the queues, as there weren't very many people. Some queues would empty and the customs officers would order us into the empty ones, and then we would be ordered back, and we got very confused not knowing exactly what they wanted. When my turn came, and my passport was stamped, I thanked the guy in Turkish. I got no response at all. Maybe he was at the end of a very long shift. Maybe he didn't want to encourage my bad attempts at Turkish. Maybe he didn't hear me. Eventually we were all out. We were met by our Turkish tour guide, a young guy who was filling in for our real guide who wasn't back from another tour yet. He welcomed us, and led us to the bus. Once again we passed guards carrying machine guns. We eventually got used to this. All over Turkey were military installations under heavy guard, and most mosques had military guards, and a lot of the sites had military guards. If you see enough of something, you stop noticing it. The bus drove us to our hotel. Turkey We had reached Turkey.