Day 306 – 6th March, Saturday. Cyprus

I have never suffered jet lag before, on any of the trips I have taken – but crossing this many times zones back and forth in such a short space of time has played havoc with my body clock. Neither of us are sleeping at all well during the night, but today I managed to fall asleep for most of the afternoon.

Day 305 – 5th March, Friday. Back on yet another plane! Grrrrrrr.

We got to the airport in the nick of time thanks to Jakki's expert driving only to discover the flight had been delayed - typical! We eventually reached Larnaca on the south side of the island of Cyprus around 5:30pm local time and Derek drove us up to the unusually busy border point in Nicosia. Safely through we headed home stopping at the 'Happy Valley' restaurant for curry on the way.  Jet lag really starting to kick in now - feel dizzy, sick and knackered.

Day 302 - 2nd March, Tuesday. Journey back to Blighty.

We got the hotel shuttle-bus to the airport in the smog and flew 13 hours west to arrive in Heathrow about 815pm where Mum was waiting to take us back to Haywards Heath for a much-appreciated bottle of bubbly. Exhausted. We have to spend the next couple of days finding somewhere to live, getting Ant a new mobile phone, meeting the financial advisor and sorting and re-packing all our gear for the colder weather in Cyprus.

Day 301 – 1st March, Monday. Hong Kong.

After two huge plates full of English and Chinese breakfast, we set out in search of the street markets. We trawled street after street and passed endless market stalls of vegetables, newspapers, seeds, nuts and medical potions. Every other building was clad in bamboo scaffolding cable-tied together and one even had builders clambering up the sides (unharnessed) to the top where they were swaying back and forth over the street adding yet more bamboo. Many butchers had whole charred ducks hanging in their windows, beaks and all. The smell walking along the streets was awful and choked you at every turn, so we made our way back to the hotel via the fish market where every shop was an aquarium with small tanks of fish and terrapins lining the pavement.

Although we were in the heart of Kowloon near MongKok and everything was easily accessible, I don’t think we will be bothering to return. Even if we had stayed on Hong Kong island where it’s supposedly cleaner and more beautiful, I don’t think Hong Kong is really the kind of place we would enjoy. They advertise hotels with hourly room rates for heaven’s sake!

Day 300 – 28th February, Sunday. Melbourne to Hong Kong.

What an incredibly long day – which started with hardly any sleep due to the crappy squashy bed in the motel and then continued with the alarm going off at 0530am to get us to the airport on time for our flight to Hong Kong at 0850am.

The flight wasn’t too bad, plenty of new movies and TV programs to keep us entertained. Ant managed to choose a program on his personal screen with a rather uncomfortable number of very raunchy scenes in it. Cracked me up... he had the aisle seat, and therefore an over-the-shoulder audience and hostesses going past every minute or so – I haven’t seen him go that red in years. I think it eventually got so much he turned it off!
We touched down mid afternoon (local time) amidst fog, smog and 26 degree heat and eventually got transferred to our hotel in Kowloon Park by about 5pm – shattered.