We’ve come to the conclusion that you know you’ve been travelling for a while when you think of airports by their 3 letter acronym rather than their actual name. That time has certainly come for us - thus the headline “CMB-SIN-MEL-CHC” - or Colombo (Sri Lanka), Singapore, Melbourne (Australia) and finally Christchurch, New Zealand. We were up at ‘stupid o’clock’ in Colombo, very shortly after having gone to bed, to meet our driver at 3.50 am for the transfer to the airport. Just too early. Colombo’s airport is fairly secure as these things go and we had a short queue just to prove we were allowed in then hoofed it past loads of little shops on the basis we would check in and then wander back unencumbered to spend our final rupees on ‘whatever’. More security almost put paid to that plan as we would have had to go through a full on x-ray/bits and pieces scan/no-going-back routine just to get to the check-in counters. Fair enough. Hoofed back to the little shops and bought a couple of small gifts then eventually legged it to the security queue. And at 5 am there really was a queue. Already.

It’s unusual for us to actually fly Business Class as revenue passengers. In fact we’ve only done it once before and that was in 2011 when once more, it just made sense. In this instance for our marathon trip from Sri Lanka to New Zealand we tried to make use of our various pots of frequent flyer miles and it just wasn’t going to happen. We’d priced out the cost of the economy flight options at around A$900 each and then discovered for only $650 more each we could fly business class the whole way. James magnanimously suggested that if I wanted to save $650 then I could travel in the back of the plane. But that seemed highly anti-social. Heaven forbid. So for the first time in a long time we coughed up actual C-ash for a premium airfare. We even earned enough miles off the fare to cover more than a third of the cost for say an award redemption from NZ to Hong Kong. Why was business class so cheap? It was leaving from Colombo. There are certain cities in the world that frequently have ridiculously inexpensive premium fares and then sales on fares and Colombo (and Cairo) are just two examples.

We only mention business class because it meant we could skip the ‘get to check-in’ security queue and go straight to the front of the line. Brilliant. Especially at 5 am. From there we finally checked in (again - no queue on the red carpet) and were rid of our checked luggage. Onwards and up the escalator to the Sri Lankan airways biz class lounge and we were the first two clients of the day. As we entered we were offered a massage (that in itself is enough to prevent me leaving most places). We made coffees and some breakfast selections, settled in and then fronted up to the mini-spa area and I think my 15 minute back/neck/shoulders massage took about 25 minutes. Utter bliss. James tried the neck and head massage, apparently equally good. At this point we regretted spending our last rupees at the shops as whilst a ‘free’ treatment, the therapist had worked damn hard and we figured this was one of those situations where a tip was a) expected and b) actually warranted. Thankfully I was careless/too careful with our change from our final hotel dinner and had folded 500 rupees away inside the receipt - only A$4 equivalent but well received and obviously better than nothing - and to put it in perspective, a tea plantation picker has a minimum daily wage of 500 rupees. (Not surprisingly they are agitating for an increase.) The lounge was lovely and the massages lulled us into a false sense of relaxation as we still wanted to have a quick look in the jewellery shops and also had to, you know, get on the plane.

We’d been trying to take advantage of Sri Lanka being one of the world’s biggest producers of semi-precious stones and had looked in various spots around the country for a bracelet for me... but rorting tourists with extortionate prices and vendors not being willing to haggle had proved a tiny bit of an obstacle. So seriously, what were the chances of finding something at an airport shop? Well irritatingly good as it turned out and of the three jewellers, the first one we went into had the perfect thing. Marked up at US$480. Sigh... but with very little squealing at all, we negotiated down to US$170 or ‘sensible market price’ for his first sale of the day and had the paperwork done, the item packed and we were out the door as it seemed 7.00 am was upon us and boarding was about to commence for our 7.25 am departure. Or, in this case, finish. Whoops. We took another look at the boarding pass and realised the confusion... usually a boarding pass has a very prominent time on it (and only one time), the time boarding will commence. Sri Lankan was trying something different and had ‘Departure Time’ on the pass. Clever. Not. And ‘lo, another jolly security queue. Ah well... not only was it a business class boarding pass, but we were actually on Final Call - so it was straight out the door, onto a little bus and up the stairs to our Sri Lankan Airways plane for the short, 4 hour/2736 km run to Singapore. ‘It is never too early for a glass of champagne’ will undoubted be our epitaph, one day in the far distant future.

The dance of the time zones thus began and we added 2.5 hours to our body clocks and landed in Singapore just before 2 pm. The gods were with us as we trundled our wheely bags through Changi, changed terminals on the train and arrived at the door of the Qantas Business Lounge smack on 2 pm as the angels thrummed their harps and the doors magically opened before us. First port of call after our exhausting morning of shopping, eating, drinking and watching movies was a long hot shower and the liberal application of loads of moisturiser. Then lunch. (But of course). We spent five hours in the lounge altogether and time passed pretty easily indeed. We had pretty much lost track of what we were expecting by the time we boarded the flying kangaroo at 7.30 pm for the overnight run to Melbourne. It was therefore very exciting to find we were on one of the A380s as we headed up the separate entry way. Nice actually as the first time we ever flew business was on an A380 back in 2011 when we went from Sydney to LA. It had been a while since we’d flown Qantas and it was one of the best flights we’d had in a long while due to the superb quality and attitude of the flight attendant looking after us. I semi-joked when we deplaned that we’d had a flying hotel experience with Dinner, Bed & Breakfast included - even more amazing since we’d both slept very well and they only had 7 hours and 20 minutes (6030 km) to accomplish the whole she-bang. And that was another 2 hours added to our ever-protesting body-clocks (jet lag here we come).

We arrived in Melbourne about 5.30 am and we headed straight to the lounge for a shower. No coffee. No food. No nothing. Qantas took excellent care of all that on the flight from Singapore. We were boarding again at 7.30 am and off at 8.15 am for the final leg of the marathon trip to Christchurch - a mere 3 hours 20 minutes / 2412 km for the run (further) downunder. Yawn. And that was another 2 hours onto the body clocks by the time we arrived into a sunny day in Christchurch at 1.35 pm. It was all we could do to get past quarantine, get cash, get the uber and get to our Christchurch AirBNB for 2 nights (pictured). The AirBnb was a brilliant spot, only 10 minutes from the airport (and yet $20... definitely not in a developing country now). But 2 bedrooms thus lots of ‘jetlag room’ and only a five minute flat walk to the corner shops with a chinese takeaway/fish & chippy and a supermarket. And the cool breezes of early Autumn - no air conditioning required... Ahhhhh... bliss. We certainly enjoyed staying there for a couple of nights of sanity-recovery, sleeping at odd hours and ‘local’ food before we headed back to the airport for the short hop to Nelson and our first NZ housesit in a couple of years.