Saturday 16th Sept.

We are on our way….the first 11hr flight with Emirates from Perth to Dubai was on an A380, which translates to a massive plane. Two decks, up stairs for the rich and famous, so no guessing what deck we were on. However, it was the most luxury cattle class that I've been on. Entertainment screens were nice and big so one didn't need to squint and there was on board free Wifi. Couldn't find a movie to take my fancy so decided to watch 6 episodes of the new season to "Call the Midwife", good ole TV shows! The coolest thing to see was views from cameras mounted on the outside of the plane, so from 3 angles you could watch the plane taking off and landing, really cool with all the runway lights at night. After some food we tucked in for a bit of sleep. Arrived in Dubai early in their morning, we haven't passed through this airport since 1989, just a little has changed! We had 1 ½ hours to get to our next departing gate, so with up and down 4 sets of BIG escalators, walking from what felt like one end to the other, catching a train and, up and down a couple more escalators by the time we reached the departure gate we only had a sit down for 10mins before it was time to board again.

The leg from Dubai to Rio de Janeiro took 14 hrs, and we were back to the regular economy, obviously not as many people travel this direction because it was only a boeing 777. The plane wasn't full so many travellers were able to stretch out to sleep. A pleasant, but it felt like a very long flight. I managed to finish off the last 3 episodes of Call the Midwife, along with a reasonable amount of sleep, but still managed to feel like I had done a back to back night duty! We had a 1hr 45 min layover in Rio, but had to stay on the plane, that was interesting watching it being cleaned and prepared for the next leg to Buenos Aires. We were asked over the intercom to sit in our seats while the plane was refuelled…after sitting for 14 hours who would listen to that?

On arrival at Buenos Aires it was a fairly straight forward dis-embarkment, I think our cases were that last off due to coming all the way from Perth. Going through immigration, I got called to desk 9 and Rob went to desk 6, I was asked for the address of where we would be staying. Just saying with relatives wasn't really enough, so I began to scroll through my messengers to look for an address, meanwhile Rob was waiting for me, so the officer let me through. Rob commented on that I took a while? When Rob was asked where he was staying he answered "I don't know" then he was asked what are the relatives names, he said "I don't know that either!" With watching boarder security, one would have thought we would be more prepared!! Anyway, on the other side waiting for us were Robs cousins - Cristina and Rita.