Early in the morning of Wednesday 3rd December, we dragged ourselves out of bed and had a quick shower, then a breakfast of small tubs of yoghurt and bits of pineapple out of the fridge, most of which didn’t look that great because the fridge in our room wasn’t the strongest. So most of the pineapple didn’t even get eaten; just thrown out.

Predictably, downstairs, the same two hotel staff were on duty again. I think they probably own the place. We thanked them for everything and took a quick photo of the nice young man behind the desk, who was slightly surprised.

Despite it being 7am there was still a choice of tuk-tuks out front, who knew from the bags to ask us if we were going ‘airport airport?’ We were indeed going airport airport. We had slightly tinged visions of either a very long slow tuk-tuk ride, or perhaps once again one which cost more than what it should have, but the driver said $7 which is what it’s supposed to be. That’s fair enough too; it is a pretty long ride out to the airport, and the traffic was already humming. I sat facing backwards, going a bit crazy with the video camera trying to get one last look at everything. So somewhere there is about half an hour of footage somewhere of regular Cambodian traffic.

The only day was a bit accident on the other side of the road, which was pushing traffic onto our side. Unfortunately, from what we could see through the crowds, it looked like a motorbike rider had gotten caught underneath the front wheels of a small truck. Two people, apparently the truck driver and the bike rider’s friend, were in an argument. The blood on the road did not look very promising. And with all the mental traffic we had seen in Vietnam and Cambodia, over the last few weeks, I’m surprised that we hadn’t come across something like this sooner.

Did we break down in tears on the way to the airport, and beg to be let off to go back to travelling? No; we were just happy and relieved to be going home, and also kind of astounded that we had made it through four months in the world without getting major-league cabin fever and strangling each other, or running out of money and needing to declare some bodily organs ‘non-essential’.

The airport is not that big, and not very busy either. We got there just after 8am, thinking we needed to be 3 hours ahead of departure time as it’s an international flight to KL.

Nope.

Could have still been in bed then.

We sat in the airport twiddling our thumbs and double-checking our bags and getting really hungry for an hour, before our flight even showed up on the departure board, and we saw that we two hours before check-in closed and also that we wouldn’t be waiting in long lines. There’s 7 or 8 departure desks, and flights aren’t frequent enough for a queue to build up. So we walked over to the little cafe and discovered that fleecing hungry transients is an airport customer all over the world, not just in Sydney. Quiche: bland and unevenly warmed. I can’t remember what Alice had, but it was average. And we’d spent about $5 of the USD $10 we had left.

Out front of the terminal a Cambodian sports team, in matching tracksuits, was getting ready to depart for somewhere or other; not sure which sport, but there was a TV camera and everything so it must have been a big deal.

Eventually check-in time came, and we kicked our stuffed backpacks along in the Business Class line, trying to push the wrinkles out of our clothes and generally appear presentable, convinced that for some reason when we arrived at the desk there’d have been a mistake and of course we wouldn’t get our comfortable seats.

But No!

The nice lady took our tickets and passports. She reminded us to pay our Departure Tax of USD $25 (oh crap…). She didn’t notice that our overweight bags were actually leaning a bit against the desk when they got weighed. And she gave us a card each, which was an invitation to the Traveller’s Lounge upstairs. We quickly transferred to Plan B, which involved putting the Departure Tax on the credit card, and skipped on through the security gates and all that lot, then followed the signs to the Phnom Penh International Airport Lounge.

If I had known it would all work out so smoothly, I wouldn’t even have eaten breakfast. Free drinks! Free internet! Free comfy lounges and swish tables! Free food – and not airline-grade food. Nice stuff like pastries and mini chocolate mousse and fresh fruit, juice, anything small and tasty was there somewhere.

In fact there was a whole glass-front fridge full of mini pastries and sweets.

I hadn’t slept that well so two free coffees and a substantial morning tea later, I was feeling a lot better about the prospect of waiting around in KL for eight hours for the flight to Sydney. We’d get lunch on the flight there, so if nothing else we would not be hungry.

Of course when the time came to board our plane to KL we didn’t really want to leave; but we twisted each other’s arms.

Through another stroke of fortune we’d been assigned seats three and four, which are the first ones on the left when you get in the plane. We were comfortable seated (and I mean comfortable… lots of elbow room in Business Class) and ready to fly about 30 seconds after walking on the plane.

Would you like some wine before lunch sir? Why yes.

Yes to everything.

One very cushy 2 hour flight later, after a quick jaunt over the ocean, we pulled into Kuala Lumpur where with the 1 hour time difference it was now 2pm. KL airport is rather a lot larger and busier; in fact to get from the terminal we arrived at to the one we’d depart from, we had to catch a shuttle train. Not that far; maybe 1km at most, but still it’s a pretty sizeable airport.

And that terminal on it’s own is still pretty big. It’s x-shaped so we wandered up this way, up that way, and up the other way and around and about for a while, then saw that there was a Malaysian Airlines lounge up on the second floor. Terminal boredom was just setting in, and immigrants had already staked out the best sleeping spots in all the plastic chairs around the corridors. So why not, we thought. Let’s try our luck with the lounge. We presented our boarding passes like everything was normal, explained that we had been upgraded to Business Class, even though our next flight was economy, and the nice lady waved us through.

Should we, I said, stick our backpacks out of the way in the pigeon holes near the doorway? But Alice didn’t hear me or didn’t care, and was almost running into the lounge before they realised they had let in two hungry and disheveled backpackers.

Without going into too much detail, it was paradise. Much bigger than the lounge in Phnom Penh, with rows and rows of couches, newspapers everywhere, free tea, coffee, cakes, biscuits, cheese, sandwiches, free wireless internet, and a bar where you just walked up and got what you asked for. So we got some champagne and toasted our success. And then red wine. And then more free cheese and biscuits. And juice.

And the bathrooms were swish.

So we made ourselves (very) comfortable in the lounges, plugged the computer in, sent everyone an email with a picture saying Guess Where We Are, and then did some writing and wasting time and reading the free magazines.

And then – well – time flies, and seven hours later it was time to brush our teeth with bottled water for the last time in a long time, and say a regretful goodbye to the now rather full Business Class Lounge, and shuffle off down to our gate for the flight home. To Sydney. It was an odd feeling that the travelling and packing was actually going to be over for a while; but as an anti-climax we sat on the tarmac for about half an hour, waiting for a flight from Phuket to arrive with Australians fleeing Bangkok on it. On the TV they  played a documentary on the restoration of a castle in rural Malaysia. It was boring.

In our two separate seats right up the back we could stretch out a bit, do what we wanted, and wait for late dinner to arrive, once the plane got into the air, even though we weren’t hungry anymore. I don’t sleep that well on aeroplanes. I’d had too many free coffees and sat watching the little dot of the plane move over the map toward Western Australia, trying to nod off.

Greg

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