Whirwind

Well here we are at Sim's Cozy Guesthouse in Chengdu. Things seemed to go surprisingly smoothly all in all.

So let's start at the beginning.

7 nights in a row was shite. Actually, the work wasn't too bad, but it meant we had bugger all time to do any packing or organising. Managed to stay up till 3:30pm after Wednesday night/Thursday morning's night shift organising stuff in town, then got 5 hours sleep, did some more packing, and then fronted up to work.

So on Friday morning I think I got an hour's powernap in total; Jen didn't get any at all cos Annette was up and very lovingly gave us a lift to the airport.

So Virgin Blue is a good airline, cos they count any sporting equipment (kayak, surfboard, skis, BIKE) as 5kg no matter how heavy it is. That's probably how Jen and I got away with bringing 3 kayaks home from NZ a few years back. So Launnie to Melbs was pretty low stress.

Hanging out in Melbourne airport was boring as usual; I won't go into the details. Suffice to say that the guy at the check-in counter scared the crap out of us, saying that we may not be able to fly to China because we didn't have return flights from within China. But he chatted to his boss who initially said "they can bugger off, we're not letting them fly to China otherwise we'll be fined for flying them there" but after a bit of convincing on Mark the counter guy's part, they let us through.

Funnily enough, getting through customs in Chengdu was as easy as selling a heatpump to an eskimo for 50c. No questions, no hold-ups; very, very smooth.

Chengdu is hot; 27 degrees today and balmy as hell. Luckily we had an airport transfer booked and a room (luckily with air-con which we weren't expecting) waiting for us (we sound like old people, don't we?) for the princely sum of $30 between us.

Had an awesome dinner at this local restaurant; 3 dishes were Ma Po Tofu (a Sizuan province icon apparently), a yum tomato and egg dish that reminded me of my Grandma's cooking, and a strange spicy ?eggplant dish that was delish.

I'll try and find some photos to put up... actually, I just tried to, but it didn't work. And everything's written in Chinese and I bloody well can't read what it says. Ah well.

We fly to Lhasa tomorrow... 5:30am pickup.

Catch yas all later,
m+j