About once every two years my car breaks down. It’s quite an old car, but German quality, so it’s still a rather reliable one. But when you’re going to Australia, you don’t want it to break down when you have to get to the airport. But that’s what happened. We both had decided not to go to sleep Friday night, mainly because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get up at 3.30 am. We would have enough time to sleep in the plane. That night, about half past twelve, three and a half hour before we had to leave Leuven, Erik and I were still moving the last stuff from my old home to my new apartment, when my car began making strange noises. Not much later it was obvious that my brother couldn’t drive us to the airport with my car as planned. I guess my brother was kinda happy he didn’t have to get up at 4 am, but neither he nor I were very happy about the failing car. So far for plan A... Luckily both Erik and I know enough people in Leuven who were willing to drive us, so thanks to Gert and the backup-plan, we still managed to get to the airport in time.
However, the problems weren’t over yet. Apparently some people (well actually everybody) have difficulties to spell my name. So did the people of the travel agency, and also the Australian immigration services. Consequently, my name on the boarding tickets was spelled ‘Onkelinckx’, on my visum it was ‘Oncelinx’ and on my passport and international driver’s licence the correct spelling ‘Onkelinx’. (Now you know it, please remember!) Anyway, as my passport name didn’t match my visum name, I hade quite some problems at the check-in in both Brussels and London and with immigration services in Sydney. But after making the necessary verifications, Australian immigration services corrected the mistake, so I hope I won’t be having that much trouble when returning to Belgium.
The trip by the way was quite good, but very long. We flew about 26 hours, with stops in London and Singapore. We departed in Brussels/Zaventem at 7 am on Saturday and we arrived Sunday-evening at 7. Meanwhile, when we were in Singapore, I took the opportunity to buy me a digital camera so I could take some pictures to put on this website.
While flying above Eastern Europe and Asia, we saw quite a lot of beautiful landscapes from the plane. As I had never left Europe before, I was quite amazed by some of the nature and landscapes I saw.
However, I’ll quickly skip to Australia. I still want to get some sleep this night so I rather not write too much while staying in a beautiful country like this.
The first view of Australia, from the air, was amazing. We were flying above the huge desert in the centre of Oz. We didn’t get to see anything of the North-Western coast-area because we were still sleeping and it was still dark anyway when we entered it. A couple of hours later we arrived in Sydney, where the sun had already set. This was one of the first things we noticed about Oz: it gets dark rather early in the evening. Quite a shame, as we only have three weeks to stay here.
We didn’t do much anymore that evening. Erik had to get up early for his congress and I wanted to get up early to discover Sydney. We just checked in and made a short walk through the centre of Sydney.
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