Day 129

06/11/2009

The last day in Australia. Seems an age since we left home heading for Dover, wondering if we'd even make it that far. Flight home at 15:40 via Kuala Lumpar, so it would have been easy to waste the morning. With this in mind we had booked a back stage tour of the Opera House last week when we booked the bridge climb, so were up at 05:00 to shower and then walk to the Opera House for 07:00.

The Opera House is undoubtedly an iconic building from the outside, and inside it's no less impressive. Five separate auditoriums which appear to be in almost constant use means there is always lots of activity below stairs. The limitations of the site (water on three sides) has meant the layout had to be carefully thought through for it to actually work. Built almost 40 years ago, it was well over budget and well over timescale, but as our guide said - who cares about that anymore. Australians are rightly proud of it.

On our walk back we called into the Mint Museum where the first coins were minted in Australia. They were gold sovereigns and half sovereigns as it was still using British currency 130 years ago.

Back to Claire's flat and a final pack of our cases ready to head to the airport. Flight to Kuala Lumpar was noteworthy for the proportion of time we flew over Australian soil - 4 of the 8 hours. It truly is a big country, with not much sign of habitation across most of it.

Kuala Lumpar is much like any other airport and we boarded the London flight on schedule, but then sat at the gate for an extra 40 minutes as the prevailing winds were in our favour and we would otherwise have been too early to land at Heathrow.

Town Kuala Lumpar
Distance ++6715 km (Sydney to Kuala Lumpar)