Day 81 (26 August): Travel Day

I woke up very early to fly from Christchurch via Sydney to Hong Kong where I met my eighty-seven year old grandmother and father to finish out our trip in China. The total flight time was twelve hours with about four hours of layover.

Observations:
1) New Zealand is really far away from anything. Its 2000 km from Australia, which takes over three hours flying. And the big Australian cities are about a nine hour flight from any other major cities as it is.
2) Australia is really, really big and really, really empty. Most of the flight traversed Australia where I spent seveal hours (since it was daylight this time) looking out at nothing but red ground and a few trees. I couldn't see these on my flight to AUstralia as that was a red-eye.