At the start of 2023, my fellow traveller and I journeyed on a Viking ocean cruise from Sydney to Auckland. It was only our second Viking cruise. Almost three and a half years after our first, and until then, only cruise – from London to Norway in 2019 – it finally happened.
On our return from New Zealand we immediately rebooked the original river cruise for 2024 and persuaded two friends to join us. We’d had years to research it, so we knew exactly what we wanted. Before we knew it we were on our way to join one of the river ships that we had planned to travel on in 2020, four years earlier.
Houses, so familiar from a million films and guidebooks, along the myriad of canals in Amsterdam
Seeing the future
En route from Sydney to Hong Kong, I thought that when you are flying long haul flights, there is a great emphasis on inflight entertainment. For me, I don’t really need it – flying itself is my inflight entertainment. I was also reminded of what I’d said before, when we arrived at Christchurch Airport in 2023, ready to fly home to Sydney – when we walked past the Economy queue for a Qantas flight. Then I suddenly realised that it was not our queue and there was only one single person in the Business Class queue, and there and then I saw my future.
En route from Sydney to Hong Kong, I thought that when you are flying long haul flights, there is a great emphasis on inflight entertainment. For me, I don’t really need it – flying itself is my inflight entertainment. I was also reminded of what I’d said before, when we arrived at Christchurch Airport in 2023, ready to fly home to Sydney – when we walked past the Economy queue for a Qantas flight. Then I suddenly realised that it was not our queue and there was only one single person in the Business Class queue, and there and then I saw my future.
