Day 1: From Amsterdam to Hong Kong

2 days before we were leaving for Australia, I had my last day at work. During the day I felt a pain in my left upper arm, which only got worse as time went by. From experience, I knew I had an inflammation to my left shoulder joint (I've had it with both shoulders years ago), so I called up my parents if they could call the doctor and get me the same medication as I had back then, cause I knew those would help really fast. I had 2 bad nights because of the pain and the fact no matter what position my arm was in, the pain was always there. Luckily I had an entire day to pack my suitcase.

So today was the day that our journey begun: 1 month "Down Under", touring through 5 states, seeing lots of places and hoping some dreams would be fulfilled.

My arm still somewhat in pain, and I could move it like normal, but no one could see my discomfort luckily. But first a brief introduction as to how this holiday came about.

"My old colleague and close friend, Martin came to me in november 2008, asking me if I liked the idea of going to Australia with him. The idea for him was to meet his sister and her boyfriend who left for Australia in october 2008 to travel and work there for 1 year. Australia was not on top of my dream holiday destinations, but when I was asked, I immediately said yes. I mean, how often does a person get asked by a friend to join him to travel to the other side of the world. We got the new summer travel brochures in december and started looking and working on a dream holiday and when we booked the holiday at the travel agency by the end of january 2009, so we had in our mind the perfect holiday to explore Australia!"

And now back to the actual trip.

I left for the airport around 9:30am, while Martin had left 15 minutes earlier. Both our parents and his girlfriend decided to drive us to the airport and to say goodbye. The ride took just over 1 hour and around 10:40am, I arrived at Schiphol Airport where we met the others. We had to check in, well drop off our suitcases, as we had done an online check-in 48 hours before. The waiting line was long, but as we had already had checked in, we simply had to drop off our suitcases, got our tickets for both the flight to Hong Kong and the flight from Hong Kong to Sydney and we were all set to go!

Saying goodbye was for the parents and girlfriend quite hard, so it took some time before we got to the passport checking. After that a final look back and waiving goodbye and our holiday had officialy begun: Australia, here we come!

The Cathay Pacific flight CX0270 from Amsterdam to Hong Kong was scheduled to leave at 2:00pm, so we had quite some time left before boarding would start.

We had a lunch at McDonalds, as I know from experience that airplane meals are not really the highlight of the journey, to put it mildly. So close to 1:30pm, we got to our gate and took our first pictures of the holiday, the plane: a Boeing 747-400 would took us for the first leg of the 22 hour flight. We had window seats and best thing also: leg room! That's something I like about this airline company. They have actual leg room for tall people, without sitting at the emergency exits of plane. Comfort and good view.... just perfect for such a long flight!

Around 2:00pm, we taxied onto the runway and the plane gathered more speed to finally lift off towards Hong Kong, taking us well over the halfway point of our long flight. The inflight entertainment system was great, with loads of options to watch movies, documentaries, tv shows and listen to lots of cds, even making your own favorite tracklist.

The first movie I watched was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, followed by a hilarious episode of Family Guy. Lunch/dinner was served and I went for the vegetable meal of penne pasta with tomato & balsamic salsa, with apple normandy crumble for desert.... Like I mentioned above, airline food will never get a Michelin star.... Anyhow, we encountered some turbulence, which lasted for some time, while I was watching another movie: The Watch Men... which turned out to be a very weird movie, as I had thought it would be a good movie. During the flight, a passenger apparently wasn't feeling well or got sick, cause we were asked if we were a doctor. One woman told the flight attendent she was a nurse and went to check on the passenger, but quickly returned. No idea what the situation was.

- Distance travelled: 5763 miles or 8472 kilometers