There’s some really good things about Darwin. It’s only 20 minutes to the airport, and there was only one flight leaving, so you could get dropped off at the door and join the line of, oh I don’t know, maybe 10 people to check in.
However, for every good there is a corresponding bad, so there is only one taxi company, and that company only has mini buses on the road at 3 in the morning, and they’ve just been ferrying everybody home from the nightclubs. They don’t have plastic covers on the seats, full height perspex screens, and doors that can only be opened from the outside for nothing. Not sure why the driver didn’t turn on the meter. “What do you normally pay, mate?” he asked as he rang up the EFTPOS machine. “Not that much” I responded, so he immediately knocked $10 off the fare. That’s Darwin.
Of course there were no queues to be seen, and all the automatic immigration gates were functioning, so we just kept walking and there we were at the gate. Plane left on time. Can only go down hill from here.
Departing
It’s really a wonder that we think so litttle about. We had breakfast in Australia, lunch in Singapore, and dinner in Arabia. A Jetstar A330 took us the first leg, and with a long lay over we went through immigration and customs, and hauled our bags on 3 trains to the other side of the city where we met friends from Melbourne for coffee and lunch. Almost everything went like clockwork, though for some inexplicable reason you can’t buy a train ticket at the airport with a card – only cash – but there are no ATMS at the train station. Walked all the way back into the airport to find that ATMs only dispense a minimum of $20 with a $5 fee. Somebody made a profit out of us going for coffee. Anyway, lovely to catch up for a short while.
3 trains back, through check in, customs, immigration and security, and on to our much larger Singapore Airlines Dreamliner 777. Unlike Jetstar where you have to pay to scratch yourself, Singapore Airlines is a full service airline. You remember them – entertainment system with 299 movies, a meal with entree and dessert, drinks cart, hot towels. Beats growing up in a paper bag in the middle of the road.
Guess Where We are
Finally got to see The Greatest Showman on the in-flight. Well, it was that or Frozen. Dubai is a strange airport. They keep building more terminals, which is fine, but you can’t always get access to the new location for arrivals, departures, customs, security, parking, buses and so on, so they stick a light rail out to the terminal to ferry everybody back to mission control where all the services are. We were on the light rail with our lot and two other huge Chinese flights. Back at base camp the queues for formailities weren’t bad, but the trouble was that they had to ferry your bags halfway across the desert, so everybody became really friendly during the wait.
Knew that Dubai was going to be hot, but even at 7pm it was like a blast furnace. It had been 42 during the day, but had cooled to the high 30s. Picked up eventually by the hotel shuttle and taken to the nearby Holiday Inn. Just what we needed. A shower and 6 hours of horizontal time.
Holiday Inn Express Dubai Airport