Ah Sydney International airport, you pile of crap. Some poor couple asked one of the guards if there was a food court somewhere. The answer is of course no, that would be in the domestic terminal. The international terminal, to quote Obi Wan, is more construction site now that airport terminal, twisted and evil.

After being limited to bide my time out at an over priced Heineken bar, a tiny overpriced chicken burger shop, and as I later discovered a Pie Face (I thought these guys had gone bankrupt??), I opt for the Heineken bar only because it had somewhere to sit. Settling in I purchase a $10 schooner of Heineken (I don’t think it’s even a schooner), and in a couple of hours time I board to the plain and meet Sam and the Pig Girl.

Sam, and the girl whom I mentally started calling Pig Girl, were sitting at the two seater window row, while I was in the aisle of the middle row. As it turned out, I was the sole occupant of the entire 4 seater row I was in. Score (for now)!

Pig Girl wss doing her best to not interact with Sam and just try and sleep (it was 10;30pm at this point). Sam began worrying me. He kept looking down the aisles, really jittery. When the lady in front of him set up a cradle for the baby (which thankfully was well behaved the entire flight), he was poking his face in between the seats to watch. He was utterly weird, and naturally I accidentally made brief eye contact and he started talking to me.

It appeared that this was Sams first aeroplane trip, and he was a little over excited by the experience (I’m fairly sure this was helped by a white powder prior to the flight). As we flew over Sydney’s illuminated nightline, he whipped out his mobile phone and started taking pictures. After a moment of my brain asking itself whether he should even have his mobile on, in wide eyed enthusiasm he showed me the photographs with the zeal as though he’d just photographed the Yeti.

Pig Girl received her moniker when she materialised in my row. I had my eyes closed at the time trying to sleep, and a moment later upon opening them she was there, lifting all the arm rests and lying down over the three chairs. Then came the noises. She was watching movies the entire time, and every half an hour or so there was a noise. As she tried to stuck down the mucus in her noise, a beastly noise echoed within the cabin. A great wild pig sound, as though the hog was in heat hunting down a mate. I swear if I had put some kind of noise matching software against that noise it would match it with a hog.

After a fairly sleepless night we arrive in KL, at the grand old hour of 4am. Nothing was open. All the lounge areas were already taken. So I took one of the steel leather cushioned seats and sat uncomfortably for 5 hours waiting for the connecting flight. I did discovery something interesting with their free wifi. Australian news sites are blocked.

At first I thought the Sydney Morning Herald was playing up. But then I tried The Australian, and it timed out, then the Telegraph also timing out. However the BBC was find. Maybe after all the Budgie 9 mess they decided to block us!

Finally it was time to board the flight to Yangon. One odd, and actually annoying, feature of KL airport is it only lists the boarding gates an hour before boarding. I had a sneaking suspicion that my flight would be in the old terminal, and when it eventually appeared on the board I jumped on the aerotrain to head to the correct terminal. However, it would turn out three of our passengers missed this and we had to wait half an hour of announcements, and eventually the unloading of their luggage.

With that done, the plane taxied down the runway, and soon enough it was hurdling forward and lifting off into the air towards Myanmar.