3 September 2025 The Last Laugh

Three go on Safari!

 What I should be writing is:

Here I sit in my Air New Zealand business pod sipping on a glass of bubbles as we begin our final flight of the journey from Perth to Auckland. Homeward bound to New Zealand. 

What I am really writing is:

Here I sit in a very average business class seat on a Qantas flight from Perth to Brisbane.

Yep, you guessed it, Air New Zealand  had a mechanical problem and our flight from Perth to Auckland was cancelled.  However at the Air New Zealand desk in Perth, after quite a little wait, we were promised business flights from Perth to Brisbane, and then business on to Auckland. It 

So off we trundled to the taxi stand and the first two taxis said they don’t take the taxi chits. Lance had been very cool, calm and collected until that moment. Fortunately a lovely driver stepped in and took us to the terminal which actually clocked up a $45 fare. Thank goodness for the $50 chit. 

 We arrived in Brisbane at midnight and were booked into a motel (shabby at best) where we  repacked our bags to allow for only one piece of check in luggage and crammed 7 kilos into our small case. This was due to no business seats being available from Brisbane to Auckland, only economy seats, so we assumed only 1 piece of check in instead of the two promised for the final leg of our trip. (PS. Got to check in and they had made an allowance of 6 bags for the three of us, but nobody told us, even when we had called Air NZ to check).

After moaning about the domestic business class, my dinner and a second glass of rosé arrived and it was bloody great! Salmon salad.

We finally arrived home on the 4th after leaving Mauritius on the second. All very happy but tired. It is a shame that things went a bit haywire at the end, but at least the problem occurred in a country that we are very familiar with!

Thanks for coming along with us. There have been a load of posts made by moi  over the last couple of weeks and sometimes I wonder if anyone read and more importantly, enjoyed them. 

Often as I am experiencing wee adventures or extraordinary experiences or something just plain stupid the words play out in my head and I really need to get them down. So once again thank you for reading my words and for your comments. They mean a lot. 

I hope I haven’t appeared too snobby throughout this blog with our business class flights. But it has been a big deal for us. It is not something that we would usually get to enjoy. However this change to economy for our last flight home should result in a refund of sorts and of course that will help the credit card! 

I thought that I should finish by including some of our best videos. 

Even though we had some up close pictures and personal experiences with elephants and even lions, my favourite is still the sunset at Gomoti Lodge with the hippos. You can’t see them, but they certainly make their presence felt in the most entrancing of environments with the tinkling of frogs in the background. I do keep watching it and each time I laugh out loud. 

Our first scary elephant encounter. My bum was squeezed tight!

The baby elephant who just doesn’t know how to operate his trunk yet. And his cousin grinds to a halt!

And lastly this little elephant who got left behind. 

See you on ur next journey! Until then!