Go the distance

This is the first story I'm going to write about my journey, and it'll be about my literal journey; how did I get to where I am now: Sydney? You often hear shitty stories from people that have been traveling and you're always glad it's not you, but I think if I knew the way here would be so difficult, I wouldn't have gone at all. I left four days ago, on Wednesday.

I was an emotional wreck when I said goodbye to my family and Yoram, and so were they... No one really knew what to say to make us all feel better, but that's understandable because there was nothing to say that could make me feel better about leaving. I'd never traveled alone before and I was really scared but when I arrived at the gate I saw three of my classmates, so we talked for a bit and we were all together when we heard that our plane had an hour delay. So an hour, that was still fine, we could still make our transit in London to Muscat, we had a two hour layover there. It was all fun until we heard of our second hour delay, because that meant that we would miss every single transit from there on forward. At this point we met Jasper, who had to go to New Zealand, and he was traveling the exact same way we were: via London, Muscat, Kuala Lumpur. He kind of stuck with us from that point. We got a voucher from KLM to get 5 euros worth of food when we heard about the third hour delay, to make up for the difficulties. We got our plane to London and had to book something to stay the night there. Honestly, I wanted nothing more than to be at home with mum and dad at this point, because I couldn't see why I was going through all this trouble, just to be alone in a strange country. We had to re-book all our flights, and KLM provided us with a flight straight from London to Kuala Lumpur. After struggling to find a hotel, I booked us an amazing apartment with a view until Windsor Castle, just a half hour drive from the airport. We had four hours of sleep there when we had to leave for our flight to Kuala Lumpur.

We had a big breakfast at the airport, on KLM's costs, before we got back to sorting out our trip. The night before, they'd told us to pick up our bags in the morning, because they were locked at that point. But when we arrived that morning, they told us we should've picked up our luggage the night before and that they wouldn't be able to find them at that point. This basically meant: you will not have your luggage when you arrive at your destination, we'll send it after you, but we don't know when. Our flight to Kuala Lumpur got delayed another few hours, because someone in the plane wasn't feeling well, and he decided in the end to get out, so we had to reconnect the plane with that tube that everyone walks through and that took another hour. During the flight I watched movies and we arrived in Kuala Lumpur at 8 in the morning, where I heard that I had an alternative flight to Sydney. 15 hours later. So did the three people I traveled with. We had to stay on the airport and we had to make best of what we had, so we slept on the ground and we ate, and we slept some more. We made a 'missing-bags-report', saying that we wanted our bags to come to Sydney and we split up after that, because my flight was leaving from a different part of the airport.

On this flight, I was seated between two people and the seats were really narrow, I couldn't fit properly and I'm not fat or anything. But then again, I guess the seats in AirAsia airplanes are made for Asians. I woke up when my neighbour knocked over my glass over water in his sleep, and everything was soaking wet. He was very apologetic, but in the mean time I'd gotten air sick, so I couldn't care about my clothes. I felt nasty because I hadn't showered in the past 60 hours, and now I was sick as well. Luckily, there were only 2 hours left and I was so exhausted that I fell asleep again right after that.

And then I finally arrived in Sydney after almost 60 hours of traveling. Fucking finally.