2025 - India, Mumbai to Goa: Day 1: Wed 5 Nov - Home to Mumbai via Brisbane and Singapore

We were going to drive to Brisbane yesterday, spend the night, and then Wendy would drop me at the airport on her way home today. However, we decided to drive to Brisbane this morning to catch the flight, which was scheduled to depart at 0910h. That meant a very early start to the day, 0145h in fact. Got away about 0220h and apart from some fog and some fairly heavy traffic close to Brisbane the 3-hour drive was uneventful.

Wendy dropped me off and drove away. About 20 minutes later I was sitting in the Silver Kris Lounge having some breakfast. The lounge is smallish, but it had all the essentials. The food all had an Asian flavour, which is expected when you are flying Singapore Airlines.

The 7-hour odd flight went fairly fast, watched a couple of dozen BBC docos, ate too much, drank copious cups of tea and went to the toilet a fair bit. Then we were there. Singapore Airport is much bigger than I remember, took 30 minutes of fast walking to get to the train station to go to Terminal 3, where Bob and I fly out of. Found the Lounge and settled in for about a three hour wait. Every conceivable food and drink is on offer, but I was not hungry nor thirsty. Met up with Bob, mate from Canberra who arrived via Melbourne 5 minutes after me.

Maybe I started singing the praises of SA a little too early. We boarded in Singapore for Mumbai on time and eventually pulled back from the gate pretty well on time. Taxied out to take off but then stopped and sat. An uneasy silence came over the A380-900, I believe the latest model, before an announcement by the Captain that one engine refused to start and we were returning to the sky bridge for the techos to check it out. Everyone was offloaded and we went back to the lounge. They found another plane, who has an A380 sitting around waiting for another plane to breakdown? New ETD of 2145h, that’s a 3-hour delay. I suppose it’s better that the engine fails on the ground rather than in the air! Bob was able to text our taxi in Mumbai with the new time so he’s not sitting around waiting.

The 4.5-hour flight from Mumbai went pretty quickly as I slept most of the way. The pre-booked taxi (by the tour company) was waiting for us and took longer to get out of the car park and the drive to the hotel! Eventually arrived at the hotel about 0130h, just as my body was telling me it’s time to get up. Needless to say, it wasn’t until 0300h that I got to sleep.