Day 115 - Home: Colombo, Sri Lanka to Kent, UK

Day 115 - His.

Some things are truly amazing. One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how you can wake up in one country and go to bed in another 5,000-ish miles away. That will be today. After 114 days of travelling around Asia via boat, truck, bus, train, plane and elephant we are due home today.

We got up relatively late - after all, the airport is only 15 minutes away and had a slow breakfast. This wasn't necessarily planned - really just a product of Sri Lankan service. In order to get dinner on time you have to order 45 minutes to an hour before. If you don't want dinner before 10 O'clock then by all means wander into a restaurant at 7 and order a la carte. It seems the same mentality runs to breakfast and it makes you wonder if they have to plant the tree, wait for it to grow and fruit before you get your orange juice. Truly - it takes ages. Still by 10 we were in our taxi and heading off.

Our plane ride was a gruelling 12 hour session cramped between a fat man and a screaming child as we did our leg exercises to prevent DVT (as described in our in flight magazine) and waited until we got to England. Thankfully Sri Lankan Air is one of the better airlines we have used so we arrived gritty, tired and unprepared for the cold instead of gritty, tired and miserable. Long distance travel is both a curse and wonder of the modern age.

Steve, our friend - who is, himself, a wonder of the modern age - was bobbing about waiting to pick us up and whisk us to the safe bosom of our home. Steve is a slightly amazing character. For the drive home he had brought food and drinks and chatted happily as we drove back - and when we got back we found he had had the house cleaned, bought food and milk and bread for us. He poured Patti a glass of wine and me a beer. What we all really need are friends like Steve. We had imagined arriving home, dumping off our stuff and grabbing some shut eye before the mammoth task of getting back into the daily grind - but thanks to Steve the house was actually cleaner than it had been when we left! God bless him.

Still we are back home now and we had been in the door for 30 minutes when I caught Patti on the computer.

'What are you doing?' I asked. 'It's time for bed.'

'Just looking at Antarctica,' she replied.

'Antarctica?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'For our next trip, of course.'

So watch this space!