Hoiking it up in Hong Kong

Naava booking Israeli buses on Skype a the transit lounge, Hong Kong international airport, Hong Kong

You know you're in China when there's enthusiastic phlegm-hoicking in the adjacent and opposite urinals. And a small man in a cleanly pressed uniform who you see picking up lint from the floor as you enter.

Or maybe that's not China, or Hong Kong, or anywhere in particular, just the diminutive green hallucination of a sleepless, never-ending transit through a major international hub. Whatever the case, it's been a long, long time since we woke up in Elsternwick at 4:15am, and I'm entering the seriously fuzzy-headed stage of the catatonic, while Naava nods off over a Marie Claire in another armchair.

The flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong was alright -- no worries -- and it was mercifully empty; we had seats at the front of economy, with all that delicious leg room, and notwithstanding a famine of a break between breakfast and lunch, with all the brilliant canned programming on the entertainment system (The Apprentice, Fight Quest, Man vs Wild, 21 Up: Born in the USSR), we were well sated, happy even.

Then came the boarding pass fiasco, in which we failed to make it to our day room at the Novotel Citygate, not far from the airport (to sleep away the seven or so hours we thought we'd have), and ended up getting special dispensation to enter the departures floor, shower and hang in the lounge, before slipping past security (yes, there seemed no other way) in a staff-only elevator, down to the X-ray machines, to again attempt a boarding-pass retrieval.

We're finally on the way to Istanbul. We have five nights in four different hotels; two of which are in the new city and two of which are in the old city. Post-Istanbul, we're off to Israel, during which we'll be spending time in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Eilat, Safed, and Ra'ananna, and I'll be doing a three-day ride through the north, from Haifa to Tiberias, via Nazareth. It's going to be a very solid three-and-a-half weeks!

The view from our balcony, Elsternwick, Victoria, Australia