More later..

Some of us have been awake more-or-less continuously for 48 hours. It is almost 11pm here and I think that we'll sleep just fine.

Good night.

Boeing 777-300 ('77W')

This is the airplane that carried us over the top of the world, from Toronto to Hong Kong via a Polar Route. A big airplane with big engines.

We were supposed to be travelling on a brand new 777-200 ('77L', shorter fuselage, longer range), but Air Canada switched to the 777-300 ('77W') after we had already selected our seats.

The result of all this is that we had chosen seats behind the wing on the 777-200, but ended up sitting above the huge wing on the 777-300.

We had an excellent view of about an acre of aluminum.

Hong Kong's new airport

[Note: you can click on the photos to open them in a larger format in case you want to see more detail.]

Ngong Ping 360 in the background

In the background on the mountain, you can see a couple of cable car towers for the Ngong Ping 360 system. It is the new cable car system that we were planning to visit on the way back, but they accidently dropped a car (an empty car) about 150m. Oops, maybe next time...

Inside the new Hong Kong airport

Joy peeks through the orchids at HK airport

Razel and her airplane

Hey, is that Rudy Maxa?

MS GPS-500 dongle with 'SiRF III'

Wow - GPS dongle for USB. The size of a postage stamp, plus an adapter to make it fit the USB cable. Once it locks onto the signals, you can move it away from the aircraft window perhaps 20-30 cm and it will still maintain tracking of six to ten GPS satellites. I even left it in its pouch and slid the window blind closed (*) and it still worked fine. Although the aircraft entertainment system wasn't providing position graphics ("not available"), I was able to track most of the 15.5 hour flight over the polar region.

(* Our route across the top of the world meant that we took off from Halifax at 6am in daylight, then Toronto to Hong Kong in daylight, left Hong Kong in daylight, and it didn't get dark until we were approaching Cebu. Roughly 24 hours of continuous bright sunshine on our side of the aircraft.)

Missed by 378 miles...

Cebu

We have arrived at our hotel in Cebu safe-and-sound.

Along the way...

A family picture at Toronto airport waiting for flight to Hong Kong