This evening at just before 10pm I touched back down into Manchester Airport, and breathed in English air for the first time since February.
I wouldn't like to analyse whether the feeling of returning home is a good or a bad one as yet, seems to me that it just one that exists and I'm not quite ready to decide yet which way it is leaning.
After four months away, one thing that I am pleased about is that I made it home safely, in one piece and without anything disastrous happening to me. In fact the most distressing thing about this journey might have been when I dropped my wallet at 6am on the morning as I was travelling from St Neots to Heathrow!
Returning to this country was much smoother, and fingers crossed I didn't suffer any misfortune in ensuring that I brought everything back.
Our journey from Hong Kong back to Manchester was extremely long and tiring but relatively event-less.
We left our hotel at about 9:15am this morning making our way to Hong Kong airport via the same route that we got here by taking the MTR to Central, and then picking up the Airport Express which got us back to the terminal in plenty of time.
I don't think I mentioned in the last couple of days that I had a bit of drama with the booking, then cancelling and then re-booking of my flight through KLM, but upon checking in we had to change our seats in order for us to be able to sit together (a problem we experienced yesterday and didn't fancy going back to again). Our flight was about 30 minutes late in departing Hong Kong and during most of the flight it won't be too much of a surprise to read that I mostly drifted in and out of sleep. Throughout this journey I have made waking up at crucial times a speciality of mine and I got up whenever the air hostess' brought food around. and did spend a little bit of time watching some of the many things which were available to view on the plane.
Despite setting off late we arrived perfectly on time in Amsterdam although that meant sitting around and waiting for just under two hours before being able to board our flight which was again late in leaving.
It was only an hour or so's journey to Manchester and I spent most of the time admiring what was an extremely beautiful sunset out of the window as we flew below the clouds to our eventual destination.
It's funny that in the last couple of months I have spent plenty of time queuing up at airports waiting to get through immigration to never have any issues, but get back to my own country to find out that the electronic face scanners apparently didn't want to recognise me and I had to wait in line at the counter instead. Thankfully it wasn't too busy and that also gave time for our bags to be there waiting for us when we arrived.
Sarah had parked her car at Manchester Airport over the last week so we didn't have to worry about getting the train back to York although we did have to take a twenty minute bus ride to get to the car park and find where she'd left her vehicle.
On the way home we stopped off at the services to get ourselves some food - a wide decision considering that air-plane food is probably equivalent to one full meal for me and we had been travelling for a rather long time.
We eventually arrived back to York just after midnight and it was odd to see familiar surroundings once again.
Over the next couple of days I will be experiencing the fun task of sorting through all of the clothes that I brought back - probably throwing most of them away because they have become threadbare or bleached by the sun. I'm well aware that when it comes to tasks like finishing off this blog, printing off all of my pictures and trying to create some form of scrapbook about my entire journey, I could be at it for a while so just because I am back home certainly doesn't mean that everything relating to this journey is instantly forgotten.
I feel like I will be in a bit of a strange place emotionally as I battle with the pleasure of being home, safe and in a familiar place, but also probably quite a lot of sadness when I consider everything that I have been through and the many magnificent things I have experienced since leaving to go travelling.
It is very easy to reflect on the latter part of my journey through Japan and Hong Kong as a success as I'm pretty sure that these were two of my favourite places to visit along the way. But in a strange way I am more looking forward to considering the beginning of the trip and also the whole thing in its entirety as I know there will be plenty of memorable moments which I have forgotten and fabulous sights which have slipped my mind.
Although tonight marked the end of my journey, I feel like it is far from finished....
Lenny Kravitz (2001)
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