Sydney to Nhulunbuy (Gove) via Cairns

7 July 2017

An early start this morning (Friday 7 July). Our flight to Cairns was sheduled to depart Sydney at 9:35 am, which meant the alarm going off at 4:30 am for our pickup by the airport shuttle at 5:30 am. At least we avoided the peak hour traffic and it gve us time for breakfast at the airport.. From Cairns we were supposed to have short stop over before boading an AirNorth shuttle flight to Nhulunbuy,

But there was a slight hiccup even before the start of the trip. About 11 pm on Thursday evening, I switched on my mobile phone to set the alarm and......Hullo, what's this? A message from AirNorth advising of a change in our departure time. Surely we weren't going to have connection problems on the first day. Fearing the worst, I opened the message. Relief! The change involved a 2 hour delay, so instead of a 50 minute stopover in Cairns, we had a couple of hours - time for a leisurely lunch.

Anyway, our pickup at Castlereagh was on time and our friendly driver, Ray, made good time to the airport, arriving just after 7am. Check in proceeded with only a minimum of confusion. "It's so simple", the friendly Qantas attendent said. "You just press 'Start' and follow the on-screen instructions. You can't go wrong" Oh, really? But eventually we got our boarding passes and luggage tags with only a minimum of assistance - and then it was on to the scanner.

"Excuse me sir, you've been randomly selected for a manual scan" Random? Ha! I don't fly much but the same thing happened last time. Do really look like an axe-weilding maniac? No, don't answer that. How come Marg never gets selected?

Scan successfully negioiated, we headed off in search of breakfast at the outrageously overpriced eateries. $5.90 for a small orange juice? Come on!

While chomping on my chicken BLT, I decided to check the print out of the flight plan. "Hmmm", I wondered. "Why can't I focus on the words?" Slowly realisation dawned. In our hurry to depart home I had forgotton to swap my computer glasses for my bifocals - which were still sitting on my desk at Castlereagh... Bugger! Fortunately, I have a spare pair - the ones I sat on some months ago. Here's hoping they can hold together for another 3 weeks! Of course, they were in the checked baggage so I was stuck with the computer glasses for the day. On the bright side, eventhing at about one metre distant was in perfect focus. Closer or more distant, not so much.

Will these last 3 weeks?

We departed Sydney about 15 minutes late and arrived in Cairns at 12:50 pm after a smooth flight. With the 3-abreast seating of economy class, there's always going to be a stranger seated next to you. On this flight we were fortunate to have a very pleasant American woman from Chicago who was in Australia to visit family in Melbourne. While here, she was taking the opportunity to sample other parts of the country. After Cairns she was headed for Adelaide and Kangaroo Island. We didn't broach the subject of The Donald....

Now, what about our checked baggage? At Cairns, would it be automatically transferred to the AirNorth aircraft or would we have to collect it from the carousel and check it in ourselves? Unfortunately, I made the mistake of asking too many people - and, of course, got conflicting answers. The only solution was to see if our bags were on the carousel so off I went leaving all of our flight tickets and boarding passes with Marg in the departure lounge. The problem is, once you exit the departure lounge you can't get back in without exiting the terminal and going though the security scanner (again). At least I wasn't singled out for a manual scan this time. And the exercise wasn't necessary anyway as our baggage had been automatically transferred to the AirNorth flight.

The AirNorth service is a daily shuttle - Darwin > Gove > Cairns and back again. It's run using a Brazilian-built Embraer 170 and compared to sardine class on the Qantas Boeing, it was luxury. I could actually sit without having my kness up around my ears. They didn't serve a bad lunch, either- albeit at around 4:30pm due to the late departure. We'll be travelling with AirNorth again on our way back to Cairns in a couple of weeks.

Somewhere over the Gulf of Carpentaria

We eventually landed in Gove at about 4:30 pm (Territory time) where the Outback Spirit coach was waiting to convey us the short distance into Nhulunbuy.

Welcome sign at Gove Airport terminal