Bidet's. A Luxry Overlooked?

I’m sitting in small room, on my bed, in the early hours of the a.m. in the dark writing on my laptop while listening to music.

The setting is a boutique hotel on a very beautiful Lago d’Iseo, Paratico.

My trick to adjusting my body to the local time is to hit the ground running and stay awake the first day, not giving in to the temptation of sleeping when it’s normal sleep time back at home.

My record is flying up to the far north of Sweden to visit my sister and her then husband inside the Arctic circle where the sun does not set at all for a while during their summer they had a holiday cabin on an island on an archipelago.

It was so surreal. Sitting on a jetty on a very remote island in northern reaches of Sweden, no noise, golden sunlight reflecting off the calm water at 3am.

A moment that will be with me forever.

Back to my record, a very late night the night before I leave Australia, (as it is tradition amongst my friends to get the traveler surprisingly drunk the night before flying), I flew from Brisbane to Bangkok, Bangkok to London, London to Stockholm, Stockholm to Lue Lue then a speedboat ride out to my stepbrother and sister’s island to drop off my bags and another speedboat ride back to a pub that was an old boat where I had convinced the locals that I had come to film a documentary about a natural phenomenon that was going to occur, a tidal wave was going to sweep through the lake like waters of the archipelago, I would jump onto the wave from a helicopter that was filming, not a very good story but it was all my brother in law and I could come up with and it earned me the nickname ‘tsunami Phil’ amongst the locals.

The sun was up and I had a Kronenberg in my hand at 4am.

72 hours I’ll never get back, but I’m sure I set some sort of record.

Surprisingly I slept like a baby.

The trip here was VERY ordinary, from Brisbane to Singapore I had some kids behind me that were not quiet at all for 9 hours and managed to bump my tiny chair every time I was almost asleep.

I made friends with a guy called Tom from Australia’s Sunshine Coast, it was his first major trip on his own and he was going to Italy, what a way to start! All the best Tom if you read this, Be street smart and enjoy yourself.

Our plane re - fuelled in Singapore (changi airport), (which is huge), I disembarked and freshened up and by the time I had done that it was time for take off. Another 9 hour jump and then we changed planes in Dubai.

Australia is a new market for this airline so they use newer equipment to lure clientele, yes their planes were newer but the service was very poor and airline food is already bad enough but this helped consolidate that, we flew economy but we really felt it. (it’s called cattle class and often it feels like this, this was one of those times).

And from Dubai it only got worse.

In my many years of extensive travel Singapore airlines hold the trophy. And it’s very affordable too, so I would encourage you to try them and judge for yourself.

Dubai’s cityscape and coastline are very impressive from the air and the architectural design of the airport is very good too. Neat, efficient, practical, easy to negate and lots of natural light.

Then a 6.5 hour flight into Milan. (malpensa).

A long trip, but it’s worth it.