Halfway through my holiday! I woke up, sent an email, then the keyboard broke. The x and c keys started giving me both letters from a single press. The 1 and 2 keys did the same, but with 1 and 2, 3 and 4 also being generous. The more interesting combination was V and the return key, both providing a carriage return followed by that letter.

Sydney has a Microsoft store. By 10am I’d walked 3km, almost all on a single street, and found it, bright eyed young men eager to help. I told them the issue and they looked sceptical, called over an even younger man, attached my keyboard to one of their own tablets.

“Oh wow!” exclaimed the youngest man, hitting x, c and the 2 key, “That’s so cool.” He looked at me and said, “Sorry. But I’ve never seen that before. It’s amazing. If it wasn’t happening to you you’d think it was cool too”

I responded with a look, to which he visibly wilted. I made up for it by suggesting he hit ‘v’. He reached new levels of excitement then booked an appointment for me, for 10.45.

I asked where I could find good coffee, got sent a hundred yards away, through an arcade and past three coffee shops. A tiny shop had a queue out the door, inside a single man taking orders at the counter, handing them to three baristas sharing two coffee machines, no room to move or turn, all working flat out. They charged me $4 for a “We only do one size” long black which arrived only half filling the small cup. I was glad I hadn’t gone for an espresso, they probably only let you smell it.

The coffee was good.

I was fairly sure my keyboard was irretrievably dead, courtesy of a drink slopping over it on Saturday. But that wouldn’t explain it being fine through Sunday and the start of this morning so I gave the Microsoft tech guys a chance. A young woman took it, attached it to her tablet, expressed surprise at x, c and digits 1-4, then got told by her colleague to try ‘v’. She ended up hitting it a dozen times, clearly delighted by its new function. Finally she told me the keyboard was broken.

Microsoft charge $249 for those keyboards in Sydney but I didn’t want to try updating this travelogue without one. She gave me one for free. I thanked her and assured her that I’d cope with it being the wrong layout.

That’s true, I will cope, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy with it. It’s not just that the symbols printed on the keys no longer match the characters that appear on screen, it’s not even that the # key is where the Enter key should be, it’s that the keyboard is missing a key entirely: I have no way of entering a backslash or pipe symbol, unless I install an American keyboard mapping. I may need to do that, although it’d be switch-mapping-backslash-switch-mapping. Sigh. (Hmm. Easier and quicker to detach the keyboard, use the virtual on-screen one for those characters then plug the physical one back in.)

But still, better than not having a working keyboard at all. I walked back to the hotel, collected my suitcase, dragged it to the train station. A quick card transaction later and I was stood in an underground concourse looking confused. A passing man stopped and asked if I was lost, then told me where to find a lift to the platform I needed.

My second train journey in Australia was very similar to my first. On time, clean, quiet, a seat easily found. At the airport just two counters were open for baggage drops, a long wait made worse by one of the counters being blocked by a family of four. The man was there so long that one of the children had time to empty her bowels, get taken away, changed into a clean nappy, brought back and fall asleep. I wondered if the man taking so long to help her parents drop their bags realised she’d been critiquing his performance.

My bag has gone up in weight again, now 23.5kg, although that did include a bottle of vodka. Given three different groups of people ahead of me had all been made to reduce the weight of their luggage I was mildly surprised that I wasn’t.

After clearing security I was asked to pause and given an additional check, probably explosives. They checked my bag then checked me too but fortunately both passed muster. Inside the departure area I found a cafe, ordered my only meal for the day. “Parmesan garlic dough balls” sounded interesting but didn’t look very ball shaped to me.

They were quite nice and I followed them with a small pizza, the base soggy enough that I had to pick up the cheese and pepperoni separately.

The nice lady in the cafe found me a table with a view, but also took all of my remaining money. I couldn’t afford a dessert.

Sydney airport is quite nice, as airports go. Why don’t British airports offer relaxed seating too?

I needed it. Too much exercise and my nose starts running again, my throat is sore but worse, I’ve lost all physical recovery capability. Walking makes my legs sore and they need much more rest than normal. Walking 11km yesterday followed by 8km this morning meant I was aching.

I was sat almost in sight of the gate, half an hour before boarding was expected to start, over an hour before take-off when the airport tannoy announced a late call for three passengers, then gave my flight number. It told them to go to my gate too, so I checked the time on my watch, double-checked by also looking at my phone then confirmed my sanity by looking at an airport display. Its time matched my watch, so I wasn’t late, the announcement really was just that weird.

I waited a while longer, reading a truly excellent study that performed tests of parachute effectiveness, giving the control group ordinary backpacks instead.

Boarding proved painless, although the empty row I’d found when changing my assigned seat (at the airport self-check-in terminal) hadn’t stayed empty. A large man in a wife beater was at the other end of it, but we had clear space between us, an aisle each and the empty row continued the other side of my aisle. I’ve been in worse airline seats.

The flight got a little bumpy but was otherwise pleasant. Before take-off I had to ask a man sat three rows behind if he could stop whistling, got a smile and silence in response.

New Zealand was dark and wet when I arrived. It’s been raining for three days here, road markings are invisible under water and the meet & greet car hire turned out to be a ‘please phone for a pick up’ and the car handed over by a very different company.

I still haven’t seen the car. It’s probably white, it’s a Nissan and it’s an import from Japan with 108k on the clock. It drives like a petrol engined car and is quite nicely fitted out inside, except that it feels about 20 years old and all the labels are in kanji.

I found the motel easily enough, the roads quiet and nobody to be upset that I was dwardling along at 70 in a 100 limit. Harder was finding a car park space big enough for the land barge I was driving and working out when to stop reversing into it. After getting out I found out why the other two cars had left a gap, as I ended up in water to my ankles to get my case out of the car. Literally to my ankles, six inches of jeans are now soaked, my shoes drying out by the bed. Hopefully the rain will ease overnight, the unofficial lake will drain a little and I’ll be able to get back into the car without needing to swim to the driver’s door. I’ll pull it forward onto dry land before trying to load the case.

The motel is basic and I have a shared bathroom. I hadn’t expected that but since I arrived at 11pm and intend to leave again around 9 hours later it’ll suffice. It’s also to be fair exactly what I paid for, and I didn’t pay a lot. The room is clean, the bed a double and the key left exactly where they’d promised when I let them know what time I’d be arriving. Add in the perfectly acceptable internet connection and it’s only needing waders to enter that’s made me less than happy.