Europe trip days 19 and 20: Munich to Sydney

On Wednesday morning the alarm sounded at the appointed awful hour of 05:30. Munich Airport is a long way from the city centre, something close to 50 kilometres away judging by a map I looked at. The way to get there is by the S-bahn, which left from the Hauptbahnhof, right by our hotel. I thought we might have to walk an extra block, but it turned out there was an underground S-bahn entrance right outside the door of the hotel. We gladly took this to avoid walking on the streets in the 10°C morning. It took us into a network of tunnels that eventually led to the S-bahn station.

We found escalators going down to platforms, flanked by ticket validation machines. I didn’t see anywhere to buy tickets, and guessed there may be machines on the platform, so we went down, but there were none down there. I left my wife with the bags and dashed back upstairs to see if I could find tickets. Coming up the escalator I spotted the ticket machines across the tunnel. I went over and fiddled with the machine to buy two tickets to the airport. While doing this, a young man approached, speaking Hindi I think, with barely a word of English. He seemed to want help using the ticket machine, and used his phone to translate from Hindi to English. The English that came out was pretty broken and it wasn’t entirely clear, but it seemed he wanted to buy train tickets to Frankfurt. I was trying to get my own tickets and back down to my wife as fast as possible, so really didn’t want to deal with this. Then he translate some more stuff on his phone and the message I got was that he wanted me to buy tickets for him, and he would transfer money to me somehow. At this point I figured this for some sort of scam, grabbed the tickets I’d just printed out for myself, and said sorry and ran off.

I returned to my wife on the platform after validating our tickets and just in time. The next train to the airport pulled in as we walked down to check the departures sign.

Once there we found a Lufthansa check-in area. We went to see someone there and explained that we had a connecting flight from Frankfurt to Singapore, with just 75 minutes transit time, and we were wondering if we could get our seats moved to one of the earlier Frankfurt flights to give us more time to make the connection. The woman at the desk said she couldn’t make that change and we needed to go to the Lufthansa service counter, a short walk away. We went there, and explained the same thing to the woman at the reception desk. She said that a flight to Frankfurt had been cancelled and a lot of people were waiting to have their flights rescheduled. She asked us when our scheduled flight was and we said 10:00 (almost three hours away still), and she said we might have enough time and gave us a ticket with a printed number and told us to go inside and wait. We went inside the barrier and saw a dozen or more people waiting. The tickets being called were in the 40s. Our ticket was 65. We waited about five minutes and no other tickets were called.

My wife decided to go for a walk while I waited and see if she could find something to eat. While she was gone, a few tickets began to be called. I overheard one staff member ask a passenger if they already had a boarding pass, and I realised we should have actually checked in and got our boarding passes before coming here, to make sure we had plenty of time to get them sorted. My wife returned a few minutes later with a coffee and a couple of pain au chocolat for us to eat. We still had 15 tickets to wait, so I suggested we go back to the check-in counter and get boarding passes and then return here. So we did that, and a different woman at check-in issued us boarding passes all the way through Frankfurt to Singapore and Sydney. Armed with these, we returned to wait at the service counters, where our number was still a dozen away.

But then, for some reason unclear to me, our number was called next, skipping ahead of all the others. We didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and went to the counter, whee we explained our situation again to the next Lufthansa woman there. She was sympathetic, but said that because the flights had all been issued on one ticket, she couldn’t change one leg of the trip. I asked if she thought we’d have enough time to transfer at Frankfurt and she looked at our boarding passes, which had a gate number listed for the Frankfurt-Singapore flight. She said it was a good gate to have, relatively easy to get to, and we should have enough time, if we didn’t go too slowly. She said she’d worked at Frankfurt Airport for 25 years and knew it like the back of her hand, and when we got there to go quickly and we should be able to make the next flight. She was extremely sorry she couldn’t help with moving us to an earlier flight and wished us luck.

So now we still had over two hours to wait for our 10:00 flight. At boarding time we went to the gate and boarded the plane. The plane was very empty. All the seats in the half-rows in front and behind us, and also across the aisle from us were empty. Boarding was completed very quickly and we departed a few minutes early, which was good. Munich to Frankfurt is a very short flight and we landed 42 minutes after take-off, a few minutes ahead of schedule, giving us more time to get to our Singapore flight.

Now the fun started. Frankfurt is a very big airport. Our plane had pulled in at a far gate along one of the terminal arms, so we had a long walk, several hundred metres, to get to a central hub. The time we’d missed a connection here some years ago we’d had to catch a train to transfer to a different terminal. But we knew our gate number and found signs leading towards it and after maybe 10 or 15 minutes of walking we reached the correct arm of the terminal without having to use the train. Here was a passport control area, obviously because gates on this arm of the terminal were used for international departures. Fortunately the queue was short and we were through in just a few minutes. From here our gate wasn’t too much further and we arrived with some time to spare.

Our flight to Singapore ended up being delayed about 15 minutes, but eventually we boarded and settled in for the long hauls across the globe.

Our flight arrived in Singapore around 07:00 Thursday local time, or 01:00 in Central Europe. So we were tired, but had to do a long journey across Changi Airport to our next departure gate for Sydney. Changi is if anything even bigger than Frankfurt. We had to walk 10-15 minutes from our gate to a central hub, then catch the Skytrain from Terminal 3 to Terminal 2, and then walk further. We stopped at some seats as we had an hour or so to kill. Now the tiredness really hit us. But after a bit of a wait we had to move again, giving ourselves 15 minutes to walk the remaining distance to our next departure gate. By the time we got there and went through a security screening, boarding was almost beginning. We got on board and the plane departed on time for the final flight leg.

We landed about 19:00 Sydney time, 25 hours after we departed Munich Airpot. After clearing customs and immigration we caught a train home and got there close to 20:00, a total of 30 door-to-door hours after leaving our hotel in Munich.

Tonight we’re just going to bed to try to sleep out the jetlag. We pick up Scully from our dog-minder friends tomorrow.