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After leaving Orpheus Island, we spent a pleasant evening at the airport Sheraton with an ISDN connection. We left early the next day for the airport and our flight to Hong
Kong. It had stopped raining and was only cloudy for a change.
 We were pleasantly surprised to be whisked through the airport
process and boarded on a 747 that had converted its first class section into business class. More good news, the seats had laptop power plugs so we could catch up on our email and other duties for part of the 8-hour
flight. It turned out to be a pleasant flight and we're ranking Ansett Australia as one of our new favorite airlines. We took off and said goodbye to Sydney. We
could see through the clouds at what appeared to be the major Olympic site. We then headed inland on a flight path that would cut across North Eastern Australia and leave around Darwin.
 We were surprised to see the clouds part (our previous flights up and
down the length of Australia had been totally in the clouds) and to find that there really are great wide-open spaces in Australia, just like the old Mel Gibson Road Warrior movies. It really looked barren with
large scars on the earth from river floods even though they were basically dry riverbeds now. It was also interesting to see that the Australia road builders
just drew a straight line on the map and they build the road, no matter what was in the way, the roads went as far as the eye could see at 35,000 feet.
 We finally left Australia to the east of Darwin as we flew over some
pleasant looking desert islands (probably what Orpheus looks like from this distance in the sun) and the last Australian mainland we saw was a point of land that looked somewhat like the boot of Italy from our
viewpoint. For the next few hours we saw various islands and some neat cloud formations. Hong Kong was ahead.
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