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Having flown from Egypt, we spent two nights at Corfu on the west coast of Greece.    We parked at Corfu's airport.  Corfu's old town is quite charming.  There is a lot of history, including its long centuries as a possession of Venice and the periodic assaults by the Ottoman Turks.  This resulted in impressive fortifications. A practical feature of Corfu was that my mobile phone did not work at all.  I could not log on to any local mobile phone provider.  My own service form Three seems to be very substandard. Today (Sunday) we departed Corfu and flew across the Adriatic to Italy.  Here is landfall at Ancona: There was a considerable headwind and we stayed low over Italy, eventually climbing to FL200 (or 20,000 feet) over the Alps.  The Alps had some considerable weather and the TKS anti-ice system was put to good use.  Here are the Alps, largely cloud-covered.......  .... followed by descent in to Switzerland and crossing the Rhine. Finally getti
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This map shows the westbound route: Shangjie near Zhengzhou (China) Nanning (China) Chiang Rai (Thailand) Bangkok (Thailand) Yangon, formerly Rangoon (Myanmar, formerly Burma) Kolkata/Calcutta (India) Ahmedabad (India) Karachi (Pakistan) Bahrain Hurghada (Egypt) Corfu/Kerkira (Greece)
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From Karachi we flew westward towards Oman, then over the UAE (Fujairah and right over downtown Dubai) and onwards over the Gulf to Bahrain. Here is The Palm at Dubai. Umbrella being put to its original use, at Bahrain Airport. A village in the Saudi desert. Being shadowed by an unknown aircraft, over the west coast of Saudi Arabia. Hurghada, on Egypt's Red Sea coast, a holiday resort that is struggling due to the security situation in Egypt.
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A refuelling stop was made at Karachi.
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Here are a few photos from India.  Early morning in Calcutta.  Little did we know that we were heading towards the Black Hole of airport bureaucracy. Ben and Peter with Mr Karati of the Indian Customs at Calcutta Airport.  I will post at more length about the thievery and obstruction we encountered there, and how it took SEVEN hours before departure to go through ATC briefing, terminal manager approval, customs approval, immigration approval (for a domestic flight), security clearance etc.   A certain Mr Bannerjee of the Customs, scowling at us and sporting a very large diamond ring, took it upon himself to create as much mischief as possible; this was not just regarding Customs matters but also raising objections with the Immigration personnel about their processes and complaining constantly about our paperwork and alleged regulatory infractions.  A flavour of the issues may be be given by the fact we charged some 70 cents per litre tax on the fuel remaining in the aircra
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I should just like to explain that posts to this blog have been fitful, partly due to a lack of time, but partly because access and/or the ability to post have sometimes been difficult.  In China as I explained earlier no Google products were accessible via normal hotel wifi.  More recently in Egypt I could access Blogger but posting anything was impossible.  So along the way there have been various issues.  I should have set up a separate website that would not have been blacklisted or restricted for political/security reasons.
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Now in Corfu! We made a long (almost 8 hours) flight from Hurghada in Egypt, across the eastern Mediterranean to western Greece, Corfu (Kerkira).  This was into the teeth of gale force headwinds.  This was the longest flight I have ever made. More later ......
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