Wednesday, Feb 24 - Joining the tour

Wed, Feb 24 up at 5:30 and down for another great breakfast of sweetened egg yolk buns and sushi for me and eggs for RRZ.

This is transition day so we decided to lounge. I took another swim in the pool, we rearranged our gear, ate peanuts and our welcome beers that we had put in our room frig and forgotten about and at 1:30 reluctantly checked out, grabbed a taxi and headed for the airport and the Novotel Hotel. This is where we are to meet our leaders, Dion and David, and the eight other participants at six for dinner..

We wandered down to the enormous lobby and spotted birder types right away! We met Dion and David, our leaders from Australia, plus Frances from Queensland, Mary from Ohio and all the others from California. We went into dinner. As this is an airport business hotel I wasn’t expecting much, but we were overwhelmed by the variety and quality of the food! I started with oysters on the half shell and sushi, Bob had excellent pork curry and then fish curry and we had a coconut dessert with young coconut shoots in sauce…just amazing!

Tomorrow we meet at six AM for breakfast…the work begins!