Ministry in Australia

Our farewell meal was stuffed pigeons in a restaurant by the Nile. We watched all kinds of craft going by, tourist ferries to old falukas. It was our farewell from the Nile. Fawzy said, that whoever drinks water of the Nile will come back again. We sincerely hoped so, one day.

Via Singapore, with a rest of a few hours in a hotel with the compliments of the airline, our plane took us to Sydney. Australia greeted us with a spectacular sunrise. It was 8 September. Our long journey had ended. Four eventful months had passed. We arrived back in Canberra on 8 September with a grateful heart that all had gone smoothly and neither Alison nor I had become sick. It was difficult, though, to settle back at work, but I trusted the congregations would benefited from our experiences via my sermons for some time to come.

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There is a post script to our tour. The airline bookings had been done by a Canberra travel agent, however, as they were unable to give us any information about train travelling from Beijing via Moscow to Berlin, we wrote in January 1987 to the Russian travel agency INTOURIST in Sydney to book the section Beijing Warsaw through them. We indicated that we would be prepared to pay about $2,000 for both tickets. INTOURIST asked us to pay a deposit of $500, which we did. Much later we discovered that they wanted to charge us $3,500, which we found too expensive. I then asked for our deposit back, but they refused. On our return I wrote to the Department of Consumer Affairs, complaining about the unacceptable business ethics of INTOURIST. This matter was then forwarded to the Consumer Claims Tribunal which set a date for a hearing in November. Five days before the set date, INTOURIST paid us back the full deposit.

By doing the whole trip through China and Russia without prior booking, we saved about $3500. The ticket from Beijing to Warsaw was $310 p.person hard class, and train travelling through China amounted to $160 p.person, with hotel accommodation for the two of us about $700 and food $375. To pay for all this we took $5000 with us, half in traveller cheques, the rest in cash, some US dollars but most in Australian dollars. It took some preparation, but I think we have seen almost as much as we would have seen with a fully booked and guided tour. Our advantage was to have seen much more of the way people live in China by buying our own tickets, travelling in buses and trains, and rubbing shoulders with ordinary Chinese in eating places and in the beautiful parks. I'll be for ever grateful for the wonderful experience of this trip.

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