So I wandered all the way through the international checkin counters and reached the end without finding it. The person at that counter said I had to go all the way back to the first counter after the domestic ones. So I trundled back again. And there it was! It wasn’t open yet, but I knew I was at the right place without reading the signs. The islands aren’t very fertile, being sand from coral breaking up, so the islanders don’t produce much food, although they do have a lot of seafood. So everything is very expensive. The Cocos Malays have a lot of family in Perth and other parts of Western Australia, and the high school only goes to year 10, so there’s a fair bit of travel between the islands and Perth. Every time anyone goes, they bring eskys of frozen fish from the islands and go back with cardboard boxes of stuff and eskys of frozen halal meat. The checkin queue has a couple of reels of plastic bags that are big enough to fit the polystyrene eskys, and everyone puts all the eskys they’re taking into a plastic bag so they don’t leak. The picture shows one person’s luggage but the queue flowed onto the concourse by the time they started checking people in even though we were in a prop plane and a lot of rows were empty.
We stopped at Learmonth to refuel before heading across the Indian Ocean for four hours.
You really realise how empty the ocean is when you think that the Cocos (Keeling) Islands are the only piece in all that space.
You don’t see much before you land, because it’s small.
Here’s a picture from my balcony. It’s a very nice place.
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