I suspect ‘Er Indoors, being quite the experienced traveller, had been looking forward with considerable amusement to watching the fun as Hughesy tackled the various administrative procedures prior to embarkation, which was, more than likely her motivation for allowing me to hand over my passport first.
And everything went smoothly.
Once the Japanese passport came into play, on the other hand, matters became somewhat more complicated. Our operator required assistance, first from the girl on the terminal next door, then a supervisor appeared on the scene, followed by further assistance from higher up the echelon.
In the end it was, we gathered, some minor glitch or typographical error - a zero entered as letter O or some such.
Several years ago I took great joy in describing my version of what happened when a lone traveller on her way back to Japan left an unattended bag in the midst of a Japanese tour group while she made use of the conveniences, returning to find the group had moved on and an unattended bag was the subject of serious scrutiny from the security staff.
However we’ve frequently been warned about the inadvisability of joking about security issues in areas like check-in counters, so I was forced to give the flick pass to such potential rib-ticklers as That’s funny. It should have worked. Surely the ink’s dry by now.
Anyway, once we were past that little hurdle it was a case of up the stairs, round the corner and through Immigration where my previously pristine passport received its first exit stamp.
There was still a good ninety minutes to kill before boarding and the departure area was almost totally deserted when we walked through Security and ‘Er Indoors once again attracted the attention of the guy with the little wand that scans you for traces of explosives.
Over the last dozen times we’ve passed through a security set-up I’ve walked straight past the individual in question while the strike rate where ‘Er Indoors is concerned in something like 50%.
Lack of crowds meant that we were the only customers in sight when we walked into the duty-free store, making a predictable beeline for the wine department.
It wasn’t as if we were necessarily looking top buy anything. There were three half bottles of Rutherglen Tokay tucked away as presents and I didn’t fancy the prospect of lugging extra weight around as we made our way around the Land of the Rising Sun.
On the other hand I thought it would be interesting to see what was on offer. While I suspected that the usual Aussie wine icons would feature prominently, I suspected that we might encounter a couple of items that you wouldn’t normally be able to find in your local liquor outlet.
When we visit the Lolly Shop we are usually looking to restock the wine rack with a couple of dozen value for money wines and when we do venture into the quality section we tend to head towards areas where we’re likely to find something from a winery we’ve visited, so I have no idea whether Jacob's Creek Steingarten Riesling is widely available or whether it’s a label that has somehow managed to slip past without attracting my attention.
The Steingarten vineyard was something I remembered reading about back in the mid-seventies when I was just starting to get interested in wine, Steingarten being a relatively high-altitude vineyard with a gravelly soil (Steingarten, of course, translates as stone garden) which had been developed and planted with a view to producing a German-style riesling.
Interesting, I thought. And proceeded with further investigations.
Since the first night in Kobe’s accommodation was supposed to be a 4.5 star establishment with water views, I started to think that perhaps a nice bottle of red might be an acceptable way of celebrating our safe arrival as we looked out over Kobe’s harbour.
And a bottle of Steingarten in the backpack wouldn’t be that much extra weight.