This holiday is an unknown. A ship we know virtually nothing about and ports about which neither of us have done much research. Over the course of the months leading up to today I tried to do as much organising as I could, but responses from tour operators in French Polynesia has been very variable. Hopefully it will all come together.

Sunday March 23

We loaded our mountain of luggage into the cab at 6 .15am and amazingly the boot lid closed. My current Qantas status lets us check in using the business queue but this time we were actually really flying business, with Emirates, in an A380!! On points of course!

Emirates have their own lounge at Brisbane Airport, right at the very end of the concourse where Brisbane's only double decker air-bridge lives. It is beautiful, the food excellent and Veuve is the champagne in the ice bucket! We have a glass to celebrate.

We board straight on to the upper deck of the plane and are shown to our pretty amazing seats – a whole overhead luggage bin for each seat, more space in bins along the wall, huge seat, minibar with water, juice and soft drink and best of all a massage function. It was fantastic. A welcome glass of more champagne, Moet this time, and then that humungous plane lumbered down the runway and we were on our way to Auckland.

I won’t go into it in too much detail except to say the flight was fabulous – great service, great food, lots of top ups of the champagne. Best of all was the bar at the back of business class (see pictures) where the lovely Benita made sure our glasses were never empty. That flight just wasn’t long enough. We’d better start saving those points again for a longer flight next time!