Before we even left London one thing was clear, we had packed too much luggage. This wouldn't be too much of a problem for our first flight, Singapore airlines are very generous with their luggage allowance, as are most airlines when it comes to their long haul flights. The real problem would occur when we got to all the little air Asia flights in between where a luggage limit of 20kg each is all that they allow.
We arrived at Heathrow airport with loads of time, my sister and her husband drove us to Heathrow from their house in Kent. It is not by distance a long drive, but as it entailed travelling along the M25 we decided to err on the side of caution when it came to estimating journey times. There was no queue at the check in desks, and as we had checked in on-line it was simply a case of a baggage drop. There was also no queue at security, although the metal buckle on my shoe must have set the metal detectors off, resulting in an unnecessary frisking. By the time we got through we still had two hours to wait just for our gate to open, it would be another hour after that before the flight would leave. Still we were making progress, we were officially on our way out of the UK.
The flight it self was uneventful, B is always saying how great Singapore airlines are, but I have had better flights. It was an old plane, and the in flight entertainment was not so good. The flight was also quite empty, which is why it annoyed me even more when an old man with hairy arms took the seat next to mine and hogged the arm rest the whole way. I don't normally sleep on long haul flights, but because the film selection was so bad, I did try and get some sleep quite early on. B on the other hand who normally falls asleep before the plane is even in the air, stayed awake the whole flight.
We arrived in Singapore in the early afternoon, there is an underground rail network that runs from Changi airport directly to the hotel we were staying in, V Hotel Lavender, so it was a straight forward trip from the airport to the hotel. It was also surprisingly cheap considering how expensive a place Singapore is. The other thing to point out at this stage is how clean the trains were, a theme to be repeated throughout Singapore, something other big cities like London and Paris could certainly learn from. It was raining heavily when we arrived so we had a little respite in our hotel room before making any plans for the evening. The rain eased to a light drizzle and we headed out to explore the area near to our hotel called little India. There is a large Hindu temple called Sri Veerama-Kaliamman, where some festival seemed to be going on which we stayed and watched for a while, before grabbing a cheap dinner of chicken and rice washed down with a Tiger beer.
The next day we explored a little further, to begin with we planned to walk down to the Marina, but after only 5 minutes outside in the late morning sun we decided walking anywhere was not an option, so we got the underground to the Marina and walked around the bay. In previous years in Bath there have been art exhibitions around the city in the form of colourfully painted pigs and lions. It seems Singapore has it's own variety, elephants. Inevitably as we walked around the Marina, spotting more and more of them, the memory cards on our cameras began to fill. One thing you learn quickly walking around Singapore is that although it is clean and has good public transport, there is very little to do unless you like shopping. Everywhere we went was just shopping mall after shopping mall, it was not even as if each mall had a different selection of shops. Later in the evening we headed down to Singapores chinatown, which gave a slightly more traditional asian city image, although still in the clean and controlled Singapore way. In chinatown we did find two more temples of note, the Hindu Sri Mariamman and Buddhist Buddha Tooth temples. These temples, however are nothing compared to what we are planning to see later this trip.
The next day we flew to Bangkok, the flight wasn't until the afternoon, but we had seen just about enough of Singapore as we wanted for now, so we spent the morning in the hotel. After we checked out we headed straight for the airport praying that we had managed to rejig our packing enough to prevent us having to pay an excess baggage fee. I placed my bag on the conveyor first, 19.9kg, I breath a sigh of relief. Next B placed his bag on the conveyor belt, 23kg, oh dear. The man on the check in desk however just said to pretend we never saw that, and let us on without having to pay the excess. With another 11 flights to go, I wonder if our luck will hold.
We arrived in Bangkok during rush hour, an experience I do not wish to repeat in a hurry. Like Singapore there is a good train network from the airport to the city. However the whole city feels more chaotic, more polluted and a lot hotter. Despite the recent flooding in Bangkok there was certainly no sign of rain now, I fact the only outward sign that anything untoward had happened were the stacks of sandbags everywhere. We saw one shopping centre even use them to form Christmas tree shaped structures as part of their decorations. The closest station to our hotel was called Nana, but it was still quite a hike to get there, dodging street vendors, motorbikes and holes in the road, while pulling two oversized bags each behind us. It was already dark by the time we checked into our hotel, Woraburi Sukhumvit, and we were in need of a rest and shower before we would be ready to see what Bangkok had to offer.
Adam
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