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Asia trip 2017 – first day in Singapore

Posted in Asia 2017, Singapore, tagged , on March 8, 2017 | 1 Comment »

This post is a report on my first few hours or so in Singapore.

After getting to the hotel yesterday I showered and changed, and then went shopping. I wanted to get a few things and I’d identified that there was a mall (City Mall) just over the road. it was also alongside a Singapore Metro (MRT) station, which (once I’d got a ticket) would allow me to go in search of a sim for the phone – I must have my data! The mall was good; quite busy, especially on the lower-ground floor where there was a small supermarket and other ‘practical’ shops, and I was able to get what I wanted.

Next was the MRT ticket. I bought a three-day tourist pass for S$30, which includes $10 for the pass itself and which I can get back by returning it at any MRT station when I leave. I can also extend it if I need to, which I will.

Then I used this to got to another mall at Bugis where there was a Singtel shop (Singtel being one of the cell phone networks here). I had to wait a while here but eventually bought a HiTourist! sim for S$15, which will last for 5 days and which gives me 4Gb of data (plus an allowance for local and international calls. That has worked OK since then, although it did seem to take a few hours for it to recognise the sim this morning.

After the shopping I went back to the hotel and walked through the ‘Little India’ district – as its name suggests this is an almost exclusively Indian area complete with temples and of course the ever-present restaurants. There’s actually a large covered area, almost a market, full of food stalls, but I couldn’t make myself try one of them – they were quite busy and looked a bit intimidating, especially as I was very tired. But not too far away I allowed myself to be persuaded into the Khansara tandoori restaurant where I had a vegetarian meal – vegetable samosas, gobi masala, a plain naan, and a mug of Tiger beer all for around S$20. The gobi masala was excellent but the vegetable samosas were a little different from what I’m used to. They were about twice the size and also much more spicy. Never mind, I cooled my scalded palate with naan and Tiger.

Then later I went out on the MRT again and down to one of the waterfront areas, Marina Bay. I wanted to have a night-time look at the Marina Bay Sands building but found that there was a weird ‘light sculpture’ event happening on the The Float, a large pontoon in Marina Bay. There were a lot people looking at the exhibit but not too many people paying their money to go and look at it from inside.

Then it was back to the hotel where I collapsed into bed not long after 10pm. I was awake for a while just before 5am but got back to sleep, and the next thing I knew it was 9 o’clock in the morning.

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Asia trip 2017 – Getting there

Posted in Asia 2017, tagged on March 8, 2017 | Leave a Comment »

This will have to be a short post about a very long experience – flying to Singapore from Manchester. I’ll even leave out all the packing angst that occurred, as that’s not actually part of the trip. So you must imagine me all ready to go at just before 8:30 Monday morning.

The trip over the Manchester took 90 minutes or a bit longer – this latter mainly caused by the car park I’d booked a place in not being named as described in their email to me. But I found it, and was going through baggage drop at just about 10:30 for a 13:10 flight, and the usual hanging-about-at-the-airport ensued.

The flight from Manchester to Dubai was with Emirates, in an Airbus A380, and I have to say this was very comfortable. Partly because I had a (pre-payed) good seat, but also because I think those A380 economy seats are comfortable. Anyway, 7 hours later I was landing at Dubai at just after midnight local time to transfer to another Emirates flight and with a changeover time of just over two hours. Dubai International was very busy even at that time, but I gather that because of time differences, departure times from airports all over the world, and flying times, that airport is very busy all hours of the day – indeed, late night may even be the busiest time as that’s when daytime flights from Europe arrive.

No problem making the connection and then I was onto an Emirates Boeing 777 for the flight to Singapore. This too was about 7 hours but nowhere nearly so comfortable. Partly this was because I think the seats in the Boeing were just less comfortable, but also because I ended up with the largest woman in the world sat next to me.

So then I arrived at Singapore at late lunchtime on Tuesday. By the time I got to my hotel I’d been travelling for nearly 24 hours since leaving home.

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Asia here I come!

Posted in Asia 2017, tagged on March 5, 2017 | Leave a Comment »

So tomorrow I’m off on my holiday to Asia – five nights in Singapore, three nights in Penang, Malaysia, and a couple of nights in Dubai on the way home. Hopefully I’ll be able to post while I’m away, so look out for the posts.

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Booking a trip to Asia

Posted in Asia 2017, tagged on September 4, 2016 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve wanted to visit Singapore for a very long time – pretty much since our daughter Sarah visited the country nearly 20 years ago. But it’s a long way to Singapore and it doesn’t make sense to go there just for a weekend so the obvious thing is to make a visit there part of a longer holiday.

I had a look at atlases and also at flight booking websites and quickly discovered that there are flights to Singapore from Manchester. They’re mainly with Emirates and they all involve a change at Dubai, so the idea of extending a short stopover at Dubai into a longer break began to appeal to me. But I didn’t think I would want more than perhaps a couple of days there and that still wasn’t a terrible long holiday. Where else could I go? I did play with the idea of going on to Hong Kong – I have family living there – but in the end I decided not to; I felt more comfortable with the Singapore not only being the main focus of the trip but also being the furthest distance from home. Instead, I looked at Malaysia  – a place I’d never thought of before – and two places particularly seemed attractive, Penang and Langkawi. They’re both islands, but whereas Penang has history (Georgetown could have become Singapore but for Stanford Raffles) and some beaches and landscape, Langkawi seems to be very much a beach destination, and I’m not so sure how much of a beach person I am.

This looked like a plan – a holiday of up to two weeks, with several nights in Singapore, some nights at one or both of the Malaysian destinations, and a final couple of nights at Dubai on the way home. Then came the question of how to book this trip – should I do it myself or use a third party? I know I could book pretty much everything myself – flights especially would be easy – but this will be my first trip to Asia and I do feel somewhat out of my comfort zone. In the end I decided to take the second approach and last Thursday I spent almost 90 minutes with Claire at Trailfinders’ Leeds branch. I’ve used Trailfinders a couple of times before, but quite a while ago – we last booked a trip with them in 2002, and previously did so in 2000. Our experiences with them were good on both these trips.

Of course, that was all before on-line booking had become as prevalent or as easy as it is now. I couldn’t help wondering what benefit I would get from using a third party, but as it turned out Claire was very helpful, and was able to talk from experience – she had visited the places I was interested in and was able to offer advice based on her own experience. It’s probable that I will be paying more than I would have done otherwise but at the moment I feel that it’s been worth it.

And the trip? Well, flights from Manchester to Dubai and then on to Singapore with Emirates will get me there in about 16 hours or so. I’ll have four nights in a hotel in the Little India area of Singapore before flying to Penang with SilkAir and staying for three nights at a not-too-modern boutique hotel near a beach that has shuttle buses to Georgetown. Then I’ll return to Singapore for one more night before an early morning flight to Dubai where I’ll spend a couple of nights in what seems like a good hotel in the Dubai Creek area. Finally, an early afternoon flight out of Dubai will get me back to Manchester in the early evening of the same day, eleven days after leaving. The booking also includes all my transfers so I shouldn’t have to worry about anything. Indeed, as Claire took pains to tell me, the booking constituted a package with Trailfinders as the packager, so if anything goes wrong with the delivery of the package I’m protected in all sorts of ways and I can look to Trailfinders to resolve the problems for me.

Roll on March!

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