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!