The adventure has begun… and is off to a fairly sedate and uninteresting start. The Emirates flights from Auckland to Brisbane, and Brisbane to Singapore, were completely full, with no spare seats anywhere in the plane. I’m not sure if my memories of emirates were better than reality, or whether Air NZ’s new economy class clabins have set my standards too high, but one way or the other Emirates only gets a 5 out of 10 for me for comfort and convenience based on the trip so far. The seats aren’t particularly comfortable, the entertainment system is not play on demand, and they didn’t offer enough water through the flight. Neither of us really got any sleep.
Minor problems though! I’ll try not to complain about airlines again. We arrived in Singapore on time at 2am in the morning, to find Changi Airport almost completely shutdown for the night. The skytrain to terminal 2 (where Kat’s Dad (Alfred) was arriving at 5am) was shut, so we had to walk the 500m in stifling humidity and heat (at 2am in the morning!). We took a wrong turn and ended up wandering the back corriders of the administration building, but eventually found our way to the proper place. Changi airport is very stark, all tiled floors with huge open spaces and pretty rudimentary plastic chairs, there was one coffee shop open with nice padded leather chairs, but we arrived to late to stake a claim to any of those. Turns out we weren’t going to get any sleep anyway, as we were befriended by a middle-aged business man who had missed the last train back into the city at 1:30am and was waiting for the next one at around 6am. He talked almost non-stop for the 3 hours we were waiting, with Kat and I murmering, uhuh, ok, etc, every few minutes. I don’t think it would be exagerating to say that between the two of us we probably only spoke 40 or 50 words during the entire ‘convesation’. If I had actually been properly awake he would have been a very interesting person to talk to, he was very keen on convincing us that Europe is a horrible place, and that we would both be much richer if we setup an IT consulting company in Singapore. If I am ever inclined to do that I now have his business card!
Alfred’s flight arrived from Brisbane pretty much on time at 5am, and we managed to navigate the border crossing from Singapore to Johar Bharu without problems, although it did involve three separate taxi rides. The first from Singapore airport to central Singapore, then via a specially registered Taxi via the causeway out of Singapore and into Malaysia, ending up in the centre of Johar Bharu and finally a third trip from cental Johar Bharu to Sentai airport (aka Johar Bharu airport) 30km out of town, arriving just after 7:30am. Breakfast consisted of fried Noodles! which will take some getting used to. The brief glimpes I had of Singapore through the early morning gloom and rain, suggest that it’s a very leafy city, with lots of trees lining the main highways, and a big 70% completed replica of the London Eye under construction on the waterfront in the middle of town. Looking forward to exploring Singapore a bit more in a few weeks. Malaysia is pretty much as expected so far, very similar to Thailand.
As I write this it is 10:30am and we’ve still got another few hours of waiting before we can checking for out 1:30pm flight up to Miri where we’ll be staying with Kat’s Uncle Louis for the next few days. It’s been a pretty tiring trip so far, and I think we’ve got a big dinner out already planned for when we arrive in Miri, so hopefully I’ll get to sleep in tommorrow morning!
We’ve taken a few photos so far, the new camera (Canon Digital Ixus 75) seems to work very nicely, but the Internet connection at the airport here doesn’t seem to work well enough to let me check my email, let alone upload photos. I’m not sure how much better Miri will be in this regard. I’ll try my best to get this posted in a timely fashion, but the photos may have to wait until we get back to Singapore on the 13th.
It’s awesome to actually be one third of the way across the world towards our new home!
Catch you later
Matt
PS. Singapore and Malaysia are 4 hours behind NZ.