I welcomed in 2008 just outside gate C23 in the departure hall of Singapore’s Changi Airport. We should have been somewhere over Afghanistan en-route to London but the First Officer had come down with food poisoning on the first leg from Sydney. Qantas tried frantically to track down a replacement pilot. They couldn’t, so we had to spend the night in Singapore.
It should have been a nightmare. The New Year celebrations meant that it would take three hours to organise enough buses to take over 400 passengers to the hotel. But a kind member of the Qantas ground staff told us to catch a taxi to the hotel and get the staff there to pay for it when we arrived.
The Trader Hotel was about half an hour from the airport. It was tucked between the Botanical Gardens and Orchard Road and the girl on reception was surprised that we had arrived already. Singapore being Singapore, we were shown to a room within minutes and tucked up in bed before our fellow passengers had even got on a bus.
Our good luck continued the next morning. After a very substantial breakfast we checked out and told the receptionist we were catching a taxi out to the airport instead of the arranged bus. We’d left before our baggage was unloaded and wanted to check that it had been put back on the plane OK. We’d intended to pay for the taxi ourselves. The fare was only $S18. But the girl on reception handed us $20 anyway and we were soon on our way back to Changi airport in air-conditioned comfort.
So what should have been the worst New Year’s Eve ever turned out OK. We broke the 21 hour journey with a good night’s sleep and arrived at Heathrow at 9pm on New Year’s Day rather than the originally scheduled ungodly hour of 6.20 am. And all on Qantas’s tab.
Here’s hoping the rest of 2008 works out as well!
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Hola
another reason why I envy you.
I spent my New Year’s Day comatose in a Barcelona’s bar.
Un Feliz Año Nuevo a todos
Massi
(from London to Barcelona for good)
Hi Massi – actually I think spending New Year’s Day comatose in a Barcelona bar sounds pretty enticing!
Just shows that you never know what’s round that travelling corner! My visit to singapore started when they found a phillipino’s head in bushes at Orchard Rd…but that’s another story!
Right now i’m looking for “top 10 reasons to visit Australia”….any ideas?
Hooray for Singapore!
Hey PJ – Happy New Year.
You’re right to say that. The taxi driver taking us back to the airport said it would have been the Changi Airport guys who would have insisted on Qantas treating it’s passengers to a night in a nice hotel. The airlines – apparently – are more than happy to leave the passengers camping in the terminal. But the Singaporeans know that it is their reputation that is at stake too and force the airlines to treat their customers better than they are naturally inclined to do.
So, yeah, hooray for Singapore!
Having said that, I feel cheated now that I didn’t see a filipino’s head in the bushes.
OK Marti, you can’t just leave us hanging with your ‘Filipino head in the bushes’ story. Even if you only tell us how you knew it was a Filipino’s head.
As for the top ten reasons to visit Australia, I might throw that open to everyone else in a specific blog entry. But for starters I’ll give you a list of the things I enjoyed this time around:
1. Space. Even on the busiest streets in Sydney I had a good couple of metres around me with no-one in it.
2. The weather. It rained a lot while we were there but it was still warm enough to gad about in just a t-shirt and shorts. My first weekend in Sydney was amazing – blue skies, warm breeze, jacarandas fllowering, cicadas buzzing.
3. Prawns. There’s nothing like getting a kilo of fresh chunky tiger prawns from the fish market, going down to a park by the harbour and tucking in.
4. Beaches. We stayed in Coogee and had a great time. A nice little beach, twenty minutes from the city centre, without the posers you get at Bondi.
5. It’s clean. Within half an hour of being back in London I’d stepped in my first dog turd. Even the gutters in Sydney look like they’ve been scrubbed clean.
6. Summer Heights High. There’s no way this show could be/would be showed in the UK. But I loved it. I have made it my personal mission to bring the word ‘ranga’ into common usage in the UK.
As a Ranga I resemble those remarks, Peter!!
As for Coogee, I used to live there. Funny that you felt so comfortable there. You’d feel like you were in a sunny London or Dublin (says the Aussie typing from Dublin)…
And, yeah, Summer Heights is fantastic. We’re trying to bring “Puck you” and “I like what you’re wearing, is it from Sussans?” into usage over here!!