And so it came to an end

A very long overnight flight seemed to go on forever. Boarding at 10:30 Singapore time (12:30 local) they of course felt obliged to keep the lights on until dinner(?!!) was served. This took 2 hours. And of course they felt obliged to serve breakfast 2 hours before landing. This gave us 3 hours of quiet time. The girls slept toe to toe curled up on the floor and Neil and Ro tried the same on the seats. Needless to say not much sleep was had and after the long day previously we walked off the plane feeling like Zombies.

Melbourne airport has had some improvements over the last 10 years, none of them actually translate into efficient handling of the customer (except the trolleys are now free). And so we queued (2 plane loads) - single file past a sniffer dog, queued at through passport control, fought the crowds to get to our luggage carousel and then promptly fought our way back through the same crowd to get to Customs. Utter confusion and extremely poorly thought out. Makes you wonder why we try to attract international visitors here when we muck them around like that. And of course, there is no train connection ( whereas everyone else has one).

Luckily, once we were through, we were quickly collected by Herb and the quiet roads saw us home smartly and relieved that we’d actually made it with only a couple of hiccups. We spent the day forcing ourselves to stay awake, unpacking, and generally getting used to the extra space, whilst thoroughly appreciated the full fridge, and pre-prepared lunch and dinner (how cool is that!)



The girls put their charm bracelets together and the phone has been running steadily with people welcoming us home.
















And so to some transport stats we collated:-

Planes – 9
Trains (Metro) – 29
Intercity Trains – 6
Eurostar – 1
Cars – 7
Vans – 5
Taxi – 3
4WD – 1
Buses – 26
Ferries – 3
Gondolas – 1
Boats – 4
Cable Cars – 2
Parasail – 1
Ferris Wheels – 3
Quad Cycles – 1
Push Bikes – 3
Km’s walked - countless

So that was over 100 different trips on transport (woo hoo ! – no idea if that actually means anything or not).

As a final wrap up we’d like to say a special thanks to the following people.
Gabby – lift, Paris planning & execution, company and delivering the new drivers license.
Brian and Fran – The best next door neighbors who helped up all the way through and especially in our hour of need.
Polly and Paul for showing us a wonderful part of the world with fabulous hospitality. Midsomer Murders will never be the same.
Sarah, Nick, Nicole, Oliver and Rory for sharing their lives, their rooms and their house in such generous fashion (the quiet day at the cricket was, of course, painful with just the two of us).
Marg for preparing our home coming so nicely.
Herb for getting us home quickly and safely.
Everyone who left a comment on the blog. We reveled in knowing that people were out there watching and the feedback gave us made us feel at home even though we were so far away.
And to everyone who has tracked our adventures – we hoped you enjoyed the trip and thanks for sharing it with us.

Tomorrow, school and work (aka “The real world”) beckons. Until next time…..

Sky high over Singapore

Another early start saw us out of bed at 5:30 am, pack, pay, eat and be on the road by 7 for the start of the long (and somewhat) disjointed trek home. The road back to Phuket Airport seemed to take a lot longer than the trip in – even though that could not have been the case as all was very calm, it was most likely due to the daze that we arrived in 5 days earlier. It was interesting seeing the hordes of locals swarm down the steep entrance road on the plethora of motor scooters and tray trucks. All heading to position themselves to hassle the tourists.

The short flight to Singapore went well, except we were stymied by being dumped in the Budget terminal. Not the rent a car company – this means for the people that can’t afford a real air fare (apparently) As we had 10 hours to kill, this was not too much of an issue except we missed out on the free transit passengers tours that are on offer if you can afford an airline that uses the main terminals.

Deciding this was our fate we dropped our bags in the Left Luggage, jumped on the trains and headed into town. Another day another country and yet another city. Singapore is a very interesting place to visit and lives up to its reputation. Clean, efficient, new and also hot and muggy. We didn’t really have the energy to walk around too much so we decided to stroll over to the new wheel to see if we could afford it.

As it turns out, that cat was out of the bag again because the whole town was abuzz with birthday celebrations. We thought it was very nice of them to put on concerts, military parades, air force flyovers and the like just to recognize Rosemary’s big day. Luckily they didn’t ask for a speech as it was too hot and we were all pretty tired. So we walked around the blocked roads and got to the Eye (they call theirs the Singapore Flyer) to find discounted rates, no queues and we actually got a whole pod to ourselves. This backs up our previous theory that an attraction is only going to be really popular if you charge a lot of money to stand in queues.

It was a very insightful journey and we gained a reasonable appreciation of the place in our 40 minute loop. We also fund out the real reason why the Melbourne one was such dismal failure. Feng shui. Yep – here they got an expert in and he pointed out that it was going the wrong way – apparently they should follow the path of the sun. Our people in Melbourne really should consider these things. The Singaporeese also seem to have their Mykey system working perfectly well on the trains. What are our lot doing?

On the way back to the trains we stopped by some heavy artillery and then paused in an Irish pub to while away the hours. Given the price of drinks this was done in a very controlled manner.

Leaving the locals to continue the party celebrations, we made our apologies (due to the flight times) and we headed back to the airport for a whole lot more tiring hangin’ out, sittin’ around and waitin’ in line in order to get on to our last flight.