Matt Down Under

This had already been my last day in Singapore, my flight to Melbourne was scheduled for around 8pm. I checked out early, called a taxi to the airport, put my luggage in storage and went back into town with another taxi. I wanted to spend my last day on Sentosa, some sort of theme park island in the south of Singapore, with beaches, all sorts of attractions - I was sure it would be a lot of fun.

I got a luxury taxi this time, for $5 surcharge you can get one where the driver wears tie and jacket and drives a comfortable car, cool stuff. He dropped me off at the Underwater World, similar to the Melbourne Aquarium with all sorts of fish aquariums and a giant one with a glass tunnel to walk through.

What a disappointment! First of all it takes only 15 minutes to see everything and secondly some of the aquariums where truly shameful. The octopus for example had to live in what looked like a 1x2m aquarium, how can you put a big octopus in such a small aquarium? Not really appropriate to the species. Also many of the aquariums had blue painted walls, not much effort was put into aquarium design. The Melbourne Aquarium for comparison was heaps better.

The biggest disappointment was near the exit, where they have what they call a ‘dolphin lagoon’ with, well, dolphins. It wasn’t very lagoonish at all, in fact it was a simple pool where two dolphins were waiting for the next show. The pool was so dirty it was awful, poor dolphins. I don’t claim to be an expert with dolphins, but they didn’t look like healthy dolphins to me, so I left before the show started, but not until I submitted a feedback form.

Across the street was Silosa beach, one of the (artificial?) beaches on Sentosa. This was exactly what I was looking for, a nice last day at the beach. So I wandered around and stayed at a nice spot. I was wise enough to bring swim gear, so I went swimming. The water felt warmer than outside the water, you could easily stay in the water for hours, it was wonderful.

I spent all day there and really enjoyed it, it was a sad moment when I had to leave to head back to the airport. But not until some bikini girls asked me to take photos of them - I felt like in heaven. Now it really was sad that I had to leave. I need to go back to Singapore soon, such a great place.

So I got changed, tried to shake off the sand and took a final walk around the beaches before I called another taxi back to the airport. There I found out my flight was delayed by two hours. (I suddenly realised I could have spent two more hours with those girls at the beach, damn!)

Well, at least there was free WiFi at the airport - unlike Germany where you have to pay to use T-Mobile’s hotspots, ever heard of customer service, people? Nothing’s free in Germany.

When I had been at Frankfurt airport my suitcase was so full that I was worried it could burst, so I used an airport service where you can get your luggage wrapped in foil, to protect it from damage and bursting. In Singapore they had the same, so I got my suitcase wrapped in fancy neon green foil, checked it in and waited for my flight.

Finally I had a flight with Qantas, I couldn’t have been happier, their service and food quality is world-class. It’s the little things that really matter, the crew members are wearing clothing with nice indigenous designs, after the main meal the crew is serving ice cream and immediately after take-off the first thing they do is handing out bottles of water to everyone (not just small cups of water, like Lufthansa does). We also had a steward that looked exactly like Jack Nicholson, seriously.

I was even lucky enough to have a seat at the emergency exit, so I was able to stretch my legs. And unlike Lufthansa, even in economy class every passenger has their own LCD tv where you can watch the latest movies. I spent 6 or 7 hours watching movies and so we arrived in Melbourne in no time. Sleeping wasn’t really possible since we left Singapore late at night and Australia’s time zones are further ahead of Singapore, which means after 3-4 hours in the air the sun already came up.

After we landed in Melbourne we parked next to an Airbus A380 from Singapore Airlines - what an impressive piece of European technology. I didn’t know they were already in use at Melbourne airport, but now that I know I’ll make sure my next intercontinental flight will be in an A380.

A few hours later I had my final flight back to Hobart with VirginBlue. Somehow I had planned with a delay from Singapore and booked the flight to Tas a few hours later than it could have been. I was very happy to see summer had arrived in Tasmania while I was away.