Originally, we were thinking about visiting Cambodia and Thailand, but the cost of the plane tickets versus the amount of time we would be able to spend there was just not working out. With some time spent on Expedia and pricing everyplace we could possibly go we settled on visiting Singapore and Taiwan, both for about three days each plus some travel days. We knew we couldn't do everything in that time but we'd get to do the things we really wanted to. The schedule worked out a little bit wonky for the cheap plane tickets, but hey, it was still worth doing. We wanted a day or two in Tokyo after we got back and then at least one full recovery day before returning to work, so we rounded out our itinerary with those. Our choice not to go with Thailand later looked prescient when the whole place erupted into riots and demonstrations about the time we would have arrived.
After learning some hard lessons about not traveling light (mostly involving carrying 25kg bags across Tokyo and up and down numerous flights of stairs) we resolved to fit our stuff into overhead-bin sized bags this time, which was easier than I thought once I decided that wearing the same pair of pants three days in a row might be OK. We managed to not forgot anything (we were surprised) and didn't have to check baggage on the two long flights.
Before leaving, one consideration was our plants. We had started some habanero pepper seeds and some other herbs which had all just sprouted when it came time to head out. Leaving them without water for nearly 2 weeks would not have been optimal. However, some research online told us that putting a plastic bag over the pots to act as a greenhouse and moisture-trapping membrane should work, so we wrapped them up.
We took the train across Japan (we're good at that by now) to leave from Tokyo's Narita airport. Some areas of Japan still have quite a bit of snow, more than western New York typically has at this time of year.
The amount of snow still on the ground and falling as we traveled through was quite impressive, but what was really startling was passing through a tunnel in a mountain from a snowy landscape to a spring scene that looked as if snow was a distant memory. I checked my watch and the transition was definitely less than 15 minutes. Wild.
While this leg of the journey was mostly smooth, there were a couple of obstacles. First, there was no way to get from the train station at Ueno in Tokyo to the Keisei line station that goes to the airport in the six scheduled minutes between trains. Impossible. Even if you ran up all the the escalators, through the station, and across the street down into the other station, you couldn't make it. We were able to use our fare tickets to get non-reserved seats on the next, slower train, without issue. Second, once we made it to the airport, our flight was scheduled to leave 20 minutes earlier than we for the ticket we'd booked and nobody at check-in thought to mention this. Last call for boarding happened while Ana was still waiting in line at immigration (I was already through), so I ran to the gate and told them we were both here and to please not leave. It looked to me like a few dozen people hadn't gotten the memo and the plane departed early but with both of us on it.
In view: Not the inside of Narita Airport, thankfully.One amusing part of our flight to Singapore, our first stop, was the airline map showing us where the plane was in relation to our initial and final destinations. The code for Singapore's Changi airport is SIN. According to the travel map, we were flying right into SIN, with airspeed indicators and time to arrival all laid out in front of us. Narita to SIN is about a seven hour flight, spanning for us from early dinner time to past midnight.
Most people don't have to travel so far.Right before touching down we saw the straights of Malacca through the window and they were just lit up by the volume of shipping and the lights of the cargo ships. At the time I thought they were party boats because of the lights but later, flying back from Taiwan in daylight, I saw that they were tankers and container ships, hundreds upon hundreds of them. We couldn't even try for a picture either time because we were close to landing and were not allowed to have portable electronic devices such as cameras going, but it was ships, packed densely into lines, going as far as you could see in either direction. We flew over 19 tankers once I was low enough to tell one kind of ship from another and that was just the part of the straight we flew over, out of a window on one side of the plane. I checked around and didn't find any pictures to do it justice on the internet. All I can say is, if you're flying into Singapore, look out the window and get an education on the scale of global trade. My jaw dropped.
After landing and clearing Immigration (long line) and Customs (you only got checked if you had something to declare) we purchased a ride on the hotel shuttle bus and made it to our hotel in Chinatown. Along the way they drove though some of the ritziest parts of the city and we saw them all lit up our first night in. We'd purchased a fairly inexpensive room at a cheapish hotel but by the time we got there we were quite ready to sleep. Our room didn't have windows which was actually very nice because we didn't get woken up by the sun and could sleep until the alarm went off the next morning, for our first real day in Singapore. Which is where we'll pick up with the next post.
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