Day Two - Arrival in Singapore, Orchard Street, Boats Quay
My god, just over one hour to go, and we're off this flight. My body clock's definitely all screwed up now: local time is midday and I've managed about half an hour's fitful sleep. The flight's over 11 hours old, and I could happily wander over to First Class and strangle them all. While smiling. Them and their hoity-toity moneybag ways with their freshly baked bread and attentive service. Bah.
We're currently flying over Thailand - another country I'd love to visit. Is it really too much to ask in winning the lottery so that we can endlessly travel?
Singapore. Finally here, and we get off the plane completely run down, dehydrated and exhausted. It's heavily overcast, yet the heat and especially the humidity is prohibitively oppressive, making even breathing laboured after the extremely cool British climate.
We're so tired that even the transfer to the hotel through the city fails to fully register. Arriving at our hotel, the Furama (which I keep on thinking of as being called 'Futurama'), we collapse on to the bed and sleep for several hours, waking when dark, still tired, yet due to our relatively short stay here determined to get up and out and see the place.
No flight's great, and this was not an exception, yet here we are again, on terra firma. We hit a couple of pockets of turbulence in a big way, causing even the cabin crew to be told to be seated, and nearly causing my pants to be prematurely filled.
Singapore airport immigration was the easiest experience I've yet dealt with on holiday outside of Europe, and we're rapidly granted our visa's - something in our state of mind we're extremely grateful for.
We take a taxi to Orchard Street to wander around and get our bearings. Orchard Street is the shopping mecca of Singapore, surrounded in gargantuan shopping malls populated by pricey designer stores for Gucci to Prada via Marks & Spencers. Somewhere we'll be returning tomorrow to flex our credit cards.
Feeling adventurous, we catch the local underground system (the MRT) to Boats Quay, an area in the financial district with restaurants and bars overlooking the Singapore River. It's reminiscent of Canary Wharf in London, and we enjoy a curry with one too many Tiger beers before walking back to the hotel for a night-cap and bed.
I've not been to Tokyo or Hong Kong, but the feeling here is very similar as I'd imagine these cities to be - very efficient, clean and bustling. We feel totally safe here, as I'm sure it is, and think nothing of wandering the streets, Rough Guide in one hand staring about us, betraying our tourist origins.
The MRT in particular is one of the best we've encountered, and like Paris and New York is cheap at $S1 a time, a refreshing change to the prohibitively expensive London underground.
It's a shame we only have two, brief nights here, as I'd like at least double that to see everything. We're not, for instance, going to have enough time to catch the cable car up to Mt Faber, instead opting for the Night Safari at the wildlife reserve my brother recommended. We're allegedly on a tight timescale, which we'll no doubt break, ending up drinking coffee and smoking fags whilst watching the world go by.