We were up at 09:30 hrs. to find that nobody had checked out of the dormitory, so our promised beds were not forthcoming. The bloke in charge bid us come back later and he would sort something out.
We went out and wandered up Orchard Road and noticed a sign advertising a one-hour film developing service in the Lucky Plaza. We settled for the one-day service as it was cheaper and spent ages going through the S$2 music cassettes on offer. I bought 4 and George bought 6 before we left the stall.
The Lucky Plaza was a modern multi-level shopping precinct/mall with escalators and one of those egg-shaped exposed lifts/elevators going up the central column in the atrium. All manner of luxury goods were on sale including clothing, state of the art photographic equipment, jewellery and all sorts of electronic gadgets and gizmos.
We moved on to a Burger King restaurant and battled with a Whopper before continuing up to the Tanglin Road. We passed a luxury hotel and I saw a girl that I vaguely knew, who used to work at the BP Research Centre in Sunbury-upon-Thames. It's a small world!
We went into the Malaysian Airline System (MAS) Travel Office on the sixth floor of Tanglin Plaza to enquire about flight prices. We were stunned by the half-expected extortionate prices. A single flight from Singapore to Brisbane in Australia cost £351 which seemed ridiculous to us, as Singapore to London was £228.
The smiling girl on the desk in the Travel Agents also raised the point that we would require a return or onward ticket in order to gain admittance to Australia. Thus, we set off to the Australian High Commission to verify this. I had a one-year working visa for Australia, but George only had a tourist visa.
We had a 2 hour wait until it re-opened after lunch at 14:00 hrs. so we sat at a pavement café sipping fruit juice. We found the staff in the Tanglin Road Post Office very helpful in directing us to the Australian High Commission, but they failed to raise our hopes about tracking down our mail from home.
The modern Australian High Commission was next to the British one, an identical building with the same expansive grounds. We took a numbered ticket and waited for our number to pop up above the “Visas” window, which it eventually did after forty minutes.
An agitated elderly woman dithered about, muttering about the theft of her travellers cheques to divert our attention from the window where the clerk was conducting business at a leisurely pace. We left the Commission none-the-wiser.
I was told that I had a working holiday visa, a fact that had been known to me since I successfully applied for it in London, and that yes, I might need an onward or return flight ticket. He also enlightened George by explaining that “sufficient funds” meant having enough money to last his stay in Australia without working.
Arriving without “sufficient funds” would mean us being repatriated to the U.K. at our own expense. This meant being flown back to London on the next British Airways flight with our passports held for ransom until we refunded the cost of the flight.
We returned to the Travel Agent to enquire about alternative air fares. A single to Perth was £225 but a return valid for a year was £613. There was a stop-over flight back to London via Bangkok, Hong Kong, Taipei, Honolulu, Los Angeles and New York was expensive and could only be arranged as far as Los Angeles. From there you were on your own.
Another alternative on offer was a Singapore, Sydney, Aukland in New Zealand, Sydney again, New Caledonia, Jakata, Singapore flight for £568, which George could afford but was well above the £200 that remained in my budget.
Apart from flying one way to Perth and hoping I wouldn’t be refused admission, repatriated and left penniless, the only sensible option was to forget Australia completely. A Czech airline flight to Cairo was £250 and George suggested taking this and seeking work on a kibbutz in Israel.
A kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities, a combination of socialism and Zionism. He would lend me sufficient funds from his remaining £1,100 and we could return to England in the spring.
We mulled this over in McDonalds and at another restaurant in Lucky Plaza as we waited for 17:30 hrs. when our developed photographs would be ready for collection. The waitress gave us a delightful smile as we left for the Photo Stall and soon, we were gleefully running through some marvellous snapshots of our journey so far and great memories flooded back.
We paid our S$6 per 24 Exposure film and settled in the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant (more English food!) to transfer our photographs from the cardboard wallets to our free pocket albums. The effect was just as morale boosting as receiving mail from home and we chortled at our insane appearance at the start of our journey. We had looked like two cropped-haired inmates who had escaped from an asylum!
We returned to our “residence” in the block above the Car Showroom opposite the Bencoolen Hotel. No dormitory beds had been vacated but we could sleep on mattresses on the floor in the common lounge of an apartment of rooms for S$5. We paid up, George had a shower, and we were soon back out on the streets again.
We followed Clemenceau Avenue and ate Mee Hong Kong, a vegetable and noodle affair, at Newton Circus. This was a more flashy collection of food stalls filled with a more affluent crowd of Westerners and local diners. This affluence was reflected in the vast amount of food, which was ordered and then left uneaten, the rotundity of the customers, the vast number of empty expensive beer bottles on the tables and the trendiness of the diners attire.
We ate up and moved on. McDonalds shut up shop as we approached at 22:00 hrs. so we went into the 24-hour Kentucky Fried Chicken on Orchard Road. We wrote up our daily logs and sipped coffee as an excessive number of staff crawled and toadied around us. Indeed, on girl with a concave face appeared to be employed solely to open the door as people approached.
I have only been in Singapore for 2 days, but already it feels like home. It is compact enough to cover comfortably on foot and there is always something to occupy your time. It is a shame that only a few of the new buildings reflect the Chinese and Oriental influence on the city. Chinatown itself is rapidly being demolished.
Also, it is so international with people from all over the globe on the streets, including a distracting number of shapely and beautiful women walking about. We walked back to our lodgings and found two mattresses prepared for us. It was quite luxurious really and after a short read we dropped off to sleep with the French windows open (we were on the third floor) and one of the proprietors sleeping on the balcony.
No comments:
Post a Comment