Today we are heading on our first long overseas holiday since COVID hit in 2020.
We had Mexico booked for 2021 for my 50th, which became campervanning around South Australia and with state border closures became a week at Peregian. We did a drive to Yeppoon and Canberra while Australia’s borders were closed.
Once Australia’s international border reopened, we did a week in Bali – close enough that if something went wrong we could get home easily enough.
Today we are flying to Singapore. Stu and I will have almost a week here by ourselves before we are joined by Jayenne and Peter. Next Wednesday we fly to Phuket where we will meet Craig, Linsey, Alice, Luke and Molly. We are all on the same plane from Singapore to Phuket.
All up we are gone 3 weeks in total we will have 10 nights in Singapore and 10 in Thailand. We are going to miss our little mate Eric who has been our companion on all our domestic trips over the last few years.
We got through check-in, customs and immigration without any hassles, although Stu found out what happens when you leave your glasses on at the immigration gate.
The flight was delayed by about an hour, however we are scheduled to only be about 20 minutes late when we get to Singapore. We have a really nice Flight Attendant named Cody sitting across from us. We had a good chat while we sat on the tarmac at Brisbane waiting for the flight to depart.
I am writing this blog as we are flying over the southern tip of Borneo. This flight is a lot more direct than others we have had to Singapore, we basically flew straight from Brisbane to Darwin then to the east of Bali – passing over some beautiful little islands and a number of volcanoes in the Indonesian archipelago. I think this is even more direct than the flight we had from Sydney to Denpasar in November last year.
Once we get to Singapore we’ll check into the Parkroyal on Pickering. I will add some pictures over the next few days I am sure. The Parkroyal on Pickering is covered in plants. We have always wanted to stay here but it has been out of our price range. When I booked this about 9 months ago prices were still low because COVID had impacted tourism and, lucky for us, prices. We managed to get the room for under $300 SGD per night before taxes – it’s normally $450-$600 per night.
We have arrived at the hotel and our room is on the 11th floor to get to the room you walk over a hanging walkway with bollards along the side – this has caused a few problems with my fear of heights. The room is beautiful and so is the motel.
We had dinner at Chinatown and went to the Michelin starred soya chicken rice hawker shop – the food was very nice but we went at the end of the night so next time we will try and get there a little bit earlier. The upside was that there were plenty of tables. I had the soya chicken and Stu had the roast pork. We shared a spicey dumplings – we’re in Singapore
davstuholidays 