SIN to NAN

I could have gone into some more detail on the hostel, and why it wasn’t great.

Mostly it’s just cramped; more beds crammed into the dorms than is sensible for allowing people to move around. My actual bed was fine, with a light & power outlets & a curtain, but it was also the top of a triple decker where the ladder is close enough to a chunk of structure that your back will brush it on the way up or down. Air conditioned, but with so little space for airflow that the room smelled odd. Only space you could really move around was right in front of the door.

There was a small locker, with key, but any larger bag needed to live in the bag storage in the common area.

Oh, and two showers & two toilets for the whole place. The staff were muttering about how two of the kitchen bowls had gone missing, and how they only had six to begin with.

Basically, a storage facility for as many people as they could cram into a ground floor commercial unit.

So with that covered, …

I didn’t sleep well. A couple of people had nasty coughs, which is exactly the sort of thing you want to be hearing in a cramped dorm. Glad it was only one night here, but I wish I’d booked the place I stayed previously. I think I booked this place first?

Got up at 6am, because it’s not like staying in bed was going to get me any better sleep. I’d set out some clothes last night to make things easier, so I could at least commit an act of personal hygiene before I left. Skipped the hostel free breakfast & instead got something from one of the many shops  on the way to the station, and had an altogether nicer experience, I think.

Changed into better-for-travel clothes at the airport, because I’d made a bad choice last night, and really didn’t want to stay at the hostel long enough to fix it. Plus, airport toilet stalls usually have enough room for a suitcase, so it’s much easier to get changed in one, assuming you’re relaxed about setting off the auto-flush sensor a lot.

It turns out that Changi Airport does early check-in, for some airlines at least, over at a different part of the terminal , so as I was there probably 5½ hours before my flight, I wandered over, did the bag drop, & was through security by about 9am. Not that there’s much security to go through; They have automatic turnstile things, and do the actual bag checks at the gate, which is an unusual approach.

The next bit was mostly me trying not to fall asleep in the terminal & miss my flight to Fiji. I succeeded, but fell asleep a few times while the plane was on the tarmac (there was a technical problem with the refueling truck, so we sat there for a while before joining the long-ass queue for takeoff. Also, I might have fallen asleep during takeoff.

And that’s me more or less up to date.

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The flight was long.

There were people.

It was a whole thing.

The guy in front of me could not stop adjusting the recline on his seat, so my screen kept changing distance. Didn’t make much difference to me, I was reading for a chunk of it.

But, eventually, we got to Nadi International, with it’s big smiles, open-air walkways to the airbridges, and incredibly slow immigration/customs. Through now, and having a coffee at CuppaBula Coffee Shop.