Ludwig's Odyssey: November 2015

Clean, rich, efficient, what a contrast compared to all the other countries that surround it. An expensive place though, even more expensive than Europe to rent accommodation and buy a beer, luckily cheap food can be found via the Hawker Centres or Food Courts in the Shopping Malls.

We were very fortunate for our visit here to stay with the wonderful Erin and Ollie who we’d met all the way back in Nepal some 14 months back. They had recently moved to Singapore to start new teaching jobs and invited us to stay with them. We thoroughly enjoyed spending time with them, such great company and easy going people. It was nice to enjoy the comforts of a home for a few days too. They showed us where to eat the cheap Hawker food not far from their place and we had some delicious Indian and Chinese foods. They also took us around places that the normal tourist would miss such as a great little bar selling ales, the best pints we’ve had since we left home, such a nice change from lager. We can’t thank them enough for their hospitality.

We enjoyed generally walking around Singapore, there are some funky buildings around and the juxtaposition of old and new buildings right next to each other made for interesting site seeing, the Botanic Gardens were also good and with Christmas coming up, the lights around Orchard Road (the main shopping area) where plentiful and colourful.

Of course a visit to Singapore would not be complete without a visit to Raffles Hotel and to enjoy the wonderful Singapore Sling and eat your fill of monkey nuts. A wonderfully expensive experience, taking you back a little to what it could have been like in the 1920s. Surprisingly, the dress code in the Long Bar was very casual, flip flops and shorts all ok to wear. When still in the UK planning our trip, going to Raffles was one of the top things we wanted to do and it didn’t disappoint, we enjoyed it so much, we went twice! courtesy of Uncle Paul and Julie, thanks guys!

Statue of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles

In the Botanic Gardens

Chopin and friends

We saw the original in Hiroshima!

Inside the tree

Supertree Grove

Marina Bay Sands Hotel - Crazy!

Little India, decorations for Diwali

On Erin and Ollie's Balcony

With Erin and Ollie, great night!

Fancy a second one?

Oh, ok then!

You are cordially invited to sweep the shells on the floor

Having been on the road for thirteen months and having visited most of what we wanted to see and more, we needed a break to think what we were going to do next and where we were going to go. For us, there was no better place to do this than on a peaceful beach where we could recharge the batteries.

With the weather in mind, our choices were actually limited around SE Asia as it’s wet season pretty much everywhere during October, luckily for us El Nino has changed the weather patterns in recent years and so we came to Indonesia as it’s been very dry. We made our way to Gili Air from Bali which would be my first foray to the Southern Hemisphere, Wend of course has been many times.

We stayed one day in Kuta on Bali to get some supplies etc.. and that was nearly one day too many. Kuta is a horrible place really and we couldn’t wait to get out. The day passed quickly enough and the following morning, we were picked up to be taken to the port and board the 3 hour fast boat to the Gilis.

Lovely journey, calm seas, we arrived around midday, found our guest house easily enough and started to adjust to Island life for what would be our home for the next three weeks.

Gili Air is a laid back island, one of three small isles on the north-west coast of Lombok, the other two being the party place Gili Trawangan and the very quiet Gili Meno, Gili Air offers a good mix between the two, there is no motorised transport on any of the three islands. You can walk around the island in around an hour, which we did on many occasions as it’s only a 6km circumference. The water is crystal clear, about 29c and very inviting despite there being not too much of a huge area to swim in as a lot of the island is surrounded by coral reefs but then that’s great for snorkelling.

As is the way with beach life, there isn’t too much to say about our time here, if you’ve been on a beach holiday then you know the drill.

We didn’t just laze around though, we did go on five dives with 3W, a really nice small dive centre run by some French guys who were really friendly and enthusiastic about diving. One of the dives we did was a more specialised dive to 30m, which means we can now dive deeper all the time having been restricted to 18m before. We saw some wonderful marine life and the visibility for the most part was fantastic. We saw lots of Turtles, a few White tip Sharks, some Lionfish, some Mantis Shrimps, a Cuttlefish and so much more that we hadn’t seen before on previous dives in Koh Tao. It was like being in an aquarium with fish everywhere at times, we so wish we had an underwater camera now.

We did also enjoy some snorkelling, plenty on offer on the east coast of the island and you can easily see Turtles as well as all the beautiful tropical fish.

Yep, we’ve seen loads of Turtles now, they’re so lovely.

Life is cheap in Indonesia and we had some good meals from the local Warung situated inland as well as the slightly more expensive beach bars which did some surprisingly tasty western food and there’s plenty of happy hour offers to tempt you into cheap beers and cocktails and although we didn’t indulge everyday, resistance was futile!

Aside from this, the only other ‘excitement’ was the eruption of Mt Rinjani on nearby Lombok. We had thought that we may climb it as it’s one of the popular side trips from here but if we’re honest with ourselves, our hearts weren’t really in it at this time so we were glad that the decision was taken away from us!

We had also thought about a side trip to Flores and then onto Komodo to see the famous dragons but again, getting there would have been a chore and we were feeling way too lazy. You can also dive around Flores which is meant to be amazing but it’s better suited to divers with more experience than us so we’ll just have to come back one day.

Back to Mt Rinjani, the eruption caused no real danger to us save for the volcanic ash which went down our lungs, you can see how much there was in a photo I took of a daily sweep of the patio. The real impact was on Bali Airport and many flights were delayed/cancelled because of the ash cloud. Looking at the situation a couple of days before our flight to Singapore, the situation didn’t look great, we had decided to fly with Jetstar which are owned by Quantas and so being the safest airline on the planet , they were very strict about which flights could leave and/or arrive, other carriers like Air Asia just went ahead anyway with no problems, which we thought was odd but the reasons why would become clear later.

So we made our way back to Bali a day before our flight was due to leave, another pleasant boat journey.

Once back in Bali, we looked up the latest travel news for our plane in the morning, it was due to fly as good conditions where forecasted, “Great!” we thought. We checked in the morning again and it was delayed by a couple of hours by now, no big deal as long as it was leaving, so we made the short walk over to the airport only to be told that the flight had been cancelled after all! With no Jetstar staff present on Bali, we spent a frustrating afternoon trying to chat online to their staff who where not helpful at all and by the end of the day, we were no wiser if we were to be rescheduled onto another flight in a couple of days or not, all they told us was check your emails and the travel alerts on their website.... great service don’t you think!

The following morning, we woke up to no news at all and we then decided to book a flight with Air Asia for a couple of days later as all of their flights were flying to and from Bali quite happily.

Yes we lost out on £80 but we would spend that much staying in Kuta (which is an awful place) whilst we waited anyway, if not much more. The particular daily flight we were due to leave on with Jetstar had not been in service for ten days or more by now so the backlog would have been huge. We think Jetstar were focusing on returning stranded Australians back home with a stack of recovery flights scheduled and rescheduled as the conditions changed, they really didn’t care about getting people to Singapore, well that’s how it came across to us anyway.

It wasn’t all bad though, the enforced weekend stopover in Kuta meant that we could go to the cinema to watch the new James Bond movie and we also met up with some diving buddies from Koh Tao. They had recently left Alvaro (the dive shop we learned with) to start new jobs on another Island near Bali called Lembongan, great to catch up with them.

We’ve now made it out safe and sound to Singapore on Air Asia and four days after we were supposed to fly here with Jetstar, the email from them about a flight reschedule still hasn’t come through, it will be interesting to see how long it takes...