Day 1 Perth->Singapore Hotel81

Nadya was sick today :( Some kind of gastro thing and so I had to do most of the packing.

I was quiet worried about the whole thing and all that Nadya ate for the day was a mouthfull of rice and a slice of dry toast.

Our friend David took us to the Airport, arriving about 7:30pm and we took off at 9:30pm

We flew with Tiger Airways where they sell you food on the plane.

Nadya had a cuassaunt, a greasy thing that she thought was a mistake before she ate it.

It sure was a mistake as she spent a good part of the remainder of the flight in the toilet!

I was really anxious about Nadya's ability to walk off the plane.

We arrived Singapore airport at 3am, never the best time to arrive anywhere.

I dumped our 35kg's of backpacks and we got a taxi to our pre-booked hostel for the night, arriving there at 4am.

Sadly, the door was locked and no-one came when we rang the bell, so we hailed a taxi and asked him to take us to a hotel.

That is how we came to stay at "Hotel 81 (Changi)"

It is really nice here, as we arrived at 4am, they said that we didnt need to check out till 4pm.

We wandered across the road for breakfast at about 10am and Nadya managed to keep some food inside her :)

Its now 12:30 and we will stay oround the hotel till 4pm before heading to the Bugis area for a look around.

I guess that we will head back to the airport at about 11pm to retrieve our bags and check in for the flight to Istanbul.

Ooooh, my tummy!

What wonderful timing. I got a really nasty stomach bug on Monday night (I bet that was from YOU Lara!) and was still feeling pretty bad on Tuesday. By Tuesday night I was feeling almost human again but later on was terribly sick on the plane. Fortunately for the other passengers I did make it to the toilet without incident, although I did nearly pass out in the aisle! It was a rough night to say the least and poor Clive had to carry all the bags as I was feeling so washed out.

We got a taxi to the cheap dive we had booked into at 4am (selected mainly because of the 24hr check-in facility) and lo and behold, nobody came to answer the buzzer. Not Happy! Fortunately a very helpful taxi driver took us to another place he knew of a short distance away and we were settled in and asleep in no time.

So here we are in Singapore and I'm strictly on white rice for the duration :-(
Clive will have to eat for the 2 of us. We are in the Galang area which has a lot of Malay
eating places and sadly, one of my favorite desserts called roti. Roti are like a cross between a pancake and a flakey pastry, the dough is tossed in the air until it is a paper thin disc of nearly a metre wide, then deep fried -usually folded around a fruit filling but sometimes made into a sinle layer crispy pancake and smothered in syrup or sweetened condensed milk. Dee-licious!
I saw a new version today which looked a bit like a roulade stuffed with fruit and topped with lashings of cream, ice-cream and the obligitry sweetened condensed milk.
But not for me this time...

As Clive kept saying on Tuesday a stomach bug is very slimming, so instead of smacking him (I do feel a bit weak at the moment) I will wish him the same good fortune in weight loss!

PS thanks for the elephants Colleen, so cute!

Swamp Thing

This is just a picture from Star Swamp in Perth. We went there for a walk last week and it was impressively swampy and photogenic!

Thanks to everyone who came on Friday, it was a great night, I hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as we did!
and thanks for the card Jayne, you are so thoughtful.

Only one more sleep until we go...

How many train tickets!

When I checked my credit card statements I had a shock!

Each time I tried to book the tickets and the system said "Unable to take money, please try again" It was, in fact, taking the money :(

So, we have been charged six times for the tickets! $88 x 6 - Not good

I will put through a dispute with the credit card company, but I wont start it till Tuesday as I expect the Train company will cancel out tickets once we register a dispute and I would rather have completed the train journey on Wednesday before the dispute filters through.

Train Tickets and Flight changes

That was a hectic 24 hours!

I finally managed to make the rail booking from Istanbul to Konya, after using a second credit card.. I guess the first one didnt like charging amounts in Turkish Lira. Anyway.. That is settled.

I was checking my junk emails before deleting them and this one, in Spanish, had flight numbers in it... Hum, O, I know.. We bought our plane tickets from Singapore->Istanbul from a place in Barcelona!

After translating the email, it seems that the departure time from Singapore has been changed from 06:20am to 03:20am, which is the same time that our flight from Perth to Singapore arrives in Singapore **XXZZ!! So, we have changed our flights from Perth-Singapore so that we leave Perth on the 29th instead of the 30th and will have a day to bum around Singapore..

Hope nothing else happens :)

Test of uploading a video clip

This is a small clip I took while flying in Bali in 2007

Cheap DIY Air fares

I thought that I would work out the plane tickets for our holiday myself and save $500 for each of us.

So, we are flying with Tiger Airways to Singapore and then with Qatar Airways to Istanbul.

Sadly, we cant check the baggage all the way through and have to lug it from the Budget Terminal for 5 kms or so to Terminal 1 at about 2am.

We got the Qatar Airways tickets from a cheap place in Spain, via the internet - They are eTickets which hopefully will turn out to be real when we get to the airport!

And we only have enough time to make the connection in Singapore if the flight from Perth isn't running late.

All the excitement will help us to sleep on the flight from Singapore to Istanbul!

TTT (Turkish Train Tickets)

Apparently, you can buy Turkish Train Tickets online..

Which is a good thing because the first part of out trip involves arriving Istanbul at 4pm and catching the 7pm sleeper to Konya.

Sadly, the site is in manglish and it doesn't allow you to book tickets more than two weeks in advance :(

So, I wont know if it is possible for another four days.

Then, there is the issue of the e-train-tickets needing to be taken to the station and exchanged for real tickets.

All the fun of planning

Gratuitous cat picture: Winston and Small with lettuce leaf (never eat a salad at our house if you are allergic to cats)

This is a photo of Clive paragliding down at Shelly beach in Albany. He's just hovering around before landing.

Travel Plans

Hello everyone.

So, Clive and I are off to Turkey on the 30th April, not long to go now...

We fly into Istanbul and get an overnight train to Konya in the Cappadocia region, so it will be a long trip! On the upside, overnight trains can be fun and it seems the ones in Turkey are pretty nice. You get private compartments, beds etc, like a mini hotel so we should get a comfortable night's sleep. There's also a dining car, which means our first experience of Turkish Cuisine will be train food! Oh well...

Our general plan for Turkey is to spend the first week around the Cappadocia region, then visit Selcuk on the West coast moving down to Fethiye (Oludinez) where Clive is doing a paragliding 'safety' course. After that we'll make our way up to Istanbul, maybe stopping somewhere interesting on the way. There's loads to see and do in Istanbul so we want at least a week there and then it's off to Bali and Lombok. We are meeting up with my Mum and going scuba-diving on Gilli Trawangan and then I'm going home while Clive stays on a bit to do some more flying.

There seems to be plenty of internet access in Turkey, so we'll keep you all as up-to-date as possible.

That's all there is to say until we get there!