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Published: December 4th 2009
Malaysian Satay Skewers: $17 Singapore Dollars
Two Singapore Slings: $48 Singapore Dollars
Malaysian Satay Skewers and Two Singapore Slings in the Ambiance of the 1920’s Raffles Hotel Long Bar, where the Singapore Sling was invented: Priceless!
Our final day in Singapore was spent dodging rain and hiding indoors. We headed for Orchard Road, a famous shopping district, and found ourselves at a showing of the new movie 2012 (one of the worst movies of the year, for sure)…but hey, it killed a couple hours on a rainy afternoon (stupid monsoons!). The day was saved by the aforementioned drinks and appetizers at Raffles Hotel, a gorgeous icon in the center of town where relics like Hemingway and Chaplin once sat and kicked back the delicious cocktail consisting of gin, cherry brandy, cointreau, pineapple juice, grenadine, and bitters. I wasn’t expecting to like the drink, since I’m not a fan of gin or brandy, but oh man…it’s good stuff. I wrote down the exact recipe so I can try to replicate it at home.
Our adventure to Sydney (note the choice of word:
adventure) began later that evening as we caught a shuttle back to the lovely Changi airport. We queued
up and waited in line for about 45 minutes to check in. Smiled at the agent, handed over our passports, then heard four very scary words: “Where is your visa?”
“What visa?” we respond (oh, stupid Americans that we are!)
“Your visa for Australia,” she replies kindly (silently thinking, “Oh, stupid Americans!”)
“Ummm…isn’t it visa-on-arrival?” I ask, attempting to regain my composure.
“No, ma’am. All visitors to Australia must have a visa to board the plane.”
WELL!! That was news to us. Somehow in my six months of research before embarking on this trip, this simple fact had escaped our notice. Panic ensued, as it was 8pm, embassies were closed, it would take days to process anyway, we would forfeit all our flights and hostel booking in Sydney…I was nearly foaming at the mouth at my own stupidity (I mean, REALLY?! We just navigated freakin’ Cambodia with no problem but somehow are denied access to Australia, a lovely western land…how does that happen? Of all the countries in the world, I would think we could walk into Australia as freely as Canada or the UK...aren't we all, like, basically cousins anyway??)
Luckily, before I
actually began foaming at the mouth, she indicated the Qantas airlines counter behind us. “Step over to counter 7, ma’am. You can purchase your electronic visas there. Then come back here and I’ll check you in for your flight.”
Instant electronic visas?? Sweeter words have never been spoken. Although we were a little miffed at dishing out $50 each for the visas and later discovering they only cost $20 (how does an airport manage to get away with extortion like that??), we were thrilled to be handed our visas and granted access to the airplane! Of course, the evening only got more fun when we discovered our flight had been delayed over 3 hours, meaning we would be sitting at our gate until well past midnight…and would more than likely miss our connecting flight to Sydney. Sigh. And at that point, I was still fighting my vicious sinus-head-cold thing and was miserable anyway, especially after confirmation of the whole stupid-American thing (there will be much self-deprecation in this blog, as we have done many, many stupid things in the past 48 hours!). So I was not a very happy camper.
The evening improved slightly when we boarded our
four-hour flight to Darwin and I discovered that my window seat, right behind the exit row, had NO CHAIR in front of me! I was in 12A, and there was an 11B and 11C, but no 11A. It was like I’d been upgraded to first-class with room to fully extend my legs (I could’ve done a tap-dance, I had so much leg room!). I nearly cried with delight. What’s more, I was so exhausted I actually managed to sleep through most of the flight, too, which NEVER happens (I was awake the entire 14 hours to Beijing). For once, Jeremy was the insomniac, quietly sketching the whole way (though his stupid moment came in the form of forgetting his sketchbook on the flight when we landed - argh!!).
Concerned about missing our connecting flight, we raced off the airplane, only to find ourselves selected “at random” for the harshest customs inspection (“interrogation”) I’ve ever seen. We were seated for nearly twenty minutes and grilled on every aspect of our trip thus far…where we’ve been, how much money we’ve spent, how much money we had left…even really obscure things like, “Are you carrying any chocolate with you?” (Geez, what if
I’d had PMS and WAS carrying chocolate? Would I have been deported back to Singapore?) The customs officer was nice and all, but to be questioned like that at 6am after a fairly restless night was exhausting. At last it was determined that neither us (nor our non-existent chocolate bars) were a threat to Aussie security, and we granted permission to enter the country (thanks so much!). My only guess is because we purchased our visa only hours before? Maybe it looked suspicious? Who knows? Meanwhile all the non-Americans were breezing through security without a care in the world…sigh…
Miraculously we made it to our connecting flight with about five minutes to spare…all the flights out that morning were delayed several hours (from all the delays the night before). Darwin is a tiny airport with only five gates, but has the toughest security I’ve ever seen. Aside from the interrogations, officers with dogs march all over the terminal, sniffing trash cans, luggage, purses, people (the dogs, not the officers, by the way)…I guess since Darwin is so close to southeast Asia, they have to be concerned about drugs, but still…it was a surprise.
Four hours later, (and after
even more sleep, on both our parts), we touched down in Sydney at last. We managed to lose each other in the terminal after a pit stop to the restroom (told you we’ve been brainless morons) for about twenty minutes before reconnecting. Gathered our one checked “Stuffle” bag and managed to find the shuttle to our hostel ($12 per person, each way, thank you!)…which was our first experience driving in traffic on the wrong side of the road. Our driver would give the Chinese and Vietnamese taxi drivers a run for their money (in terms of CRAZY driving), but hurtling around Sydney on the wrong side of the road, with the driver on the wrong side of the car, was terrifying. How we are going to learn to drive in New Zealand remains to be seen! Crossing the street here is mentally taxing, as you don’t know which way to look. Even walking down the sidewalk is tiring, as we typically will pass someone on the left, and here everyone passes on the right…it’s all very confusing. Everything is upside-down and backwards on the other side of the world!!
Sticker shock is worse than I anticipated, too. This is
a horrible time to be in Australia for us, as our dollar to theirs is nearly 1 to 1 (normally we enjoy a much more favorable exchange rate). After nearly two months of $5 hotels and $3 meals, forking over $100 for visas and $48 for an airport shuttle before we even GOT anywhere was painful. Shared dorm rooms at our hostel are $30 each, per night…granted, for a huge city that rivals New York or DC, that’s not a lot of money…but for a backpacking budget, it’s brutal. Especially when a couple of months ago, when our dollar was stronger, those same rooms would’ve probably only cost us $15 or $20. Argh. Oh well, what can you do? Go to Subway for a salad and 6-inch sub and spend SEVENTEEN dollars, that’s what!
Anyway, enough griping. But maybe now you know why we’re not spending more time in Oz right now (we’re not millionaires, that’s why)!
Our never-ending day did not improve when we arrived at our highly-recommended hostel and discovered that we would have to switch rooms in the morning, as there was a problem with our booking. We were furious when we discovered that their
advertised “free wi-fi” (a major deal for us, as we’re on the computer so much working on the blog and talking to family back home) is in fact NOT free and costs $15 a day! So here I am, in a McDonald’s around the corner that offers free wi-fi. At least they’re playing good music.
Refusing to take a nap despite our exhaustion, we headed out into the city to walk to the harbor. Seeing the Harbor Bridge and Opera House would lift our spirits, I insisted. So out we headed into the late afternoon, walking and walking and walking, for nearly an hour down the main street. At last it dawned on us to check the map, as we were wondering why we hadn’t reached the harbor yet. After our aggravating night and day, you can only imagine our reaction as we looked at the map and realized we had been walking for an hour
in the wrong direction.
(At that moment, the scene from “Dumb and Dumber” flashed into my head when Lloyd has driven a sixth of the way across the country in the wrong direction and goes, “I thought the Rocky Mountains would be
a little rockier than this!”)
In my defense, being that we are now in the southern hemisphere, the sun is angled very, very differently in the sky. Yes, I know, it still rises in the east and sets in the west, but during the day we’re used to seeing the sun more towards the south. Here, the sun is angled more towards the north, and that is what threw off our sense of direction. This is extremely frustrating, as typically I have a great sense of direction…but it goes with the territory here of everything seemingly being reversed. Everyone should just walk on their hands here. It would make so much more sense.
Anyway, I ramble. Before I had a total nervous break-down (complete with mouth-foaming), a bus miraculously appeared and was heading straight for Circular Quay and the Harbor. Only once we were on-board did we finally laugh at our ever-increasing stupidity. Road-weariness, it seems, has finally gotten the best of us! It was all worth it, though, when we arrived at the Quay and saw Harbor Bridge and the Opera House, all lit up against the black sky. We walked around for a bit and settled
into a cute café on the water and devoured pumpkin soup and a fabulous pumpkin frittata (kind of like quiche, with pumpkin, egg, potato, onion, and ginger) - yum!! An older guy and his son sat next to us, and we ended up talking with them for about three hours…he’s some sort of entertainment industry guru and has traveled the world and met every celebrity you can think of (he noted I look just like Meryl Streep and then proceeded to talk about what a nice lady she is)…anyway, interesting guy. We exchanged lots of travel stories until our eyelids were literally drooping shut in exhaustion.
We took the train back to our hostel (though even that was complicated, as they were doing work on our line and we had to circle around and switch trains and backtrack - argh!). We arrived back at our hostel to find many, many drunk men in dresses standing outside our door. Apparently it was “ladies’ night” at the bar next-door and their advertising said, “Anyone in a dress drinks free champagne!” So a couple of these guys thought it would be a great idea to wear dresses and drink champagne all night
(these were NOT gay men, by the way)…somehow, it just went with our day. We didn’t even blink an eye as we entered our room to find a nice Canadian couple (both in dresses, by the way…her boyfriend wanted free champagne too).
Welcome to Sydney.
Fortunately we slept like rocks last night, transitioned rooms smoothly, and located this McDonald's to call home and let our parents knows we were still alive. We managed to have a nice lunch of caesar salad and ravioli for under $20 (barely), in a pretty cafe run by a Moroccan family. Walked a while (in the correct direction) and arrived back at the Harbor to explore it in the daylight. We climbed the pylon of the Harbor Bridge ($9 compared to $220 to climb the ACTUAL bridge)...it's the world's largest and heaviest steel-arch bridge, soaring 430 feet over the water! Then we walked across the bridge and back for views of the Opera House before heading that way to check it out up-close (honestly, the Opera House looks more impressive from a distance, though the fact that the white tiles are "self-cleaning" in the rain is pretty cool!). It's a lovely city, much
like London, I think, in terms of architecture and ambiance. And, contrary to popular belief, not EVERY Aussie is gorgeous like Hugh Jackman or Nicole Kidman (seriously, do you know of any ugly Aussies? Think about it!)...
So we have one more half-day tomorrow to explore the city before catching an early evening flight to...drum-roll please...Auckland! At last we will arrive in New Zealand to begin our year there. It's a good thing, too, because at the rate our brains are melting and becoming totally useless, we might accidentally end up down in Antarctica frolicking with penguins...
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Matt W.
non-member comment
Well, we're even
I hope you and Jeremy are finding Sydney and Oz as magnificent as I did when I was there in January 2006. I absolutely LOVED it and would kill to go back. If you get a chance, go to the Sydney Aquarium, it was very good, and the Naval History Museum is right next door to it... well almost. Great stuff. Miss you guys, and hope you're having a blast!