QF5D
We’ve had a D appended to our flight number. This presumably stands for ‘Delayed’ to avoid any confusion for early attendees of tonight’s edition of QF5 (yes I know you can’t see it in this photo, so you’ll have to take my word for it).
Departures board
We finally left Singaporean soil at 18:00, 18 hours and 40 minutes late. That’s 1,120 minutes. I didn’t think planes could be that late.
They finally decided to pull the pin a bit before 04:00 this morning. Rumour has it that this was primarily because we’d reached a point where the flight crew didn’t have enough permitted flight time remaining to get us all the way to Frankfurt.
So we trudged off back down the length of the terminal to stand in a very slow queue at passport control. Then we waited for our luggage. Then we got on a coach into the city and checked into what was actually a pretty decent hotel. The whole process was actually surprisingly efficient and well-handled though and I think the local Qantas staff did a good job of keeping a lid on things. The fact that most of my fellow passengers are softly-spoken Germans was undoubtedly working in their favour.
My head finally hit the pillow at almost exactly the time I would normally be waking up, and sleep was therefore elusive for a while. My brain must have then remembered the auto shutdown sequence it had tried to engage unsuccessfully at least three times earlier as the next thing I knew it was nearly 10am and I was about to miss breakfast.
Our departure time had been moved back to 17:00, so I took the opportunity to go for a wander around, first up Fort Canning and then along the river to the iconic Merlion.
Singapore River
Singapore has, unsurprisingly, changed a lot since I was first here in the early 80s but I was much more interested in my shiny new Donkey Kong Game & Watch then so I have to admit that my memory is a little hazy. I’d forgotten how odd it is having the sun directly overhead though and I’m pretty sure they’ve moved the Merlion since I was last here.
Me & the Merlion
The flight itself was pleasant enough, though it was really rough across the Andaman Sea and through the Bay of Bengal, which wasn’t a whole lot of fun way back in row 73.
The captain had promised great views of the Himalayas, but they were buried in cloud. He’d talked up Afghanistan as a beautiful country to view from the air (a joke about flying B-52s was made at this point) but it was dark not long after we crossed the Indian coast. He’d also given us a detailed explanation of the cause of our delay – an electrical fault in engine two, which apparently took about five minutes to fix once they’d managed to isolate it. It think it’s fair to say that Qantas’ fleet of 747s are starting to show their age (ours was not the first Qantas 747 out of Singapore to have engine issues this week).
Frankfurt was suitably efficient – we touched down bang on midnight and I was tucked into bed at the airport Sheraton within an hour. In the morning, I was able to wander across the footbridge to the terminal and check-in for the flight to Ljubljana before returning to my hotel room for a bonus lie down while I waited for boarding.
Patience is not usually one of my strong points but this is something I’ve clearly made a lot of progress on lately as I really haven’t minded this epic journey that much. It’s now 49 hours since I left Melbourne and I’ve still got one leg to travel but I’ve been able to sleep (albeit briefly) on two really rather good hotel beds so I’m actually not that knackered. I’ve got a couple of unexpected stamps in my passport, had a pleasant enough afternoon wandering around Singapore, and though I’ve missed the opportunity to explore Ljubljana over the weekend, I have most of Wednesday free to do that so I guess I don’t have much to really complain about. I also have another travel horror story to impress people with, and it is, of course, all about the stories.
I will be having a conversation with Qantas about an upgrade on the way home though.