Day 1: Brisbane – Singapore

I hadn’t planned to keep a blog of this trip, but then MBW suggested that I should.

Experience tells me that while it may have only been a suggestion, it was MBW that made the suggestion.

If you know what I mean …

Today’s post won’t be particularly verbose or informative I’m afraid … although I assume that you probably see the lack of informative content as normal, but I guess the lack of verbosity will be a nice change.

So what I’m trying to say is this: don’t bother making yourself a coffee or getting comfortable. It won’t take that long today.

We were picked up at home around 08.00am by one of our boys. Our flight was scheduled for 11.00am and we needed to be there by 09.00am latest, so an 08.00am pickup would get us there in plenty of time.

Drop off at the Brisbane international airport around 08.30am and we got our bag tags, then queued up behind about 300 other people for the bag drop.

In a line that wasn’t moving.

The public announcement said that Qantas was experiencing a “luggage movement operational issue”, which I think is code for “the baggage belt is broken, so don’t plan to go anywhere anytime soon”.

Well, I guess it’s better that the luggage belt is broken than there being something wrong with the plane.

We finally got to drop our bags, went downstairs to the gate, and got coffee. Waited about 45 minutes at the gate and boarded the aircraft.

We were in row 57, the second to last row from the blunt end of the aircraft, and about as far away from First class (and the pointy end) as you can possibly get. In fact, we were so far back that I thought we might have been out on the back patio!

Welcome to Sardine Airlines. The flight was absolutely chockers and we were all squished in like … well, sardines.

Push back from the gate, and then we taxied for such a long way that I wondered if we were going to drive all of the way to Singapore. Although I’m pretty sure that there is water between Australia and Singapore, so driving probably wasn’t a realistic option.

Finally we got to the end of the runway … engines spin up, engines spin down … then we taxi all the way back to the gate again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We have had a computer malfunction and we have followed standard procedure to try to reset it, but we have been unsuccessful. So we are now going back to the gate to see if we can get an engineer to fix the problem.”

Sigh 🙁

So long story short, our 11.00am flight finally took off at 2.15pm – only 3 hours late. Engineers are wonderful and resourceful people, or they lied and took off with a broken computer.

Who knows?

Which wasn’t the end of the world, but it meant that our 5.00pm local time arrival (7.00pm Brisbane time) became a 7.30pm arrival (9.30pm Brisbane time) … and by the time we got our luggage, did our online traveller check-in, managed to buy a couple of 2 day tourist passes for the train, and navigated our way on the MRT (train system) to our hotel, it was pushing 10.00pm (midnight by our body clocks), and we were feeling pretty zapped.

Checked in, went to our teeny tiny room on level 7, and went to bed without dinner or coffee. No dinner won’t kill us, but no coffee … yikes! That’s a scenario that will never end well.

And that is about it … just a couple of very weary travellers who spent about 11 hours jammed into too-small seats for a 8 hour flight to Singapore.

But we made it!

Tomorrow is another day, and I’m sure that after a good night’s sleep we will be ready to face the world again.

Ciao

#Thailand2024