The Travels of That Man, Matt

Tag: Whinge

  • Day 38: High-Lying, Nerd

    By any rational measure, Singapore should be a near-ideal city/state for me:

    • Good, cheap public transport (including driverless underground trains where you can see right down the tunnel ahead).
    • Spotlessly clean streets and gardens.
    • Wide interplay of cultures and cuisines.
    • English as one of their official languages.

    And yet. I’m missing something. Maybe I just had a bad day.

    I went to a “recommended” cafe for breakfast that turned out to be a Starbucks-like chain, and where my reheated sandwich was still partly chilled.

    I took a bus and underground to Chinatown expecting to see some evidence of its historic past, but found a tourist market and some (nice) artwork.

    The abundant gold leaf in the Buddhist temple felt a bit excessive next to the pleas for donations.

    Everything felt like it was a bit sanitised and tourist-friendly. Except then I decided (against my initial instinct) to do a tourist-favourite attraction, the so-called SkyPark perched on top of the Marina Bay Sands hotel towers.

    Roughly, the deck at the 56th floor looks like this, a slightly curved sweep across the three towers of the hotel.

    And for S$35 (25€, £21) you can visit, well, a tiny part of that deck, on the right-hand-side here:

    All the rest of it is either for hotel guests only (like the infinity pool, fair enough) or for other access uses like a restaurant. You get to explore an area about 30×20 metres. It all feels like a bit of a con. I eked out twenty minutes up there, half of which was trying to shelter from the intermittent rain.

    It left a bad taste in my mouth and a general ambivalence toward any of the other attractions in the area (all costing similar sums).

    Hawker Redemption

    It’s not all bad though, by any means. I had a late lunch at a hawker place near my hotel.

    (“What’s a hawker place?” I hear you ask. Basically, a food market, like an indoor market in the UK but mostly with small, independent food outlets.)

    I dutifully ordered my food, waited for it to be prepared and then went to pay with card.

    Oops. Only QR or cash.

    I don’t have cash (didn’t think it necessary here), and QR only works for locals.

    “It’s OK,” says the guy. “Eat your food, then there’s a cash machine just over there. I can keep tabs on you because you’re so tall and also the only white guy around.”

    There’s still a place for trust and honesty here 🙂

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  • Day 6: Nah…

    TL:DR is that I bailed on the motorbike tour in Ha Giang and am heading back to Hanoi, pulling all future plans forward.

    The TL Bit

    Basically a combination of red flags, some real, some assumed.

    🚩1️⃣: the place I was staying managed to mess up my reservation, and somehow booking me a room for the 23rd and 25th, rather than 23rd to 25th. Result: when I got back yesterday from a wander about and went up to my room, it was empty.

    That familiar-looking backpack I saw in the lobby? Mine, along with my passport, camera, tablet, sandals but notably not my toothbrush.

    For a place that communicates everything over WhatsApp, I don’t know why they didn’t bother to message me if they thought the room should not be occupied. Would have been resolved easily and I’d still have a toothbrush.

    🚩2️⃣: I listened in to the guides running through the itinerary for the tour starting yesterday. Of course, it’s a tour, the itinerary is etched into stone. But: “we go here, ten minutes for pictures, then go to this market, then go here to lunch, then ten minutes for pictures there” etc. etc.

    That’s not how I like to ride and it’s why I’d asked to just rent a bike and make my own way – something that is offered on their website but not actually a thing they do.

    There were also way more people in the groups than suggested. Mostly they are pillions being ridden around the tour, which is fine but again is too passive an endeavour for my liking.

    🚩3️⃣: the weather. Somehow it has conspired to be wet, windy and cold in most of central and northern Vietnam in the exact days of the tour. Given that I couldn’t see the mountains from the city already, I figured I’d rather be somewhere warm with visibility than cold with none.

    11-13° max, minus windchill, up a mountain.

    You can argue that all these things are isolated and independent problems. But the nice part of travelling light is the opportunity to switch things up when the stars don’t align. I’ve lost maybe 20€ of a deposit, no biggie.

    And I will spend the new year not in Ha Giang or Hanoi, but Hoi An, which I’m looking forward to.

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