The day has arrived. After two years in South East Asia we have finally left and are on our way to Fiji. We will miss Singapore

Our last day has been a little nerve racking, as we live in fear of not being able to bring all our luggage with us. As I explained in my earlier post we always are fighting the weight limit, and trying not to pay the exorbitant prices the airlines charge for excess luggage. For our journey to OZ we are flying on Tiger Air, out of the budget terminal, and we cannot imagine a better experience

The Tiger Air flight was cheap, but only with 15kg allowance. But the good thing about Tiger is that they will let you take another bag of sports equipment (all our diving gear and heavy stuff) for only Sin$30. The also allow you to upgrade your 15kg normal allowance to 25kg, again for only about Sin$30. SO for an extra Sin$60 we get extra 45kg allowance per person. Now that is really pretty good.

So we packed, re-packed, re-packed again. Weighed our bags 20 times, re-organised, re-packed and thought we had it rights. Two ‘dive’ bags of about 30kg and two normal bags, each about 23kg. Tiger also allow a laptop bag in addition to the normal carry on, and we both had our laptop bags full of hard disks, DVD burners etc, plus our normal checked in bags. with our underwater housings, underwater video lights, Nikon D90, three lenses…..so as you can now see, it is quite a operation to move all our stuff.

My sister very kindly gave us a lift to the airport (thanks J and Rufus). We wanted to be a little early to minimize check-in hassle and because we wanted to claim tax back for the electronic gear we had picked up in Singapore. You all probably have an idea of what budget terminals are like around the world…concrete monstrosities, filled with bored grumpy underpaid idiots, all busily trying to make your life a misery…..well not in Singapore…

,,the budget terminal is beautiful, clean and totally un-crowded. We walked in, straight to the check-in desk, ready with all our excuses for having too much luggage..we are greeted with a smile, bags go on to be weight, labeled and off they go..’have a lovely flight’ we are told by the helpful check-in girl….and that’s it!! You then walk through the hand luggage check…we are waved straight through, with smiles, then through immigration, again straight through with more smiles…off to the tax reclaim..more smiles, cash refunds given….then a lovely cheaply priced meal, sitting down on one of the many spare and comfortable seats, before I get out my laptop and log onto the free wireless internet………..we are going to miss Singapore……

So thank you Singapore. Thanks to all our lovely friends and family, who have put us up, put up with us and made our two month stay a real pleasure. Thank you Singapore for having such an organised, clean and safe city….and thanks for the best budget terminal in the world, where they treat you like the human beings we are.

….but though we are sad to leave, we are very excited and happy to be on our way to Fiji. We should be in Melbourne sometime tomorrow for three days, then we leave on Friday for Fiji