Photo credit to Natasha

I spy with my little eye…

Traveling long haul can be an exhausting process. So recently, I’ve been planning stopovers en route. It was worth trying out. Just to see a bit of a country you may never have been to before. That’s what I did on the way to Cambodia and spent a night in Amsterdam, a night in Hong Kong and 6 or so hours in Singapore.

…something beginning with ‘P/P’

Flying first to Amsterdam meant that we could leave and come back to a local airport. As the stopovers were only for one night, I’d searched out and booked hotels near the airports in advance. It didn’t seem worth spending time looking once there if time is short. The transfer to the hotel in Amsterdam was easy – they ran a free taxi service. I didn’t even bother trying to speak more Dutch than ‘Dank u wel’ and ‘Goedemiddag’ after last time’s debacle with trying to apply my keen would-be polyglottony to Dutch. But I had much greater success this time. When we were on the return leg and I ‘Dank u wel’-ed the man who had just frisked me, his colleague came up and asked me if I was South African, as she had heard me SPEAKING DUTCH! I think that counts as fluency, doesn’t it?

By getting the taxi back to the airport, we could easily get a train into town, so that’s what we did. This is where the letters PP started to haunt me. At Grand Central Station, there were Palestinian Protesters out, waving flags, chanting and singing. A small police presence were keeping a discreet distance and ignoring the fact that some were smoking long joints (which is forbidden in public now in Amsterdam, largely due to the poor behaviour of British tourists).

We wandered around, taking photos and soaking up the Friday night atmosphere. “Let’s go back that way,” She said, “and go down that canal back there,” She said, “that looks buzzy,” She said. The canal soon became flecked with striking glowing red splashes as it reflected the street lights in quite an impressive way. Do you see where this is going? Suddenly, there were all these women in shop windows in only their lacy underwear, pouting, winking provocatively and beckoning people in. Including me. “Are we in the Red Light district?” Iona asked. “Ask your mother,” I tell her, “It was Her idea to come down here. She thought it looked buzzy.” So Iona got a lovely tour of the canals, backstreets and pouting prostitutes of Amsterdam.

We arrived in Hong Kong in the very early morning. A lady at the information counter told us that to reach our hotel, we must take a bus, the only bus today, right now, for a journey that would take an hour and a half. Well, this posed a problem. We needed to sit and deplane, have a coffee and a vape or cigarette and to think about this. Our flight was early next morning and we’d have to be up and out by three or four o’clock to get back to the airport in time for the flight. I never thought of that when booking. It was just an ‘airport hotel’. We decided to take the hit on the hotel, which was unrefundable by now, and looked for somewhere much closer to the airport. In the city, there are the famous double-decker trams and the streets have been taken over by women, sleeping in small tents and cardboard shelters on the pavements and in subways. It is a large protest of Filipino women demanding integration – presumably mostly domestic workers who wanted to be treated a bit better, even equally. They are cheerful and well-dressed and sit around singing, chatting or playing cards. There’s even a Filipino Pride Protest group supporting their compatriots and out with placards. We had a good look around the city and went on the tramway to the top of the mountain to look down at the skyscrapers.

In all, I’d count that as a couple of nice experiences before we even got to Phnom Penh, in the land of Pol Pot… something beginning with P/P…

Singapore Airport is consistently winning awards for being the best airport in the world. It’s more like a swanky shopping mall with a butterfly garden and indoor waterfalls and tropical gardens/forests. They have automated systems that send you through in seconds, rather than having to queue for an uncomfortably long time. Even the help desks are touch screens that connect you to a real person in an office somewhere. OK, the lager was green and overpriced, but Changi Airport is a whole holiday all by itself. Had I researched it more, then we could have booked on to the open-topped bus city tour, which they run for free if you have a long stopover. In the event we just had to sit around for five hours, marveling at the lime-green lager and flies embossed into the urinals which encourage users to try and pee it off, thus ensuring that they hit the sweet spot on the porcelain and avoid embarrassing splashback. Now that’s attention to detail! It’s a man thing, as instinctive as socially responsible non-invasive graffiti relief (writing your name in the snow): if there’s an insect in the pan, it just has to be dealt with. You can’t help yourself.

Last time we were here we did spend a night on the island and went to the famous tree sculpture park where outsize trees with live plants growing out of their trunks light up the night sky in a wonderful display and had a great meal up the top of the impressive twin towers of the Marina Bay Sands complex.

In Hong Kong Airport, I spotted a gem of a sign on the escalators. Think about it:

If you read this, then presumably you were not looking only down at your mobile phone and so don’t need to read it. And if you were only looking at your device… well then you wouldn’t see it, would you? Lovely!

All in all, I think stopovers are a great idea. Here are five things I’ve learnt about stopovers:

1. Do your research, find out what is available in the airport and how far your ‘airport hotel’ is from the runways.
2. Go with the flow and explore on public transport.
3. If you get the chance to choose a place to stop, Singapore is great.
4. Lager can sometimes be lime green.
5. I know where to aim for the perfect and successful urinal experience.

Next: Christmas in Cambodia (coming soon).