Asian Adventure: Part 1

So, for the last two years my girlfriend has been trying to kill me. No she isn’t poisoning my cereal. Nor is she cutting my brake lines. No, she is going a much more subtle route. She keeps taking me, a fair-skinned ginger to the hottest, sunniest part of the world that is Tropical Asia. She imagines that by taking me to these dangerously UV heavy places that I’d burn so badly she’d be bringing me home as a pile of ash in an urn.

Last year we went to Bali which I managed to survive (much to her disappointment). This years attempt on my life she decided we’d do a hop-scotch from Singapore to Malaysia to Thailand. Surely one of these countries would cause my ghost-white skin to burst in to flames?

The first part of the trip, as is the case with nearly all trips, is the act of getting there. We flew out from Sydney to Darwin. Too easy (except for the small child sitting behind me who kept kicking my seat). The next stage was Darwin to Singapore, our first port of stay. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, this is where things started to fall apart.

We all boarded the plane alright in Darwin, all eager to get on the road, so to speak, to Singapore and begin our adventures. After 30 minutes of sitting in the plane still on the runway the planes Captain came over the speakers to let us know the engineers were fixing something and assured us we’d be in the air in 30 minutes.

40 Minutes later…

The Captain again comes over the speakers and informs us that the problem is a bit worse than they first anticipated and that we’d have to disembark the plane and they’d be bringing the back-up plane around. The estimated time of prepping the new plane and taking off would be about an hour. My question is, if the back-up plane is so good, why wasn’t it the main plane in the first place?

So we allĀ  shuffle off the plane and back into the terminal. Remember, this is Darwin terminal so it isn’t really the glitziest of all airports. It had very few seats, 2 vending machines (one of which didn’t work) and if it did have AC it wasn’t very effective. While we sat there waiting for our second plane to be prepared I began to check out my fellow postponed passengers.

There is a dude taking this extra time in the terminal to drink 6 more Bundy & Coke cans while (pretending) to read his Matthew Reilly book. He was trying to impress the attractive young girls who were also reading… as far as I could tell, he’d drunk more rums than he’d read pages.

There was Adventure Granny. An old woman who was on her own and looked like she was off to trek through the jungles of Malaysia barefoot. If the planes pilot died and the plane was going down, I imagined she’d be the one to jump in and land it safely… whilst fighting off the bad-guys… and dispensing granny-isms like “in my day we didn’t shoot at our elders, darling!” as she did it.

Then there was Clown Dad who was doing his best to keep his 3 young kids entertained while we all waited for the flight. He went through all the good dad joke gear, from the elevator behind the lounge to the got your nose. He must have got low on material because he then proceeded to pretend to shop-lift books from a closed book store… not the best way to entertain your kids, family shop-lifting.

And then there were ze Germans, a couple who if you close your eye and picture the most stereotypical German backpackers you’d be spot on. Attractive, dark skin, blonde hair, just oozing sexiness. They were all over each other, I though they were going to do it right there in the terminal in front of everyone… certainly would’ve made the waiting go a bit quicker.

70 Minutes Later…

The poor air hostess came over the mic with the obligatory feedback sound. She told us that the back-up plane that had begun to be made into our main plane also had a defect and that it would be easier to fix the problem with the original plane than the back-up plane so they’d be bringing back our first defective plane and fixing it then we’d be off. Brilliant.

50 minutes later

We’d all boarded again and were all keenly anticipating the second attempt (well, third kind of) to get to Singapore. We were all set and in the air before I knew it. Finally. Cue baby crying…

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