Time to eat my words.

A few weeks back I posted a com­ment on Lance Wiggs’ blog.

Lance had writ­ten some very pos­i­tive words about Air New Zealand in the post:

A selec­tion of rea­sons why Air New Zealand won the Air­line of the Year in the Air Trans­port World mag­a­zine awards. Most of these refer to posts made here over the past three years, and the over­ar­ch­ing rea­son is sim­ply that Air New Zealand is a very well run business.

They have kept their fares low, and use a very sim­ple fare struc­ture. That means reduc­ing some food ser­vices, but the lol­lies remain and, it seems, always will.

They have steadily got the details right – from the econ­omy seats, to the check-in and seat back enter­tain­ment. The busi­ness class seats still rate, for me, as the best around, offer­ing so much more than the com­pe­ti­tion.

(much more at the link..very much worth a read, and mostly he’s very right)

I com­mented, a lit­tle snarkily:

I’m fly­ing ANZ for the first time in 7 years, this next week, from HK to NZ and I’m rather keen to see how they match up. To be hon­est the last time I flew them (from NZ to Mel­bourne), I swore I’d not ever fly them again. The plane was over-crowded, dirty, the inflight enter­tain­ment sys­tem was almost non-existent and the ser­vice utterly shocking.

In the interim I’ve racked up hun­dreds of thou­sands of kms with all sorts of airlines..some great (Sing Air with their usb ports and lap­top power on all seats, Qatar, Air France), many aver­age, and some awful (Malaysian comes to mind straight off, but noth­ing matches Viva Macau).

I’m look­ing for­ward to being very pleas­antly surprised.

And I was.

There is some story, albeit brief, to both my orig­i­nal com­ment and my eat­ing of words. Read on if you care, or skip to the last line if you’d rather avoid the verbosity.

I spend a lot of time trav­el­ling. I both enjoy it and its a part of my var­i­ous jobs. From 1995 through to 2002 I went to Aus­tralia on busi­ness about 40 times, on either Air New Zealand, and Qan­tas, and I found myself fly­ing to Europe and the US about a dozen times over the same time. I like fly­ing and I like get­ting there in a good state, both rested and in a good mood. I like to arrive in a town, check into wher­ever I’m sup­posed to be stay­ing, and head out. Mostly the air­line is the rea­son why that is or is not possible.

I was pretty happy with our national air­line up to about 1999. They got me there in one piece, the ser­vice came with a smile, and onboard they had pretty ade­quate food, enter­tain­ment and cab­ins. Then, that year, it all started of go wrong. It was fairly clearly linked to the Ansett fiasco (and yes, the Aus­tralians do have rea­son to be grumpy, how­ever defen­sive New Zealan­ders were) as the air­line went to pieces. I last flew Air New Zealand to Mel­bourne in early 2002. The plane was, with­out more than a cur­sory sorry, very late leav­ing, it was crowded, the food was almost ined­i­ble and the toi­lets looked like they’d not been cleaned for god knows how long. And worse, the in-cabin crew were unsmil­ing and repeat­edly refused to respond to the bell-calls com­ing from me and other frus­trated passengers.

I got off after a return flight that was lit­tle bet­ter and swore I’d never fly my national air­line again. I’m not a patri­otic soul and won’t sup­port some­thing sim­ply because we share an accent.

Jump for­ward seven years, and I’ve flown count­less miles on count­less air­lines in the interim. Some as I said in the com­ment, were bril­liant. Qatar do every­thing right (apart from Doha air­port, that is. It’s a dog. As is their awful habit of wan­der­ing through depar­ture lounges ran­domly weight­ing carry-on like some sort of 7kg fas­cists), and Air France too are hard to fault. Sin­ga­pore Air is thor­oughly pre­dictable: when times are good they tend to be rude and off­hand; when times are tough, they get a rocket from man­age­ment and re-learn the art of the smile, only to lose it again as the bot­tom line begins to improve. How­ever, they have, with­out ques­tion, the best in flight enter­tain­ment sys­tem bar none.

I’ve done the awful (all Indone­sian Air­lines, Viva Macau, who use duct tape to hold together their loos, and the always awful Malaysian who sim­ply exude rude­ness in a way that, unlike the uber-cheap Indo bucket car­ri­ers, who you can mostly excuse as the Jakarta dolly­birds (excuse sex­ism: sorry) in the cab­ins are paid a pit­tance, have to deal with 150 peo­ple phys­i­cally push­ing them out of the way as soon as the plane hits the run­way, and the over­whelm­ingly bad sur­vival odds each time they take off, they have absolutely no excuse for) and the pleas­antly func­tional (Air Asia, who are really very good).

We’d wanted to fly Thai from BKK to AKL this time but the day I went to book the flight the price had doubled.

So Brigid spent some time online and we worked out that for less than the new Thai price we could get an Air Asia ticket to Hong Kong and spend a cou­ple of days there (which allowed for some busi­ness in both direc­tions) before tak­ing the leap back onto Air NZ.

The word was they’d improved.

I’m always wary of the word.

HK, though, was reli­ably won­der­ful aside from the hotel putting us next door to a 24 hour bus stop wherein we dis­cov­ered that all buses in HK have squeaky brakes, which meant when we sat down on NZ080 we effec­tively hadn’t slept for two days.

Grumpy.

We sat in our seats (63D & E if any­one cares) and asked the stew­ard if they had eye­pads as sleep was a neces­sity and usu­ally highly unlikely on a full, as it was, 777. Of course, he said and returned with not only the afore requested pads but earplugs (these are both sup­plied as stan­dard kit to every pas­sen­ger on many air­lines so no extra points for that aside from the big smile that went with it), but also with busi­ness class head­sets (extra points earned) and the offer of a glass each of French cham­pagne from the front of the plane (extra points being ladled on now). Yes.

He returned and said “here you go, Mr. Grigg”. Bemused, the woman in 63F asked if we’d just got mar­ried or some­thing. We returned the bemusement.

After we took off another mem­ber of the cabin staff came past and stopped to ask us …just us … if all was fine. Uh, yes. Fine.

Would we like some more wine? Uh, yes? (no-one else was asked).

A few min­utes later a woman called Ruth came to us (and I para­phrase, so I’m sorry Ruth ..my mem­ory is not that good). I’m the crew man­ager. Is all ok? Yes. I bet you’re won­der­ing why all the atten­tion. Yes. Its because of a com­ment on a blog and a tweet. Uhh. We were con­tacted by three dif­fer­ent peo­ple in the organ­i­sa­tion and told you were about to fly with the air­line and to look after you. Uhhh. We just want to say thank you for giv­ing us another go and wel­come back.

Nice.

Of course it may’ve been strate­gi­cally bet­ter not to say any­thing to us and just to ramp up the ser­vice more sub­tlely, but as a way of mak­ing a grumpy ex-customer feel wel­come and more than a lit­tle spe­cial, it worked some won­ders. We glowed and we set­tled rather com­fort­ably into our quite com­fort­able seats, as we were bought our meals of choice before the rest of the cabin. So, yep, it worked.

And noth­ing I’m say­ing here of course has any­thing to do with that pampering.

Ok, it has a lit­tle to do with it.

But, the sim­ple fact is that, as above, Lance was very right. Mostly.

But, to the impor­tant stuff.

Yes, I’ve come around.

The seats (most impor­tantly) were as com­fort­able as any I’ve had any­where in recent years with far more leg room than the ever tight­en­ing squeeze of Sin­ga­pore Air or many oth­ers. The crew lacked the stern­ness of years past as still found on all Amer­i­can car­ri­ers. They smiled and seemed to mean it, unlike the plas­tic of the rule­book bound Sin­gAir or the sim­ple lack of any­thing resem­bling a smile on Qan­tas or Malaysian (where the staff have this unfor­tu­nate habit of talk­ing about non-Malay pas­sen­gers in neg­a­tive terms in Bahasa Malay (uhh…I speak it)).

And there was no call to pray to Mecca as there is every half hour or so, as you crave a beer on the bland air­line of Brunei as you fly into the even blander state of Brunei.

The food was rather good, the wine was pre­dictably won­der­ful, the movies were just fine (I liked the one about Win­ston Churchill even if it was fac­tu­ally ran­dom in a very HBO way) and it was a very pleas­ant flight. With­out reservation.

No, make that a really bloody good flight. It worked. I’m hap­pily sold and, all things as they should be, will prob­a­bly make the BKK-HK-NZ route the default route when re-nesting, using Air New Zealand. Is that hum­ble pie enough? Any chance of an upgrade when we fly back to HK? How about a radio show?

Ok two more major points winners:

The way that the air­line tells you its fine to watch the movie from the moment they shut the doors is a huge win­ner. None of this ridicu­lous no head­phones until cruis­ing height dri­vel. Seri­ously, it’s 2010 and we’ve paid for in-flight enter­tain­ment. Thank you. Points.

And the fact that they tell you you can turn your cell­phone on when the wheels hit the tar­mac. The whole dan­ger from cell­phones thing on air­craft has long since been dis­proved and indeed large parts of the planet seem to have no issue with them in flight, and, whilst the very last thing I want, espe­cially in Asia where the so-called hand­phones are used at an obses­sive level and most folks carry two or more Black­ber­ries or HTCs which are both used at the same time with­out break, is the end­less bleep­ing of incom­ing texts, or loud con­ver­sa­tion, for 11 hours, a lit­tle real­ity injected helps. Points.

I do feel the need to take issue with Lance’s claim to the Air New Zealand web­site. It’s one place they get a C. Sin­ga­pore Air, at the higher level, and Air Asia, at the bud­get level, do it much bet­ter as do many oth­ers. Hav­ing booked via the Air NZ Hong Kong Kong web­site, it was next to use­less when I tried to get infor­ma­tion, or look at the pos­si­bil­ity of chang­ing a ticket.

And the air­points. I get them on my credit card and they’re essen­tially use­less, expir­ing before you get the chance to use them for any­thing worth­while. Air NZ’s loy­alty points sys­tem seems at best half-baked, but to be fair that comes in a time when most air­lines seem to be rather des­per­ate to ramp them back (Malaysian’s Enrich site has effec­tively, and dis­hon­estly, been offline for redemp­tion pur­poses for a year or so, cit­ing some vague short-term issue).

So, yeah, Air New Zealand are quite good.

The ques­tion I found myself ask­ing over and over again this week in Sin­ga­pore is “Where all the tourists?”. The ques­tion, of course, has an obvi­ous answer, but still, in a place that is nor­mally swarm­ing with Ock­ers and Swedes in stub­bies and Nikons, it was a tad disconcerting.

We could’ve swung a Moray Eel around at the nor­mally over­flow­ing East Coast Seafood and not hit a sin­gle Swede or elderly British cou­ple (fondly remem­ber­ing empires lost).

Bali has had a fairly sub­stan­tial down­turn in tourist num­bers too, regard­less of the ‘offi­cial’ fig­ures you read. One only has to look in the restau­rants, wan­der the streets, or look at the beaches to know that some­thing ain’t right. But, unlike Sin­ga­pore, Bali has a safety net, that being the always depend­able Aus­tralian bud­get tourists. When all else fails (and Bali has been try­ing to move itself a lit­tle more upmar­ket in the last cou­ple of years, with some suc­cess, hence the thou­sands of vil­las and the col­lapse in infra­struc­ture in the new villa areas), it can always turn to the pack­age tourists from the work­ing class ‘burbs of Perth and Mel­bourne to swamp the island in their search for Bin­tang T-shirts and “plat­ting of hair”, god help us all. And if you check the uglier side of par­adise, pri­mar­ily the hell­holes of Tuban and Kuta, there are increas­ing swarms in the DVD shops and the Oz Steak Bars.

So Bali gets that…that and the niche tourists, like the not insub­stan­tial pink tourist mar­ket and the Euro­pean trust fund babies who come every year to add to the traf­fic mayhem.

Sin­ga­pore on the other hand has really painted itself into some­thing of a cor­ner. It’s far too expen­sive for the low-end tourists from Gee­long or Black­pool, and rather unwel­com­ing to the gay, and the wild and free Euro babies.

But for all that I rather like it. That is, I like it rather more than I used to like it. Sure it hasn’t put behind it all the things that have always dri­ven me rather crazy about the place…the rules, the odd design overkill, the rules, the exces­sive order­li­ness, and the rules.. are all still scar­ily evi­dent. But some­how it seems to have devel­oped the begin­nings of a soul, an edge, or at least it’s man­aged to pull that edge back to just under­neath the polit­i­cally ordained veneer that has sti­fled it for the best part of three decades. There are those who say it’s always been there, and maybe it’s just me, but either way, I’m happy to have finally made its acquaintance.

Rule num­ber one in every Asian city is to side­step or ignore the guides, online or in print. This rule just about trans­lates world­wide but, from expe­ri­ence, is most espe­cially rel­e­vant any­where in Asia. There are, for exam­ple, some pretty wor­thy online guides to any expe­ri­ence you’d want to have in Lon­don, NYC or Syd­ney. Not so in Asia, where local knowl­edge or informed explo­ration are your only choices (per­haps exclud­ing Bali where the estab­lished guide books are per­haps your best chance of avoid­ing the inevitable over­charg­ing and scams that face a novice here, and there are really no reli­able online guides).

Sin­ga­pore in par­tic­u­lar is a place where avoid­ing the restau­rant and bar guides, tear­ing up Time Out, and dump­ing the Lonely Planet are really com­pul­sory if you have designs on doing any­thing out­side the square or see­ing the some­thing that isn’t ordained as the accepted tourist experience.

Our only foray into Time Out’s rec­om­men­da­tions was a trip to Divine, the bar in Parkview, a build­ing that, in a very Sin­ga­porean way, apes Deco to excess, but thor­oughly misses the point and the essence of what they are doing. It ain’t the Chrysler Build­ing as much as it tries.

In the same way its always worth tak­ing a rain check on the grue­some swill­ing tourist / expat tack / sleaze along the river at Clarke Quay, Boat Quay and Robert­son Quay.

Much more sat­is­fy­ing and, for want of a bet­ter, less overused word, sophis­ti­cated, are the groovy lit­tle bars found around the south­ern and east­ern ends of Chi­na­town, in the maze of lit­tle streets full of intrigu­ing design bureaus, book­shops, cafes, restau­rants, bou­tique hotels, and, yes, bars.

Or the new, lets pass on the banana leafs and mass mar­ket slop please (like the awful Mutha’s in Race­course Rd), cui­sine ori­en­tated Indian eater­ies around Lit­tle India.

We always start our arrival into Sin­ga­pore with a fight with the hotel. It’s a tra­di­tion. Hotel check-in staff are, almost with­out excep­tion, rude, inflex­i­bly rule-bound, and unhelp­ful. Ser­vice is lit­tle more than an early chap­ter in the cor­po­rate rule book they read and then for­got (I have to be fair, The M Hotel is been a happy exception….they even sent a girl to my room at 1am one night…Are you Mr. Rao said the small­ish Indian lass. No, said I rather sleep­ily. She looked relieved when I shut the door, but I guess she still needed to track down the afore­said Mr. Rao for the ren­dezvous. At The Merid­ian on Orchard (a dump if ever there was one, but reas­sur­ingly over­priced as hotels in Sin­ga­pore tend to be) the door­man asked me if I’d need any­thing extra later? I sim­ply pointed to Brigid and explained I was well covered.

And so, yes, The Amara said we could either have a smok­ing room with a dou­ble / king bed or a non-smoking with twin beds. That we’d ordered non-smoking with a king and pre-paid for such seemed irrel­e­vant. If you want that, you need to pay $100 more…

No sir, yes ma’am, sorry sir repeated the rule bound James, a junior man­ager, as he remem­bered by rote, chap­ter 6 of the rule book, the one about loudly angry for­eign­ers threat­en­ing com­plaints to all and sundry.

This is between you and your book­ing agent, sir.

We made a sub­stan­tive (but very calm) noise and then made some more and said we’d be back in an hour for our dou­ble bed in a non-smoking room or we would make a fair amount more.

Noise works in Sin­ga­pore. It ain’t prop­erly cov­ered by that chap­ter in the rule­book. No one com­plains in Asia, most espe­cially in Sin­ga­pore where national com­pli­ance is taught from birth in the state sanc­tioned birthing units, and then drilled in for the next two decades.

On return, we were gath­ered by the gen­eral man­ager and escorted to his desk. He said he had some­thing to show us and we both expected it was into a sound­proof room to allow us to make our noise as loudly as we wished before we were ignored again and herded to out defined twin room under threat of expul­sion for non rule compliance.

But, no. Hell, no! I don’t know if it’s the lack of tourists, or the begin­nings of a new national spine, or a re-written rule book (scribed by some­one bought in to advise on these sorts of things), but he took us to the 16^th floor, the Club Floor, to a non-smoking king bed with a view (of a con­struc­tion site to be sure but it’s bet­ter than look­ing through into another smok­ing room with twin bed, or worse, a non-smoking room with a dou­ble bed that we’d been refused).

Is this okay?

What’s the catch?

None. Would you like free Internet?

Yes.

What time is your flight?

7pm.

Would you like 4pm check out?

Uhh, yes. No catch?

No. It’s offered with our apologies.

To any­one who’s spent any­time in Sin­ga­pore, the above is bizarre, almost certifiable.

Then Mr. Habim (that was he) let it slip:

I lived in Jakarta for 14 years.

Ahh, so you’ve encoun­tered ser­vice before…….you bloody boat rocker, you.

Either way, it does make you feel bet­ter about Singapore.

I bought a 320GB travel drive in Funan IT, per­haps the best IT cen­tre on the planet but also, tra­di­tion­ally, the rud­est and most unhelpful.

Don’t buy that one sir..this is much bet­ter value, faster and cheaper.

I was floored again.

And then I got the warm and fuzzies, a glow of pos­i­tiv­ity, at the quite extra­or­di­nary new National Museum of Sin­ga­pore, which, amongst very much more which I sim­ply didn’t have the time for, leads you on a inter­ac­tive his­tory of Sin­ga­pore quite unlike any­thing I’ve seen anywhere…with dozens of audio and visual alley­ways that demand you go down them and I’m not one to refuse.

The impos­si­ble had started to hap­pen. I began to feel good about Sin­ga­pore (feel­ings that may only have been sub­merged since I’d spent sev­eral years there as an Air Force brat, in the days, when, as seems incon­ceiv­able now, New Zealand was tasked with defend­ing the island.

I’m really not that sure I’m com­fort­able with my new found affec­tion for the place.

God knows how many times I’ve been to Sin­ga­pore in the past few years, my over­flow­ing pass­port seems lit­tered with stamps from their reli­ably wel­com­ing immi­gra­tion staff (New Zealand could do well to send theirs to study how its done). Suf­fice to say it seems thor­oughly rou­tine these days and I’ve grown to quite like the con­for­mity of it all after the often dys­func­tional chaos of Indonesia.

Another rea­son to like the trip is the exit out of Den­pasar. Ngu­rah Rai Inter­na­tional Air­port pro­vides one with a bizarre mix of humour and frus­tra­tion. The frus­tra­tion comes mostly from the creaky bureau­cracy of the place….the six lev­els of offi­cial­dom one has to pass to get out is just another sign of the bureau­cratic overkill that Indone­sia inher­ited from the Dutch which they’ve man­aged to add bewil­der­ing and con­fus­ing lay­ers to with no rhyme or reason.

But even here the humour creeps in. On leav­ing the Indone­sian res­i­dent has to pay an exit tax equiv­a­lent to two and a half times the aver­age monthly wage. There are a vari­ety of rea­sons put for­ward by the gov­ern­ment for this but need­less to say none stand up to much scrutiny and in a land like this if you have the right con­nec­tions or bucks you can eas­ily get an exclu­sion stamp. Indeed in Indone­sia if you have the right con­nec­tions you can become a gov­ern­ment min­is­ter as recent state­ments by the Min­is­ter of Avi­a­tion are evi­dence, abil­ity or com­mon­sense being irrel­e­vant to the job. But that is an aside.

You can also get an exclu­sion from the exit tax if you have a tax num­ber, so, as usual, I wan­dered across to the Fiskal office with NPWP card in hand to get the exclu­sion stamp. When I arrived the two guys run­ning the office were, like two spoons, wrapped together asleep on the floor. There was a pile of cash on the top of the pho­to­copier next to them and the door was open. I banged on the win­dow rather loudly and they woke, rub­bing their eyes. I thought about offer­ing them Rp20,000 for a posed asleep photo, for use herein, but thought that it may have been push­ing it.

They stud­ied the pass­port and our mar­riage cer­tifi­cate (mar­ried men can take their fam­ily out free, mar­ried women, even if they are the bread­win­ner, can­not. Women have a dif­fer­ent sta­tus here, a mix, I guess, of an Islamic phi­los­o­phy ingrained in the cen­tral gov­ern­ment, and the say­ing heard here that the Dutch packed up logic and com­mon­sense and took it with them when they left in 1949. You do wish that some­body would ask for it back).

Still yawn­ing, the guy stamped my depar­ture card with­out ask­ing for the ‘pro­cess­ing fee’ oth­ers have had to offer.Upstairs, after the counter for air­port tax, and the immi­gra­tion offi­cer, unsmil­ing, which is unusual these days as some­one seemed to have implanted these for­merly sullen guys with per­son­al­i­ties in recent months, we wan­dered through into the depar­ture zone and noted a cou­ple of new shops to add to the grossly over­priced food and duty free out­lets (cham­pagne for US$120 a bot­tle any­one, or a bot­tle of water at five times the rate out­side the doors of the terminal).

Yes there is now a brand new store sell­ing pirate DVDs next door to depar­ture gate 4. After a what-in-gods-name-were-they-thinking moment, and not­ing the end­less dis­plays of sin­gle pack­ets of cig­a­rettes (at twice the non duty free price), shitty Javanese made Bali­nese sou­venirs, shitty Javanese made Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nal sou­venirs (why? I can’t answer that), and the large carved penises that if you look closely are bot­tle open­ers, you pass two more offi­cials, one to take the air­port tax sticker you were just given (to pre­vent the first tax col­lec­tor steal­ing the money we are reli­ably told) and one to take the depar­ture card that the first immi­gra­tion offi­cer stud­ied earlier.

And you’re in.

I enjoy the flights to Sin­ga­pore on Sin­ga­pore Air­lines. It’s a rel­a­tively civ­i­lized air­line, unlike, say, the shitty Malaysian Air­lines flights into KL (crap Air­line, crap ser­vice, crap air­port) full of Indone­sians fly­ing full of hope into Malaysia, about to have their illu­sions shat­tered by Malaysian labour practices.

SA offers prac­ticed smiles, legroom and good food.

But mostly, on SA from Bali, I enjoy the peo­ple watch­ing, and extra mostly that means the Rus­sians, who feed from this onto some flight to Vladi­vos­tok or some­where else northerly and obscure out of Singapore

They were there this time in some num­bers and if you ever won­der who buys all that overly branded fake designer tack you find in the dozens of ‘Ver­sace’, ‘Armani, ‘Paul Smith’ and ‘Prada’ stores that fill the streets of Bali, then look no fur­ther than the Slavic tourists head­ing home.

We also won­dered how the two Japan­ese girls man­aged to get their break­fast boxes, com­plete with 300ml orange juices past the promised ‘heavy and through’ secu­rity and 100ml liq­uid para­noia with mul­ti­ple x-rays. I guess it cost them a smile and per­haps a pas­try or two.

Two and a half hours later, after an aborted land­ing due, we, were told due to cross­winds (I sus­pect an Indone­sian air­line would’ve landed any­way) which meant a mas­sive surge upwards when we were less than 10 metres from the ground and a loud uneasy silence in the cabin, we were through the ridicu­lously fast arrival process and in a taxi on our way into Sin­ga­pore city.