Feeling immeasurably better after a few days recovering, I arrived in Singapore with one thing in mind: eat. Unfortunately, my friends had another thing on their mind: drink. It can safely be said that they were shocked by the high prices of beer, and made it a mission to find the cheapest beer served from a place with sport on TV. They enthusiastically carried out this mission, to varying degrees of success. The cheapest beer was often found towards the end of the night, which pretty much made the night an expensive one, anyway.
We looked at museums and galleries, bars and hawker centres, memorials and zoos. We walked, and walked, and walked, sweltered in the heat, visited friends, and got thoroughly sick of the place after a few days. It’s nice, but we’d all been there before and the only new experience for most of us was the zoo. Still, we did find an escalator that went around a corner… that was pretty special.
And so, to home. Depart Singapore late – around midnight. Arrive in Darwin at about 2am. Customs and immigration was completely painless. Contrary to my thoughts that they’d swab two young guys coming back from three weeks in South East Asia for every disease and substance known to man, we were directed through a set of blue doors nobody else in the queue ahead of us had been directed through and found ourselves in the terminal. Easy. Darwin airport isn’t a nice place to spend 4 hours. It’s crowded, and boring. At length we boarded our flight to Melbourne and I actually managed to sleep.
I arrived home, in Adelaide, at about 5pm. What an adventure!
We’re all desperate to go back to Koh Tao, not purely for the diving but for a combination of the lifestyle and the diving. Some of us are already planning a dive master course there late next year. We’ll see.
