UK and the Baltic Day 1 – Getting There

It is amazing how much has changed since we last went roaming. For starters, our hire car outfit which we always book to take us to the airport no longer drives the very elegant Australian Made Holden Calais but rather a great Chevy tank with a Holden badge on it. On the plus side there was tons of room for us and our baggage. On the negative side, it looked very cheap  and tinny and the heating controls had malfunctioned just before the driver got to our house and were stuck on 25c.

To offset the oven effect he had cracked the window on my side with the result we froze when moving and cooked when stopped.

At the airport Singapore Airlines had automated their check in processes. We were confronted with a sea of shiny white machines that were designed to weigh your luggage, scan your passport and print luggage tags and boarding passes. There were two problems however. No one had turned on the machines and there was not a single staff member anywhere to be seen.

The chaos gradually built up as more and more passengers kept arriving, each one going through the initiation rite of vainly punching the keyboards trying to get the machines to do something. Finally the machines came to life and there was a flurry of activity as baggage labels were printed and put on bags and boarding passes collected but there was still no sign of any staff.

The crowd kept building up and we had got to the stage where some of the more enterprising passengers were starting to work on a way of shoving their bags down the baggage shute, when  three Singapore Airline employees appeared.

One hit the First/ Business class counter and started sorting out the top end of town. One got immersed with about 40 Asian students who were travelling as a group. The third, a lady, sort of did a goldilocks thing of trying out the chairs at each of the check in desks in turn then retreated to the furtherest desk, immersed herself in a computer screen then got up and left.

But this time the crowd had grown to a couple of hundred and was starting to get ugly. The bloke who did not seem to be making any progress with his group check in, and sensing the likelihood of him being lynched by an irate mob which was growing by the minute, sent the lady on the First Class desk scurrying off with instructions to “get some people down here now. I don’t care who they are”.

So finally we got rid of our bags. Next Security. This area  was all new since our last trip. First being the suss characters we are, we were tested for explosive residue. Next the metal detector. Even after depositing all my worldly metallic objects in a tray and removing my belt I still set the damn machine off. More detailed scanning followed which revealed a suspicious object dead centre in the middle of my chest.

Since there was nothing actually there when I was physically checked I was sent on my way on to the next hurdle; the new automated border security processing set up. Jeanette went first, scanned her passport on the machine, stood where the machine told her on the footprints on the floor, looked at the screen as instructed but all to no avail. The machine could not match her with the passport. So she was sent off for manual processing

My turn next with exactly the same fail result. As a matter of fact, all the travellers we spoke to (not a large sample admittedly) had had the same experience.

Finally made it to the departure lounge  Large numbers of Singapore Airlines groundstaff finally showed up here having a good time socialising amongst themselves while the boarding proceeded in a confused jumble. After all this, I have to confess I was starting to have worries. But happily I was proven wrong – we had a good flight to Singapore with a friendly crew with the traditionally excellent Singapore Airlines service.

We had a three hour stop over in Singapore airport which got a bit extended due to a tropical storm closing refueling and loading operations. Eventually it passed and we were on ourway. We had an Airbus A380 for this leg, which is our preferred aircraft for long distance travels, and after 13 hours arrived into London, eventually found our driver and made it to our hotel and fell into bed.