July 26
Spend most of the day at Changi Airport wailing for my one
hour flight from Singapore to Sumatra. That
isn’t too awful by the time I’d visited the butterfly garden, swum in the
rooftop pool, done a free tour of Singapore, had a massage, eaten sushi, done some shopping, sorted all my photos and
kept up with all my emails in the free WiFi areas. Did I do all those things?
No, but I could have and I did some of them...it’s actually peaceful - so much
better than LHR.
Joined my group. Nor much to report on that front except that there is a sixty something Aussie guy who spent most of his first night out clubbing, so God knows what he got up to!
The tour leader is an Indonesian called Eddy. He’s not very steady and certainly is never ready. And he’s not really a leader either. There are four staff on the bus. Eddy, a driver, a backup driver, who holds the microphone cable for Eddy (in case he does try and say something that we don’t understand), and a boy to keep the bus clean (though I haven’t seen him do anything yet). He stands up the whole way.
Who wants to be a millionaire? Move to Indonesia-it’s back to the land of silly money again. Eddy lent me some cash as the ATM wouldn’t work and I now owe him a million rupiah. We went to see a small and pretty boring mosque and a more interesting, but very small sultan’s palace, with one room that was open, in Medan. Then we set off in awful traffic to see the orang utans. At this point one of the party announced that she had left her luggage in her hotel room as she thought we were staying in the same hotel again. So we had to go back and get it amidst ever increasing traffic. Well at last the bar is set pretty high for any acts of doziness that I might commit in future.
