20.04 - Day 23 - Hoi An, Vietnam to Singapore
Monday 20th April
Hoi An, Vietnam to Singapore
Temperature Min 24, Max 31. Singapore Min 25, Max 33
8,173 steps
Last night Seb had said he wanted to come with me on a bike ride, though when I nudge him awake at 6:15am, he swiftly changes his mind. So I head out solo, the bike unencumbered with the extra weight of a child or indeed of gears, or lights or a bell or barely any brake pads or a helmet for me.
Skirt around the once again bustling wet market on the edge of the Old Town, through the smaller island of An Hoi to get to Cam Kim Island. It's connected via a long bridge that I'd say was wide enough for two bikes, though locals clearly think three easy and four at a push.
I am very much cycling against traffic - it's as though the bridge has just been opened so constant is the stream of scooters heading the other way - workers flooding onto Hoi An.
Cam Kim then is quieter; kids being taken to school, people working in the fields; a lot of rice as usual, but also sweetcorn and millions of flecks of red chillies in knee-high bushes.
Back to Mint Villa for 7:30am, breakfast again by the pool prepared by the three sisters like yesterday - eggs poached, fried, omelette’d with fresh bread rolls. Time to pack up and check out, scraping together almost exactly the end of our cash, about 5.9 million dong of it.
We’ve a taxi at 9:30am to take us back up to Danang Airport, not driving through the countryside but on roads 3 lanes wide with a never ending line of shops and cafes along the roadside. As Hoi An has no airport or train station, Denang's international airport is a major entry for exit point for many; Denang itself not unlike Australia's Gold Coast; high rises lining a long beach, but with a number of large resorts too such that many people stay here and bus to Hoi An for day trips.
At the airport, we check in for our respective flights; Mem and Pawpaw at 12:50pm flying to Kuala Lumpur with Batik Air (no, I’d never heard of them either - so it's a little relief to see on the board their flight is code-share with both Etihad and Turkish airlines), Sienna, Seb and I flying at 1:10pm with VietJet to Singapore. No promising code-shares for us, but at least they didn’t cancel our flights 10 days beforehand as they had done with our original booking from Taipei to Hanoi.
Despite the logistical challenges of managing flights for 3 groups of us within our 1 group of 6 people, I am still pressed by how easy it is in to find flights in this case from this airport most people won’t ever had heard of to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore within 20 minutes of each other, direct, one way only for non-exorbitant amounts ($160/pp to Kuala Lumpur, $80pp to Singapore).
After a smooth check-in and eating of snacks, we say farewell to Mema and Pawpaw as they board their flight, leaving Sienna, Seb and I to board our plane a few minutes later.
An unremarkable 2½ hour flight (a good thing) as Sienna and Seb sit with one ear piece each watching a movie on the ipad. We jump forward an hour so its 5:00pm exiting the airport at Singapore, picking up a Grab to whisk the 20km into the city.
The buildings start to get taller as we approach the city centre, but the roads are so quiet I even ask the driver if this is normal. We sweep past Marina Bay, with large ferris wheel ahead, large lotus flower building and of course Marina Bay Sands itself; its 3 buildings topped within a shape that looks like a huge canoe or surfboard.
Of a few accommodation options, Sienna had voted for Wink @ Upper Cross (their “@”, not mine) and Sienna and Seb are very happy with the double bunk-bed, the bunk semi-enclosed, the backlit mirror in the den offering half a dozen colours.
We pop across the road to find dinner at a closing-for-the-day hawker centre finding only some average chicken/duck with rice. That’s after the more important matter of finding a library on level 4 of the attached shopping centre. A mango smoothie improves things and as we walk along a very touristy Chinese market street, a Mixue ice-cream improves things further. And just like that we’re onto a 4th and final country.
