Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Learn Singapore In 5 days (Part-I, The plan)
What should be the name of this blog? I'm not sure - Singapore for dummies? A budget traveler's guide to Singapore? Singapore travel for software engineers? Touring Singapore with only Rs 20k in your bank? Okay, choose what you want it to be. Disclaimer: You'll find a lot of 'thallu' here. Can't help it.. :)
Big decisions are taken by your heart, not your head. I'm very experienced to say this.
Even when we decided that 2008 be a travel year, we didn't have even the slightest hope of going abroad on our own. I had created one Google doc (Google doc is where I do my research - travel, shopping, career plans) early this year named "International vacation plans" and had 3 entries in it - Singapore, Mauritius, Dubai. Roughly calculated the expenses and thought "okay, next year.. not now".
The U-turn happened when Rat went onsite. He was going through Malaysia. And after we chatted about the trip and other things, I just logged into makemytrip and checked the air tickets to US via Malaysia. It was of no use to me. But before leaving the website, I managed to check round trip air fare for Singapore as well. Found it to be 34000 for 2. This was less than what I had estimated earlier. Sounds interesting.. I started digging in more. Found that after March 31st airfares go up (May be because of summer vacation. Or maybe related to the extra charges by the new Bengaluru airport). Whatever, its 44K after Mar31 and 34000 before Mar31. Great, I don't need any more reasons to do a feasibility study.
We thought we would go sometime between Mar21 and 30. First thing is to get leave. Managed to convince our managers and got leave for that whole week. Let's book it then... Money? For everything, there is always a mastercard. I tweaked the days 1-2 days front and back and got a good deal at 30000 for round trip for 2 on Srilankan airlines. Yatra.com had a 2500 cash back on intl tickets. That would have made it 27500, but they were saying the ticket wouldn't be refundable. It's a risk. (If we don't get visa, we would have to cancel). So went with makemytrip, booked the tickets on a Saturday morning. !!!!
(No matter how careful you are, you'll make mistakes when the excitement is high. I entered passenger names as Mr Sandeep and Mr Soorya. (The title was a drop down list and the default was Mr. Forgot to change it.. Soo was all angry. :) I called up their call center and they said it's not a big problem)
Got the visa through makemytrip itself. I had to go to their residency road office and submit all the documents (S'pore visa documents are - passport and photo.. that's it) They charge 1500 pp which is kind of costly I felt.
Visa took 4-5 days to come and thus the trip is confirmed. :)
Next is to find out a hotel. Makemytrip had intl hotel booking. And hotels start from 2000+ per night. I checked the hotel websites. Photos of rooms look good and clean. But there was a problem. I read it somewhere on wikipedia/wikitravel that the place where these hotels are located - geylang is a famous(notorious) red light district. :) Yeah Singapore is a low crime state and you'll still be safe in a red light area. But isn't it better to avoid? I checked with Jijo, my classmate in Singapore. He said "Aliyaa, geylang kalippaa.. vere evideyengilum nokku".. Fine, let's dump makemytrip for this and do something else. He suggested 2-3 hotels and told he would book if needed. Singapore's tourism board has a visitsingapore.com website which gives exhaustive info on singapore. They have a hotel booking section as well. We made a list of affordable hotels. Some of them were - harbor ville, Copthorne orchid, hotel 81 elegance, royal peacock. Read some reviews of these and found copthorne orchid is the best. And we were getting a deal of 103S$(around 3K Rs) per night through agoda.com(a partner of visitsingapore.com). Thought that's a good deal and booked. The hotel availability was not known and it was a "book on request". While we thought everything was booked, a nice mail came from agoda.com that the hotel was full and hence the booking was rejected. It was already 15th and there is hardly a week left. Had not much of time to think. So we thought we would book harbor ville. Had to call up agoda's call center (It's in Thailand) and asked to book harbor ville (Std room - which had no photo anywhere. Didn't know how it look like) Anyway we went for it and booked.
Done. Major items are done. Now time to study. What to see, where to go, how to go, where to eat..
Thanks to Singapore being a big ticket tourist attraction, every other info is available on the net. You only need 3 websites - visitsingapore.com, wikipedia.org, wikitravel.org. So we made a list of attractions, their entry fee, reviews on some doubtful attractions etc.
If you choose to see every other ride or show, your bill for 2 will come to around 12000 Rs for attractions only. :) So a shortlisting was required. A draft plan was ready - 1st day singapore city and river area, 2nd day jurong bird park and night safari, 3rd day sentosa island, 4th day little india-china town-shopping, 5th day shopping-airport. (Airport itself is an attraction). How to go around - Singapore has excellent public transport - metro trains (MRT), buses, taxis. There is a tourist pass which you can use on trains and buses for unlimited travel for 8$. Or if you are staying for more than 3 days, it's better to take ezlink card (which is again a pass, but not unlimited). And I found a mobile application named "Singapore Digital Concierge". This is a guide you can install on your mobile phone(java app). It has almost all the info provided on the website compressed into your handset. So if you choose "jurong park", it'll display "take MRT to Boon lay station and change to bus no 138 to jurong park". Quite useful it was. Then there is nokia maps to help you if you are lost.
Finally the weekend has come. Not many things to buy. Did a small round of Indira nagar/Marathahalli and bought all required items. Printouts of e-tickets, hotel voucher, some other important information and Saturday 22nd, we boarded Srilankan airways flight to colombo via singapore.. cheyyy.. singapore via columbo..
Big decisions are taken by your heart, not your head. I'm very experienced to say this.
Even when we decided that 2008 be a travel year, we didn't have even the slightest hope of going abroad on our own. I had created one Google doc (Google doc is where I do my research - travel, shopping, career plans) early this year named "International vacation plans" and had 3 entries in it - Singapore, Mauritius, Dubai. Roughly calculated the expenses and thought "okay, next year.. not now".
The U-turn happened when Rat went onsite. He was going through Malaysia. And after we chatted about the trip and other things, I just logged into makemytrip and checked the air tickets to US via Malaysia. It was of no use to me. But before leaving the website, I managed to check round trip air fare for Singapore as well. Found it to be 34000 for 2. This was less than what I had estimated earlier. Sounds interesting.. I started digging in more. Found that after March 31st airfares go up (May be because of summer vacation. Or maybe related to the extra charges by the new Bengaluru airport). Whatever, its 44K after Mar31 and 34000 before Mar31. Great, I don't need any more reasons to do a feasibility study.
We thought we would go sometime between Mar21 and 30. First thing is to get leave. Managed to convince our managers and got leave for that whole week. Let's book it then... Money? For everything, there is always a mastercard. I tweaked the days 1-2 days front and back and got a good deal at 30000 for round trip for 2 on Srilankan airlines. Yatra.com had a 2500 cash back on intl tickets. That would have made it 27500, but they were saying the ticket wouldn't be refundable. It's a risk. (If we don't get visa, we would have to cancel). So went with makemytrip, booked the tickets on a Saturday morning. !!!!
(No matter how careful you are, you'll make mistakes when the excitement is high. I entered passenger names as Mr Sandeep and Mr Soorya. (The title was a drop down list and the default was Mr. Forgot to change it.. Soo was all angry. :) I called up their call center and they said it's not a big problem)
Got the visa through makemytrip itself. I had to go to their residency road office and submit all the documents (S'pore visa documents are - passport and photo.. that's it) They charge 1500 pp which is kind of costly I felt.
Visa took 4-5 days to come and thus the trip is confirmed. :)
Next is to find out a hotel. Makemytrip had intl hotel booking. And hotels start from 2000+ per night. I checked the hotel websites. Photos of rooms look good and clean. But there was a problem. I read it somewhere on wikipedia/wikitravel that the place where these hotels are located - geylang is a famous(notorious) red light district. :) Yeah Singapore is a low crime state and you'll still be safe in a red light area. But isn't it better to avoid? I checked with Jijo, my classmate in Singapore. He said "Aliyaa, geylang kalippaa.. vere evideyengilum nokku".. Fine, let's dump makemytrip for this and do something else. He suggested 2-3 hotels and told he would book if needed. Singapore's tourism board has a visitsingapore.com website which gives exhaustive info on singapore. They have a hotel booking section as well. We made a list of affordable hotels. Some of them were - harbor ville, Copthorne orchid, hotel 81 elegance, royal peacock. Read some reviews of these and found copthorne orchid is the best. And we were getting a deal of 103S$(around 3K Rs) per night through agoda.com(a partner of visitsingapore.com). Thought that's a good deal and booked. The hotel availability was not known and it was a "book on request". While we thought everything was booked, a nice mail came from agoda.com that the hotel was full and hence the booking was rejected. It was already 15th and there is hardly a week left. Had not much of time to think. So we thought we would book harbor ville. Had to call up agoda's call center (It's in Thailand) and asked to book harbor ville (Std room - which had no photo anywhere. Didn't know how it look like) Anyway we went for it and booked.
Done. Major items are done. Now time to study. What to see, where to go, how to go, where to eat..
Thanks to Singapore being a big ticket tourist attraction, every other info is available on the net. You only need 3 websites - visitsingapore.com, wikipedia.org, wikitravel.org. So we made a list of attractions, their entry fee, reviews on some doubtful attractions etc.
If you choose to see every other ride or show, your bill for 2 will come to around 12000 Rs for attractions only. :) So a shortlisting was required. A draft plan was ready - 1st day singapore city and river area, 2nd day jurong bird park and night safari, 3rd day sentosa island, 4th day little india-china town-shopping, 5th day shopping-airport. (Airport itself is an attraction). How to go around - Singapore has excellent public transport - metro trains (MRT), buses, taxis. There is a tourist pass which you can use on trains and buses for unlimited travel for 8$. Or if you are staying for more than 3 days, it's better to take ezlink card (which is again a pass, but not unlimited). And I found a mobile application named "Singapore Digital Concierge". This is a guide you can install on your mobile phone(java app). It has almost all the info provided on the website compressed into your handset. So if you choose "jurong park", it'll display "take MRT to Boon lay station and change to bus no 138 to jurong park". Quite useful it was. Then there is nokia maps to help you if you are lost.
Finally the weekend has come. Not many things to buy. Did a small round of Indira nagar/Marathahalli and bought all required items. Printouts of e-tickets, hotel voucher, some other important information and Saturday 22nd, we boarded Srilankan airways flight to colombo via singapore.. cheyyy.. singapore via columbo..
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