We had an early start at 5:45am to transfer from the Hotel to the airport and then onto Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Since we missed on dinner last night we decided to have have something for breakfast at the airport. The food court looked good but delivered a bit less although not too bad in the end.


This time we flew Silk Airways (the Singapore Airlines regional Airline) which is a bit of a cut down version of Singapore Airlines.


The food on board was tasty but also a bit more minimal.

Apon arrival Immigration was very simple and we were through in about 2 minutes from arriving at the counter.

We then waited for a quite a while for our bags to show on the the bag carousal, but then were told to use a different carousal.

We had booked a driver to drive us to Ella from Colombo and their representative was waiting with our names on a board at the arrivals area.

Pam went to the ATM to get some cash, since the hotels require cash for payment. For some reason she took out 7000 Sri Lankin Rupees. This is the equivalent of about $70 NZD.

So next we took out 60,000 Rupees in order to pay for our hotel.

I bought a SIM Card with 5GB of data and "more" phone minutes for 1000 rupees.

We were then on our way to Ella, it took a bit more than 6 hours to get there. Also most villages just seemed to merge into the next village for the first 4 hours. The roads are of good quality, but for the first part of the journey about 3-4 hours the roads are just really busy with traffic everywhere.
 

I have seen the Singapore flyer a few times in the past while in Singapore and wanted to go it - but at $33 was never sure. But with our Singapore Stopover that we got at $1 each (hotel, transfers, and attractions) we had to do something in Singapore - so the total cost of the flyer was an Uber from the hotel to the Flyer at about $6.

The flyer takes about 30 minutes to do 1 revolution and costs $33.

There were always people willing to get on so we assume most people where happy to pay the $

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It was a nice trip but not sure I would want to pay the $33 for 1/2 hour ride.

Trying to get an Uber took us ages as we had no Singapore $ and the taxis all wanted cash. We were going to get some food but in the end it was 10:15pm when we left the Flyer and we were too buggered to be bothered. We had our transfer back to the airport at 5:45am.

We had quite a simple morning to leave Christchurch and head to Singapore. We caught an uber to the  airport at 8am ($40)

The flight was delayed for about 25 minutes due to the crew not arriving at the airport on time?

We get on the Singapore airlines flight SQ298 and find that the same crappy entertainment units in place.


Oh well nothing I can do about that. In case you do not know the screens are about 9" which is OK, but the visual quality is terrible. Very low resolution for 9".

The food choices (in economy) sound great especially if you read the menu card.

As far as the food went typical airline food.



We made up for lost time as we were going to land about 20 minutes early but after some time wasting in the air we arrived about right on schedule.

We both felt pretty drained on arrival and went to see if we were eligible for $20 Changi Dollars each for transiting in Singapore. We stood in a queue for about 10 minutes and got our $40 in vouchers. We then went to immigration where there was a large queue of people about 20-30 people per line. You have to have your thumbs scanned now for security reasons and this took about 30 minutes before we completed immigration.

We went to pick up our bags but could not find them on the bag carousal  but we were told they were on the ground in front of the carousal already and indeed they were.

So next was to find the Singapore stop over desk, we asked a security guy who pointed us on a direction but it was wrong. No signs at all and we spoke to another person who said it was now in the opposite direction. We found a little desk and it was the correct place.

So we got our free tickets (hop on hop off bus, and other attractions) and went to wait until we were picked up in the transfer bus to our hotel.

We were picked up and then we ended up going around every other terminal to pick up other people.

We got to our hotel after quite busy streets about 8pm. By this stage feeling quite drained.

We checked into a very small room on the 19th floor...... Sorry no photos....