The boring bit – flying home.
Just as well Tashkent airport wasn’t busy. Not India type chaos, but no check-in lines and no signs where to go for immigration and security afterwards. They had snaking lines set out, but didn’t use them. Anyway, we worked it out.
No eating or food options airside, but they didn’t confiscate water. Nor did they worry about number or size of carry on baggage. Just a free for all at the gate. No boarding announcements or orderly boarding.
Bussed out to our big 767, which ended up full even though it was the middle of the night. Seems that if you want to go anywhere internationally from any of the Stans, you go through either New Delhi or Moscow, and since our plane was half full of Russian guys fleeing Putin’s callup to fight, New Delhi is the option of choice.
They served us a full meal at 3am so it’s no wonder that most of it got thrown out.
Landed a bit ahead of schedule in New Delhi and did the transfer tango in reverse. The same guy met the plane as on the way in, corralled all the Stans transfers and strode through the terminal to the transfer desk where we had to wait in a queue for somebody to transcribe our boarding pass and baggage info onto a manual form, then wait again in a second line to manually write some of it out again, before they would hand us our onward boarding passes. This time we were wiser and didn’t sit around in the transfer area waiting for directions that wouldn’t be coming, so made our way through security and down to the coffee shop.
A 787 awaited us and, like this leg when we arrived, was full of young kids bouncing around. However, being Singapore Airlines it was good food and good service.
With the time zone change, we arrived in Singapore around tea time, and spent a great deal of our 5 hour transit clocking up the steps as we walked from one end to the other in the huge terminal complex trying to get some exercise.
It’s interesting to view Changi airport three times this year, and compare. In March it was a ghost town. Seats wrapped. Deserted terminals. Everybody wearing masks. Only one noodle vendor in the whole terminal. Toilets closed. By September half the shops were open. Half the food outlets were open. Most but not all toilets were open. There were people about and a decent number of flights, but it wasn’t busy. Half the people were wearing masks. By early November it was back to normal. Busy and everything open, with only a few masks.
Being Singapore airport, boarding was efficient and organised with an aerobridge. An Airbus A330, and after a midnight meal we managed a few hours sleep before arriving into Brisbane.