New Plymouth ramblings

I've been a little room this in writing my blog. That's because we've been out doing so many different things. New Plymouth is just so much like back home but everything's different. I tell Chloe this is because we're upside down but of course she says we're not.

I don't know if any of you have ever read my blog from 2007 when Darcy and I were away in France.  We had encounter with a lady who I called the pants lady. Well it turns out New Plymouth has one of them too.

We were in the Warehouse looking for some pants. Long story. A random lady came to help us. She proceeded to let us know that she preferred comfortable pants to pretty ones and she never wore frilly ones. I mean. Seriously. I did not need to know any of that. "If you can't find any here you should go to Bindons. They have an outlet on a shopping centre just out of town, do you know it?" ERM, no..... "It's next to a shop called Harvey something and its real good."

I sensed we should leave sharpish. Bindons? "Yiss" Would you spell it for me? "Yiss. B_E_N_D_O_N" I knew it would be BEN...

Anyway we actually found Bindons and miraculously our pants quest was ended.

We thought we'd reward ourselves with lunch, and we lighted happily on the Eden in Bell Block. See my trip advisor review.....

So what's it really like here? Prices are around 10% higher than home, apart from meat. They need a better salad producer. A lot of the housing stock is very poor quality. House rentals are expensive in town. Fuels about the same. They love automatic gearboxes.

The environment is terrific. The people have all been real nice. I can see why folk love it here.

The skinny on Sentosa

I confess I just don't get it with my Western eyes. Perhaps if I lived in this part of the world I would get it.

Universal World Sentosa is a second, maybe third-class theme park when compared to Alton, Thorpe and even Chessington. It has two rides which are must-go-agains, the Mummy and Transformers, and the rapids ride has an interesting twist.

But its set in a resort which also has a massive casino, a restaurant serving £240.00 set meals, McDonalds, Jimmy Choos, Starbucks and Pisco...(more of that later). You can stay in your own suite/lodge, underwater cabins ( seriously) or like yours truly, high- end "budget" hotel rooms.

The hotel we stayed in, the Festive, seemed to have been designed after someone visited Alton resort in the '80's. Oppressively opulent black marbles and other decorations. Over-hyped rooms that just aren't what they're supposed to be. Bad use of space and, astonishingly, badly maintained and cleaned.

I just don't get what market its aiming at, and I suspect it doesn't know itself. If I was in the market for a top end beach side chalet and was used to buying exclusive consumer goods, would I really want it situated alongside the "Lake of Dreams" pumping out the same low grade son et lumiere daily?

Now don't get me wrong. The staff were superb: helpful, willing, friendly, knowledgeable and hard working.

Dubai an upgrade

When we got to check in at Newcastle we had two things to think about. First, what a freakin waste of time it had been getting checked in on line and having the e-boarding passes on the tablet. "Oh we don't use those Sir. I'll print your boarding passes out......" Then "but you can take advantage of our offer on an upgrade...." The offer was £360 each. Now I might have taken that had it been for all our 8 flights. But it was just to Dubai. Not happening.

If I'd known about the obnoxious gasses from one of our fellow travellers in economy I might just have thought again.

The flight out of Dubai was on an A 380. Now those things are just plain not right. Two stories???? 400? In a plane???? Someone's surely kidding. How it took off I've no idea. Great lumbering thing. Then our pilot informs us " Blah blah blah....and as its monsoon season you can expect some quite hard bumps. Good idea to use the toilet while you can......"

It was the red eye to Singapore. Daughter #2 said " I won't be able to sleep as I don't know how to on a plane". She soon learnt that skill. It involved laying on my arm for four hours till my skin was blue and the pins and needles had passed to rigor mortis. Sigh.....

It was of no matter. I knew we'd be seeing daughter #1 soon, so all was good. Pins and needles. Violent turbulence. I laughed in their faces. And they laughed back......

Changi airport was easy. Except the oberlieutenant of a customs lady did challenge the official view that smiling faces were waiting to greet us. Daughter #2 and I lay in wait at the baggage reclaim, and 1hour later we were met by daughter #1. Not a dry eye in the house.

I'll have more to say about Singapore when I'm not worried about being monitored. For now I'll just say their PR people are "creative". I was well disappointed when we arrived at Sentosa. I was more miffed that they took S$400 off my card for " incidentals". What incident are we gonna have???? "Well the WiFi has to be paid for, and any TV."

I was too tired to argued and headed for the King family room..

This turned out to be another PR triumph, the room being half the size it looked on their website. And it was designed by someone who confused retro with '80's trash. I was even more disappointed. All I could see was the stained marble worktops, the badly cleaned floors and walls and the oppressive decoration. And I was sleeping in the kids bunk bed.

What had I let us in for?????

Hadrian's Wall Post

So we set off 12/07/14. It was a lovely morning and we made good time, it being a Saturday and there being a recession on. Apparently. We made such good time I decided to use the Old Military road from Haltwhistle to Chollerford. Along Hadrian's wall. It was well stunning in the early sunshine. Hence Hadrian's wall post. Well I didn't check, but I bet there's a Facebook page. And that made me think. Did he use wallpaper? Hadrian's Wallpaper. I bet it was scraffitti. Then I thought, is there Wallpaper shop near here called Hadrian's Wall paper and paint shop? And if not, WHY not??? Could be an opening. That thought kept me going till Newcastle airport.

Which was deserted when we arrived. Not daunted, we went to Boots and bought stuff ( I told Darcy that I thought Puss in Boots was the chemists cat, but that elicited no laughs.) Then we had a Burger King. And waited. And waited..... By the time our plane arrived the airport was packed. (Note to Government: we got on to the plane without showing anyone our passports.... That didn't worry me.)

The flight was uneventful apart from one tiny thing.... We did the usual security stuff - strip to the skeleton, dissemble tablets and phones, leave behind uncharged pacemaker but I must tell the authorities this. All that is great, but for Gawds sake invent a scanner to see which passengers have been eating noxious chemicals!!!!! Whoever it was farting for 7 hours in that pressurised atmosphere did waaaay more damage, I assure you, than any shoe bomber. Yuk.

When we arrived at Dubai we decided to be true Brits, so we went to Boots to buy stuff and had a Burger King. Newcastle in the Middle East. Globalisation has a lot to answer for. Those of you who read my blogs will by now be saying - " He's not being his normal vitriolic self!!!" That's cos I am worried about all this public WiFi. I reckon it's being monitored. So I'll leave my observations on Sentosa Resort World for Trip Advisor and later. For now, fantastic to be here with daughters, and more later. Oh, and the staff here are amazing. As for the other Guests, well let's just say Pig Ignorance is not a reserved state. But may be directly proportional to height. To clarify, I feel like a Giant and I am EXTREMELY polite.

Sagalossos

Sagalassos

Having taken the roller-coaster ride that was the bus from Antalya to Egirdir, and knowing that I had to travel back by bus, I didn’t relish the day-trip organised for the Group to… Antalya.  So (and this seemed to me to be perfectly logical: at that time) I decided I’d rent a car and go visit Soggylosses

The car hire place was exactly where it would be – in a mobile phone shop. I would never have found this out without the help of Ali the receptionist at the Hotel. Odd really, as most Turks I’ve met have been “all business”, not shy at selling their goods and services.  In fact I had been told by some folk that there was no car hire in Egirdir.

Ali wasn’t there on the day in question, but his replacement. Ali (I know, I expect they use the same professional name to amuse the guests) was just as helpful and took me to the aforementioned phone shop in the Hotel’s van.

One thing everyone should know is that you cannot conduct any business in Turkey without partaking of cups of Çay (chai, tea) and these were provided by the owner of the next door shop – to be honest I couldn’t figure the connection, my Turkish having only expanded to “evet, Yok, Çok, Çay and Yavash-yavash” But we all had tea and smiled pleasantly at each other.

I asked for some idea of how to get to Soggylosses and the car hire man very helpfully drew a few squiggly lines on a post-it note – sadly I threw it out with the trash last week else you could have all wondered at its meaning just as I did.

The car of course had no fuel in it, but Ali#2 went with me to put some in, and he even pumped the tyres up (tank = no fuel; tyres = no air). How often would that happen back in Blighty?

Armed with my squiggly lines and not at all nervous about the somewhat whimsical ways I had observed in their road users, I set off for Soggylosses.

And wonder of wonders I got there! Not least because the roads I had to drive were the same ones I had enjoyed being driven along by the crazy bus driver.

Sagalossos is pretty spectacular.

 

However I was first visitor of the day, and I was surprised that the four attendants were each equipped with what looked like high-powered rifles. When the saw me approaching these got hastily put away. I didn’t ask. Couldn’t. I did however make the mistake of wishing a car load of tourists “bon journée”. They were actually French, and they took my greeting to be the prelude to us being best buddies, and I spent the next four hours wandering round the ruins and trying to translate the English details about the exhibits into French. I don’t know if their Frenchness rubbed off on me, but bizarrely when I was on my way back to Egirdir I stopped for some more fuel and the garage man and all the Çay drinkers spoke to me only in French. I spoke more French that day than I did on a typical day when I lived in France.