Yesterday was Day 94... The day scheduled for moving on from England...

There was absolutely nothing wrong with our farewell English brekkie at the Leonardo Hotel Heathrow. It has really been pretty nice here. Of course, as is the way with airport hotels, it's far from cheap (and you need to pay extra for the transfer to the terminals). But the rooms are very comfortable; they didn't charge us for our brief spell in their carpark (even though they could have done); and yesterday's bedtime glass of wine was both good and reasonably priced.

Which -- diversion ahead -- is a far cry from airport hotels in the old days. When we suddenly had to return from Cote d'Ivoire to England for my father's funeral in 1997, I wrote this in my diary: "The barren wastes of Heathrow ... [constitute] a dismal place, and a horrible trap for the unwary or the unprepared (and the latter, through no fault of our own, we were). If you book through an agent, you can get really quite good-value hotel rooms at Heathrow. If you don't -- or can't -- they try to charge you GBP 100... We ended up paying GBP 65 for a less than epic bed-and-breakfast in Hounslow. Then they tried to charge us GBP 12 for a credit card payment. No way, we said, and stomped back upstairs to locate a cash machine."

Anyway, yesterday, having reached Terminal 2, we whiled away the waiting time by pacing the walkways, sampling the offerings of Leon Coffee (nice, and worth investigating for breakfast another time), and taking photos of the Manx cat we'd acquired on the Isle of Man (courtesy of our kind hosts at Close Taggart):


Singapore Airlines are great -- really up there with the absolute best -- but there's no way they can transform a 12.5-hour flight into a pleasant experience... True, the food was good, the wine was good, the seats were comfortable enough, and the entertainment options were extensive (I watched Todd Field's Tar, featuring Cate Blanchett in the role of gifted musician and manipulative predator -- see here and here for discussions of what it all means). Full marks for aeronautical effort, therefore. But sitting in that cramped space for that length of time is just never going to be good...


Once down, we were through the airport pretty quickly (although the automatic passport control wasn't working quite as seamlessly as they were no doubt aiming for), and into town pretty quickly, too, given that the morning traffic was still quite heavy.

We're staying at the Ibis Bencoolen, and were rapt when they found us an available room well before the official check-in time.


From our taxi, we'd spotted Manxman, the Isle of Man ferry that is currently heading towards its homeland from the shipyards of Korea. Still a little bleary and jet-lagged, we decided that getting a closer look at Manxman would be a very suitable occupation for a hot afternoon.

A bus and a walk later, we were drawing a blank at East Coast Park:


But over lunch (first noodles for many months), we consulted Vesselfinder, and figured out that we needed to go to Marina South Promenade to get a good view of our target. We hailed a Grab (hot, you see -- hot to the tune of 32-feels-like-42 -- and we were a bit tired, remember). And, sure enough, we got some nice shots from the walkway:




The observation platform at Marina South also offers some good views:



So... Here we are in Singapore. Just one stop from home.