Singapore Diary. Part 7: The trip home to Boston

Friday, July 27, 2007

Continued from Part 6: Thomson, Hopkins, AsiaMedic, National Neuroscience

I figured this would be a long, long day and I wasn't wrong. Is started off with my alarm going off about 4:10 am and meeting my driver at 4:30 for the trip to the airport. As expected there wasn't much traffic on the road. I do have to revise what I said about the lack of speeding in Singapore. There is some. (Maybe there's an unofficial relaxation period before dawn when zipping along is ok.)

In any case the check-in process and security screening was much faster than the arrival procedure, and I went off to the lounge to do some writing. Soon I was back in the hands of United Airlines for the relatively short hop to Hong Kong. That flight was pretty empty and all went well. Unfortunately my itinerary called for a 7-hour layover in Hong Kong, which I spent in the Red Carpet Club. I couldn't get on the earlier flights to Chicago because they were full. (There were two prior flights instead of one because one of yesterday's didn't take off at all!) I got a lot of work done but it was during prime sleeping hours in Boston, which delayed getting back on the right time zone.

Singapore to Chicago --a 16+ hour flight-- went a little less smoothly. The flight left more than an hour late and then lost another 30 or 45 minutes in the air. Why? Apparently environmental conditions (heat, humidity, wind?) forced United to boot some passengers off the plane, which took quite a while. (The silver lining is that I ended up with an empty seat next to me. A teacher from China who was headed for a US visit with her school ended up moving to sit with her kids.)Then for some reason not all the bags were loaded. When we landed in Chicago many people missed their connections. I turned on my Blackberry when I landed and got the message that United had rebooked me for a flight the next morning, which really annoyed me, especially since the Singapore to Boston route is billed as a single flight with a "change of gauge" rather than the connection that it actually it. Then I was stopped at immigration because there are a lot of bad actors with the same name as me and they wanted to take their time to see if one of them was me (it's not).

Just when I was feeling down I found out that the flight to Boston was delayed (what a shock) and that I was still booked on it. In the end I was upgraded to first class and arrived in Boston at about 1:30 am, about 33 hours after I was picked up at my hotel in Singapore. Believe it or not Singapore Airlines does have nonstop service from Newark Airport, which is a 19 hour flight. That's probably the way to go if you live anywhere near New York. There's also nonstop service from the West Coast.

I felt pretty good when I got back, but I can't help thinking that someone in ill health may not have felt as good. I'm going to ask an expert to write an article for MedTripInfo on travel topics.

All in all I really enjoyed my trip and can strongly recommend prospective medical tourists to consider Singapore.