This second round-the-world trip, which is planned to last eight weeks to the day (8 August to 3 October) has been quite a long time in planning, but as I always say about the individual travel I do, planning is half the fun (probably more), since one ends up with a custom-made product ideally suited to one’s liking. (Anyway, I wasn’t the first to say “If you want something done right, do it yourself!”) I blocked a potential route out several years ago, and started making final plans just about a year in advance, then came back to it six months before, then three months. I therefore knew precisely what I wanted when I asked Eleanor Hardy at the Society of International Railway Travelers (Louisville) to book me onto the Eastern & Oriental out of Singapore (more high-style than I need, but it goes where I want), and the very extensive rail route around Australia (three high-style routes, three routes more down-to-earth), which included getting the discount Austrail Pass. This, because of the complicated route involving several vendors, took quite some time and effort, and compares to the ease of my being able to book online in the course of one evening the entire rail route in New Zealand, with rail pass, plus the two interisland ferry crossings, before that trip [2009/8-9-10-11].

It is also the second time, after Fiji and Tahiti, that I used the services of Stella Bugg at Qantas (Los Angeles), who got me a nice flight discount to and within Australia. The three other international flights I did separately.

The only plan that I’d blocked out generally but needed further help with as to details involves northern Thailand. I’d left nailing down the final plans for that to the very end, about three months ago or so. I had at that time an extensive email correspondence with Stuart Cavaliero, owner with his wife Wicha of the northern Thailand mountain resort known as the Chiang Dao Nest, not only as to my visit there, but as to my getting around to visit that entire region. He was extremely helpful in helping me cobble together a local itinerary drawn from standard tours, according to my wishes, which will result in my riding an elephant and getting to the Golden Triangle, including the Opium Museum. (I already mentioned the planned camel ride in Australia.)

The route, once again, out of New York is (1) Singapore to Bangkok to northern Thailand; (2) out of Sydney, a counterclockwise rail (and plane, ferry, bus) route around eastern and central Australia, followed by a rail run from Sydney to Perth; (3) Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on the way back to New York. The expense of the trip is front-loaded in the Singapore to Bangkok segment. Northern Thailand has cost me a pittance. After that, there are two free hotels on Starwood points (Westin Sydney, Sheraton Dubai) plus moderately-priced accommodations otherwise, plus the upscale-downscale Oz rail connections already commented on. Most (not all) expenses other than meals have been prepaid, typically online.

Singapore Airlines Flight 21   What are the odds of this happening? Since the flight didn’t leave until 11 PM, I had most of Sunday to kill, my bag having been packed the night before. [Even for eight weeks I use only one medium-size carry-on rollerbag, half-filled with books, maps, and laptop. Wash-and-wear clothes that you can rinse out in a hotel sink overnight are a great gift for travelers.] Then, I noticed in the Times that, of all things, the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby-Dorothy Lamour 1940 film The Road to Singapore was on TV. I don’t think I ever saw it, nor was I overly interested in it, but I had to watch at least some ten minutes of it given that I was doing my own “road” to Singapore that evening, and given that I suspect the first time I ever heard the name Singapore was in relation to that film. How fateful it should have been on TV that very day.

The greatest expense of the trip bar none is the business-class-only flight 21 on five-star Singapore Airlines. It is, as mentioned earlier, the longest regularly-scheduled flight in the world, so will move to the top of the list of long flights I’ve done. Its scheduled 18h50 from New York (Newark) to Singapore is even slightly longer than in the opposite direction. Any further comments assume knowledge of the preview discussion in 2010/5, including the video of the flight.

On this trip, I leave New York via Newark Airport and return via Kennedy Airport. Fortunately, we in New York have rail connections to both, so I took the subway to Penn Station and then New Jersey Transit just three stops to the airport station, where a rubber-wheeled automated Autotrain on an elevated track--$5 fare included in the rail ticket--connects all terminals. I arrived early, about 7 PM, partially because I had nothing to do anyway, but also to take advantage of the Business Class Lounge, which I had also enjoyed in Vancouver on the way to Seoul in 2005. This one was run by SAS, with which Singapore Airlines apparently has a contract. Complimentary snacks and all beverages were available to pass the time.

I will cut to the chase. This flight turned out to be the most enjoyable, most pleasant flight I’ve ever taken. But I was not surprised, since Singapore Airlines’ five-star reputation is well known.

I’ve flown First Class a couple of times on short flights, and continue to say that the bloated expense is in no way worth it. I’ve flown Business Class only once before, on that transpacific Korean Airlines flight from Vancouver to Seoul. It was very pleasant and enjoyable, but it wasn’t like this. And then there are those Cattle Class flights, listed as “Economy”, which could turn a person off of traveling if one didn’t blank the experience out of one’s mind. Fortunately, a number of airlines do do a four-star Economy, which is better, although you still maintain your pretzel shape for a few hours after an overnight flight even on those.

We have to be careful not to compare apples to oranges. Still, Singapore Business is superior to Korean Business, and leaves Economy Class flights in the dust. Of course, you do pay for it. It’s the most expensive flight I ever took, even after the small discount I was able to arrange. But then of course, it’s a very long flight, and you pay for what you get.

If you recall the video, what you get is similar to office cubicles, yet pod-like. The A340-500 seats 100 passengers in a 1-2-1 pattern, in other words, one at the left windows, one at the right ones, and two in the center. The only glitch was that, while I had booked a window seat--not for the view so much as for a bit more privacy--I ended up with an aisle seat. No big deal.

The similarity to office cubicles and not standard airline seats is some semblance of walls higher than your head when seated, yet open to the ceiling. The ensemble in front of you has that height, higher than any seat elsewhere, and fixed. It has to black-screen TV, controllable from the arm rest, plus a few pop-open compartments, including one with a lighted mirror, one with a drink rest, and one with an electrical outlet, referred to in this part of the world, quite sensibly, as a power point. It uses, as Singapore does, the rather large, three-pronged British plug, so I got out my UK adapter and was able to plug in. I believe it’s the first time I’ve been able to power up the laptop on a plane. While the first half-dozen paragraphs above I wrote in the spare time before I left, I’m writing the balance of this posting in real time on the flight as it happens, which I believe is another first for me.

While you have an entire storage bin above all to yourself, there’s also room on the floor in the unit in front of you to hide the QM2. Most interestingly, at knee level to the side, is a foot rest that protrudes forward into the seat in front. More on that in a moment.

The aisle side is quite open, although the (high) seat you’re sitting in does wrap around you somewhat, giving the semblance of a partial wall. On the common side it does as well, but there’s also privacy screen that pulls forward, reducing the open common area by a third. That’s where the largest airline table I’ve ever seen pops up and over your lap. Once extended, it can be popped to raise even higher. During food service, it gets covered by a linen cloth.

The seat width is amazing. I’d read it’s 72 cm (30 in) across. I suppose if the several children on board weren’t in their own seats, one seat could easily accommodate an adult and child side-by-side. In addition, the seat has power adjustments, just as the driver’s seat in a car does. It powers forward and back, and another switch can raise a leg-rest extension as well.

Since they advertise a flat bed, I’d assumed these power switches took care of that. Only later did I discover that the bed is a whole new, otherwise invisible world. The already massive seat back is folded forward and down and snaps into place. An extension flaps forward and folds into that foot rest in the unit in front (for me on the left). You suddenly find there’s been a little more space all along behind you than you’d imagined. You can now see behind you the bulge on one side for the foot rest of the person in the seat behind you, while your head has plenty of room over on the right. There is a blanket covering the surface, and a wrapped top blanket for your use. Sure enough, you lie fully extended, but diagonally, for me, head to the right, feet left. While it isn’t your bed at home, or even in a hotel, it was easily as comfortable as any bed on a train compartment, and actually, considerably wider with more possibility of movement. All in all, the four-aisle layout in bed mode must form something of a herringbone pattern (with me in red):

Given this shape of the back of the pod, you can see that your regular seat had been reclining only within your own measured space, and neither did the passenger in front of you intrude on your space when he reclined.

The service was prompt and impeccable. Some eight international chefs prepare the menus, but the only name I recognized was Gordon Ramsey. The flight left promptly at 11:00, and before 1:00 AM, dinner was served. After takeoff, I chose to have a Singapore Sling--why not? After dinner, the cabin lights went out (you of course had your own), and stayed out essentially until close to arrival. I assume this was to accommodate those people who wanted to take the change in time earlier or later.

The change in time was rather remarkable in that you didn’t have to change your watch. You’ll recall that Perth is close to the antipodes of New York, and Singapore is in Perth’s time zone (and well on the way towards it from New York). That means that the time is just a twelve-hour flip-flop (as long as your watch doesn’t show the 24-hour clock). That means, when we left New York at 11 PM it was 11 AM in Singapore (and Perth). Twelve hours later, it was 11 AM on my watch, and 11 PM ahead in Singapore. We had strong tailwinds, and would arrive a little early, at about 5:20 AM, when my watch would say 5:20 PM, but what’s the difference, so no change in watch.

What I did “shortened” the trip considerably. After that late dinner, I did what most people did, I went to bed at about 2 AM and just slept through--a bit fitfully, of course, but nevertheless--up until just before noon (noon here, midnight ahead). I ordered a waffle-and-bacon snack, since it was no longer a matter of set meal times, you just ordered from the menu when you were ready. That left me an “afternoon” to write ( middle-of-the-night ahead, before a breakfast just before arrival. Sleeping that much during so long a trip did seem to shorten it, and--I hope--will lessen the twelve-hour jet lag.

The route we took was what I’d expected. We went north to Canada, near Montréal, and near Baffin Bay. I was asleep as we crossed the pole area, and the TV map didn’t show just where we did that, anyway. I woke up with us over Siberia, then Mongolia, China near X’ian, the Golden Triangle (Laos, Myanmar [Burma], Thailand), and the Malay Peninsula to Singapore. The distance reported on the TV screen by the end of the trip was over 15,700 km and almost 9,800 mi. As it was dark when we left New York/Newark, there was still a before-dawn darkness in Singapore.

RTW Definition Redux   Since last discussing round-the-world, I’ve been having friendly discussions with friend Paul, who’s also very interested in the subject, as to definitions. Playing the devil’s advocate, he dug up some other opinions as to what you “have to do” in order for your trip to be RTW. I continue to reject many of these arguments.

Take a marker and an orange and draw as many circles as you can imagine on it, around its equator, through both its poles, around the top half, around the bottom half. Try some irregular ovals covering opposite sides. My point is that there are many ways to skin a cat, and if your INTENT--within reason--is to go AROUND the world, with emphasis on that preposition, they your trip is RTW.

One argument I reject (I think Paul did, too) is that to do a RTW you have to do a trip of similar mileage of going along the equator. Nonsense. That would preclude circling the globe just in the northern hemisphere (as I did in 2005) or just in the southern hemisphere. I suppose that mileage argument is based on precluding someone walking a circle around a pole and proclaiming he encircled the earth. A related bogus argument is that you have to cross the equator for it to be RTW.

An enticing argument is that, for it to be RTW, you have to cross all the meridians of longitude. That sounds good, and could possibly preclude my calling the present trip RTW, since I’m not sure if we passed the North Pole on the side including the Pacific meridians, which, by that definition would make this RTW, or on the other side, which would not. It’s possible that the meridian argument might have once held some water, when it was only possible to encircle the globe horizontally, but, as I explained earlier, it’s possible nowadays (although not commercially so) to encircle the poles in flight, which is RTW by definition, although vertically. As a matter of fact, a flight could theoretically go south along one meridian and then north along the corresponding one opposite, thereby encircling the globe using only two meridians.

To me the only thing that most likely would EXCLUDE a long-distance trip from being RTW is if it backtracks home. If this trip to Singapore then went to Bangkok, Sydney, and Perth, but then went back to Singapore to return to New York (which was a possibility if I didn’t want to do it RTW), such backtracking would have excluded it. In the same way, the QM2 trip out of Southampton past Africa that encircled the Pacific quite extensively, but then backtracked via Africa to Southampton is in no way RTW. This sort of thing is what I like to call a lollipop trip, with the back-and-forth being the stick.

To me a RTW trip is one that is long-distance, multi-continental, without significant backtracking, whose intent is to arrive home from roughly the opposite direction than one left. I see no restrictions--within reason--for crossing the equator, for minimum mileage, or for maximum meridian crossings.

I can’t guarantee it, but I’ll try to maintain real-time reporting once I land and get to Raffles, where I’ll post this essay series first thing.