Wahhabalinese Adventures: SIN-DXB-RUH-DPS on SQ/SV Y/C
Introduction
At a squeak over 10,000 miles, this trip is no great shakes when it comes to distance, but there can't be too many places on Earth with a greater level of contrast than its endpoints.
In the left corner, we have the virtually untouristed capital of a filthy rich, rigidly conservative, strictly Islamic absolute monarchy in one of the world's most arid countries:
And in the right corner, we have the rather less wealthy yet famously liberal, only notionally Hindu and immensely tourism-friendly tropical paradise of Bali:
DPS DAFIF Denpasar [Ngurah Rai - Bali Intl], Bali, ID
I'm going to one of these for work, and the other for play, so my esteemed readers are invited to guess which one is which. Here's the exact routing courtesy of the Great Circle Mapper:
That's SIN-DXB on Singapore Airlines (SQ) Y, DXB-RUH on Saudi Arabian (SV) Y, and SIN-DPS on SQ C. As with my previous trip, I'll be splitting this report between FT and Wikitravel Extra -- flights will go here while the bulk of the story goes to WT.
I just flew the SIN-DPS dlight in SQ C today and you will definitely not be dissapointed. In all honesty the flight and level of service were so good I wish the flight took an extra 10 hours.
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Kind Flight Safety Expert, can I please have a Bloody Mary to keep me extra safe?
The flight started off ominously: on all seat-back and cabin screens was a freeze frame from the SQ safety video, showing a little girl with an orange oxygen mask on her face and the caption: "Take care of yourself before attending to others." Kiasu or what?
That aside, it was another day, another SQ 777 -- SQ is the world's biggest operator of the 777 and unsurprisingly it's also by an overwhelming majority the most common plane I fly. Fortunately life is made marginally more interesting by the fact that SQ has no less than four variants of this. The pedestrian B777-200 is the workhorse of the regional fleet, with neither on-demand entertainment nor decent business seating. B777-300s like this are a step up, with decent entertainment but still no near-flat seats; it's only the B777-200ER that introduces the Spacebed in biz, and the still rare B777-300ER (aka "77W" in SQ-ese), which I've yet to fly, was SQ's star until the A380 crashed the party.
But today, something a little out of the ordinary happened. We taxied out from the gate and lined up for our turn to take off... and waited, and waited, and waited some more. Eventually the captain came online: an indicator light for a punctured tire was lit. We taxied back to a safer position, waited for the mechanics to show up, and they eventually confirmed that, yes, a tire was indeed punctured. Nearly two hours after pushback, we arrived back the same gate we'd left from. They guessed 45 minutes to replace the tire, so I headed back to the lounge (T2 this time) for a quick bite and laptop recharge.
After barely 10 minutes in the lounge, it was time to try again, and this time we were off for real. I'd finished my first movie (an enjoyable if brainless Egyptian criminals-fall-in-love romp) by the time dinner rolled around. No Arabic catering here either, I'd had the same ayam rendang (chicken in dry curry) umpteen times before, but I've had worse.
And the flight continued. The lights went dark, I played with my laptop a bit, tried to sleep a bit, watched the barely entertaining Rush Hour 3, had a fairly bizarre "refreshment" of a croissant stuffed with salsa, tuna and yoghurt, had the lights go off again, and come back on only 30 minutes before landing. Soon we crossed over the northern tip of the UAE, flew past Dubai, executed a U-turn and came down for a landing, the Palm Jumeirah visible in the distance and the insane lit-up spike of Burj Dubai looking like a computer rendering error in the night-time sky.
I'm not quite sure what I was expecting when I stepped inside the door of my first Saudi Arabian Airlines plane, and I'm not quite sure if it matched those fuzzy expectations. A B777 is still a B777, even though this one was a little faded and scruffy on the edges. One of the stewards was equipped with a closely-cropped head combined with the long, scraggly beard of a devout Muslim, but there were also stewardesses flitted about, with dark blue veils hiding the hair but not the faces.
We pushed back on schedule and, after a monotone male baritone read out an invocation starting with a dual Allahu Akbar (which passed the taxiing time nicely, I might add), we bounced off into the sky. Meal service followed, with a bit of confusion as there was a special meal for seat 40C despite me not requesting one; on declining, I was offered the usual "chicken or beef", and picked chicken. This got me a rather dry pilaf-type rice dish with chicken chunks, a lettuce and tomato salad, an industry-standard warm bread bun (there must be a giant factory somewhere that makes these for every single airline on the planet) and a cube of strawberry cake (probably from the aforementioned factory as well).
Seat pitch was pretty decent (36"?), although the layout was a weird 2-5-2 and, this being a two-hour flight, I had a little time to look around. Despite the claims of the inflight entertainment mag, there was no airshow flight route map, only a rather less exciting arrow pointing the direction towards Mecca (qiblah). The plane was supposed to be equipped with two cameras, but only the forward-pointing one worked, and it too was switched off. The first five channels were, predictably, "The Holy Quran", "Islamic Programming" (Arabic and English versions) and "Your Guide to the Hajj" (Arabic/English), but the rest was devoted to Hollywood fare, including "Rush Hour 3", which I'd watched on SQ. No on-demand options though, just looping videos, so I didn't have the chance to check out how Saudi censors had treated the scene where the cop duo checks out the backstage of a Parisian burlesque show... so I stuck to the qiblah-o-rama, which allowed interesting mental gyrations as I tried to estimate the plane's heading and direction in reference to not our destination, but a city some 500 km to the southeast. Fun for the whole Islamic family!
Try as I might, an aisle seat over the wing didn't allow me to see much scenery as we descended. After a smooth touchdown into scraggly desert scenery, we rolled up to one of the gates of the still remarkably futuristic-looking King Khalid International Airport. What awaited me inside?
Precisely the same flight as last time, only in the opposite direction, and the difference was night and day. Then, it was night and I sat in the aisle -- now, it was day and I had a window seat, with amazing views out into the endless sand dunes below, a vast, endless expanse of reddish sand with occasional dunes and solitary roads. Dotted here and there, seemingly entirely at random, were perfect circles of lush green: farms in the middle of the desert, one of Saudi Arabia's more harebrained attempts at diversification. (At one point, Saudi authorities had to issue a fatwa to declare the practice of feeding livestock with Saudi grain un-Islamic: at the time, all local production was bought by the government at around 8x the world price and sold for half it.)
The plane, too, seemed in slightly better shape, with a functional Airview program and two operational cameras. Lunch rolled around with much the same formula as last time, only this time with a rather tasty beef stew. Regrettably, I was foiled in my attempt to purchase two decks of Saudi Arabian Airlines playing cards, which would have been just the thing for a rousing game of strip poker on the weekend. Sigh.
The route from Riyadh to Dubai doesn't follow the shortest route: instead, it heads a bit northeast, flying directly over Damman, before turning southeast and flying around Bahrain and Qatar, both visible in the distance, from the north. There was a fearsome tail wind of nearly 200 km/h pushing us along, but the time thus gained was lost at Dubai -- we flew across the city and into the desert for a while before U-turning back and touching down on schedule.
I hate airport transfer desks: they're always full of people with bizarre problems flying on bizarre itineraries that made my half-paper, half-electronic SQ-SV mutant combo look normal. This time around, a Chinese guy with a dodgy ticket, a very lost-looking Somali housewife and a pair of Pakistani mullahs had to be disposed of before the frazzled Filipino agent got around to processing me, and even my ticket took a couple of phone calls to sort out.
But eventually I had a boarding pass in hand and I set off to check out the Star Alliance Lounge, which based on the amount of LH propaganda lying around probably used to be Lufthansa's. For an airport the size of Dubai, it was rather ridiculously small, with seating for maybe 40 and most of all of those taken even on this offpeak weekday afternoon. The full bar looked pretty good and they had rather spotty free wifi, but food offerings were limited to a few miniature sandwich-type things, chips and peanuts and the selection of newspapers was heavily Germanic (LH again?).
Back on the bird, which was coming in from Moscow and hence full of Russians knocking back vodka like it was going out of style. Somewhat to my surprise this turned out to be one of SQ's regional models with no AVOD, and I understood why the people stuck on this thing for 12 hours were intent on getting liquored up. I'd forgetten to online checkin back in Saudi, so I'd ended up with an inner aisle seat way in the back of the bus, but the middle seat was empty and I could stretch out a little.
We took off on schedule and within minutes were back inside that crazy tail wind: I could feel the plane jittering a little as it was pushed forward and the airshow speedometer showed an amazing ground speed of 1138 km/h! Alas, once out of the Gulf the wind slowed down and meal service started. As I honestly can't remember what I ate, I'm pretty sure it was airplane food, but part of the blame has to lie on Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, an utterly brainless Hindi comedy of the type that makes three hours on a plane fly past. A bit of laptop hacking later a simple breakfast rolled around (choice of muffin or danish with tea or coffee), and before I knew the plane was starting its descent, with a good half hour shaved off the scheduled flight time of 7:15.
As I'd expected, the plane turned out to be one of SQ's regional models, without even on-demand video. I'd prebooked seats together for us and, as I kicked back and praised the joys of having some space in front of me for once, Z poured rain on my parade by noting that she's small enough to sit in any seat and has a proven ability to sleep anywhere. Well, the back of the bus is that way, m'dear... but then a stewardess came to distract us with a glass of champagne and a terrible drink of the month involving apples, bitter lemon and 7-Up, and her fear of business class (a rather rare ailment on FT, I suspect) subsided into a mixture of relief and a wrinkled nose of disapproval when a passenger on the opposite site turned out to be wearing flip-flops and shorts revealing pale, hairy legs. So much for business class being all business.
I had one last surprise up my sleeve: I'd preordered Book the Cook for us and even gotten her selection for it by asking her to pick her favorites off an e-mailed menu without telling her what it was for. Reconstructed from memory, our "Light Lunch" menu was:
Appetizer
Scallops with avocado salsa
Main
Hers: Slipper lobster Thermidor, buttered asparagus, and slow-roasted
vine-ripened tomato, and saffron rice
His: Fish souffle and spicy minced chicken served with pineapple rice and
curried vegetables
Dessert
Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough or Strawberry Something ice cream
The scallops were sublime, big and juicy and a surprisingly good fit for the avocado, definitely one of the best things I've eaten on a plane. The lobster -- originally my choice, but ever the gentleman, I bowed to her birthday veto -- was also cooked to perfection, but my Thai-influenced entree was a bit of a disappointment: all of it (souffle, red curry chicken, green curry veggies) was furiously spicy and tasted like something I'd get in a Bangkok canteen for 30 baht, which isn't to say it was bad, just not what I'd associate with "gourmet". The Italian wine she opted for was quite tasty, while the German riesling (the only other white on the menu) was sickeningly sweet and singularly unsuitable for my dish.
It's a short flight to Denpasar, so the meal service was abbreviated, with no dessert/cheese platter or liqueurs (although port was on the menu). But the ice cream was tasty, even though I had to ask for it twice, and by the time Z finished exploring her seat controls, it was already time to descend.
Thanks for an interesting trip report. A very mixed bag of flights.
I disagree that Bali is liberal, although a lot of tourists misunderstand the culture of the island in this way. It is also certainly not "nominally" Hindu, but rather a place where the lives of most of people are at least heavily influenced by their beliefs.
I disagree that Bali is liberal, although a lot of tourists misunderstand the culture of the island in this way. It is also certainly not "nominally" Hindu, but rather a place where the lives of most of people are at least heavily influenced by their beliefs.
I'd define liberal as "live and let live", and by that standard Bali certainly is liberal, with the Balinese almost too willing to let tourists do their own thing while they do theirs. Eg. major temples like Tanah Lot are veritable orgies of mass tourism, with tour groups of teenagers in hotpants clambering all over the monuments and souvenir stalls out the wazoo. And by "nominally" Hindu, I meant that Balinese Hinduism is rather radically evolved form of the Indian original -- in everything from the popularity of beef burgers to temple architecture, the casual visitor would be fairly hard put to notice any similarities.
Wahhabalinese Adventures: SIN-DXB-RUH-DPS on SQ/SV Y/C
Here's the exact routing courtesy of the Great Circle Mapper:
Singapore
