It's position as neither a premium carrier nor a low cost one made no more sense and so all its planes, its crew and its routes got subsumed under SQ.
In today's increasingly divided world, business models are similarly polarising to two winning strategies: luxury or mass. Speaking of mass, I am flying on Jetstar, Qantas' low cost carrier. It's an occupational hazard but I can see so many things it could do better (even if it was a low cost). What really floored me was the crew keeping the front toilet for themselves. Reminds me of Vietnam Airlines of 30 years ago and they are miles ahead now. It's like Jetstar are purposely trying to make their bad service worse.
Be that as it may, I am compelled to take this flight as its the last flight to Jakarta from Singapore tonight. Its a public holiday (Deepavali, the festival of light) and its bad enough that I have to travel on a public holiday in order to meet the British Ambassador to ASEAN first thing tomorrow morning, I was not going to take earlier flights that would have reduced my time with loved ones at home.
As it happens, it was really nice to have D to send me off and see J&N take C for a walk. We can never take time together for granted.
Yesterday, D & I went to the hospital to see her paternal grandpa who is warded there for a fall and then subsequently caught COVID (potentially while at the hospital). We are all very worried of course. He is a grand 100 years old and was initially (mis?)diagnosed as having pneumonia and his body didn't react well to the antibiotics they gave him and in fact developed fast AF with a low blood pressure and low oxygen levels. We pray he gets well soon, though at his age, he is vulnerable.
D was holding his hand and I was with her and by his bedside. We hope we will be OK. He was wearing his ventilator mask and we were both masked up too except for a quick photo.
We also hope we are strong enough with our triple vaccinations to not have gotten infected. We were only there for 30mins and by his side for no more than 15mins as they had to do a chest x-Ray and we stopped to speak to the doctors in attendance.
We are supposed to go on an our own evocative romantic trip... to the heart of the middle east. No, not Dubai or Riyadh - the commercial or religious capitals of the region but to Qatar and then Jordan. Wasn't it in the wilderness of Jordan that Jesus's cousin, John preached and baptised his followers on the banks of the river there.
But all that we will hopefully see later this weekend. Like the Silk Route of old, we need to traverse long distances and endure risky and uncomfortable conditions to get to our destination.
So, embracing that intrepid spirit (with a wild dose of imagination), here I am starting out my journey on a low cost and low service airline, with quite few people coughing away, starting my journey on a public holiday to the most populous city in Southeast Asian, Jakarta.
I used to come to Jakarta a fair bit when leading the region and you cannot be successful in Southeast Asia if you are not doing business in Indonesia which is the largest country and growing fast.
It's been awhile since I kept a travelogue. I do feel the urge to write a bit more and what better way than to use this trip to do so, beginning with Jakarta and after making our way all the way to Uzbekistan in 2019 and to Azerbaijan, across the Caspian Sea, earlier this year, we know go further west from Central Asia into the Middle East and visit two of its richest lands (in modern times, Qatar and in antiquity, Jordan).
Watch this space, dear readers, for D and my upcoming silk journeys together.
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