Day 33 and the Invincibles limp into London

We DID IT!

HAVING RACED halfway round the world in a month, the foot was easing off the accelerator as we closed in on London and our last day on continental Europe started in the laziest of fashions.

Day 33 was heralded by snores, stretches and yawns with nobody awake in the Shine suite of the Luxembourg Parc hotel until gone 9am – except, of course, bionic Mrs S.

This tells its own tale of mental and physical exhaustion: apart from SuperMum, we are all dead beat.

 Yawn…stretch… do we really have to get up?

And as sure as eggs is eggs, hand-in-hand with exhaustion comes terrible behaviour. The punishing schedule of the Long Trip Home is to blame rather than the stolid Shinettes. Rules will have to be put firmly back in place once this adventure is finally over, but for now it is about getting through each day.  

Today’s breakfast was, pound-for-pound, just as chaotic as yesterday’s with Ben  winding everyone up and Kitty on super crotchety form.

We somehow got to the end of it with nobody sin-binned or red-carded and remarkably avoided clearing the restaurant with our noise, although a few minutes later found our kind, tolerant waiter sucking feverishly on a cigarette outside.

We had obviously made an impact on someone.

Ben’s favourite colour in Luxembourg Gardens

The highly charged nature of breakfast made a trip to the Luxembourg Gardens a necessity rather than a pleasant distraction before being cooped up again in yet another train carriage, and it was probably the highlight of our trip to Paris as far as the children were concerned.  They ran wild in the beautiful gardens and even wilder in the playground by the tennis courts which we’d had to pay to go into which stung a bit, but was well worth it in terms of fun and energy burnt off.

Kitty just took control of the situation, trying out every bit of equipment and bossing her brothers around. She was totally at home on the toy train (much to our amusement) and was so absorbed that she didn’t notice her brothers disappearing to play on the crazy winding flying fox.

All aboard…

All the children appeared back in the hotel room looking as if they had been down the mines or up the chimneys, so Mrs S showered them all and packed whilst I tweaked yesterday’s blog and fished out pictures for it.

Checking out and climbing into our taxi, Mrs S thanked the lovely proprietor of the hotel for our stay lavishing praise on her for the accommodation, apologising for the behaviour of the children (‘don’t worry, they are only young’) and promising to return. The proud smile of the owner turned into a rictus grin as she begrudgingly handed over a business card.  I have a feeling the Invincible Shines are not necessarily on her top ten wish list of returning guests.

We made it to the Eurostar with very little drama and thinking we had done our usual arriving at the station with rather too much time to spare, sauntered through an empty check-in and passport control… only to find the other travellers were already on the train.  Perhaps we have become too casual at the end of our trip.

Clambering aboard our final train
Emotions were running high, and the whole Gare du Nord experience was a pretty visceral one.

For me it was when we reached UK Immigration Control in Paris and were served by a lovely balding Englishman, full of good humour and welcome. It really felt like being welcomed home after a long time away – not just a 13,000km madcap adventure, but eight years of living as a foreigner in someone else’s land.

For Mrs S it was the sight of the Eurostar itself (well, she has become a total train spotter these days). Luckily, as usual, we had our fellow passengers to break the mawkishly sentimental spell.

As we were boarding we encountered the same couple with a little boy Kitty’s age, as we had run into at security.  We had been queuing behind them for the X-ray machine but ended up using the one next door since it had taken them nearly 10 minutes to strip down their pushchair and load more Mamas and Papas baby equipment onto the belt than I think it is possible to display in one store.

Mr MumsNet has a lot to do

When we first encountered MumsNet dad he was looking extremely stressed whilst his anxious wife cradled their precious 2-year-old boy.

When we bumped into them again they were waiting to get into our carriage on the train, with another couple with a 9-month-old.

“You’re very brave travelling with a child in the first year of its life,” Mrs MumsNet remarked to the non-plussed parents.

“We’re finding it hard enough with our 2-year-old,” Mr MumsNet pitched in. Mrs S, meanwhile, was finding it hard enough to keep her breakfast down at this point.

Perhaps we were this precious when we brought Jasper to Paris as a baby, but I don’t remember it that way.

We raced through the stunning French countryside: yellow wheat fields, green maize crops and small French villages.

“Hello – there’s a real world out there,” I reminded both boys as their noses got stuck into Minecraft, and the pair of them savoured their last glimpses of France and then the tunnel.

Their smiles when we reached the UK side of the tunnel were genuine and interested and that was lovely to see.

Back in the UK – yessssss…

And then we pulled into – what? NOT Waterloo??? St Pancras? Well, that tells you how long it has been since I got the Eurostar, and gives a hint at perhaps how we ended up in Mongolia without a visa and at the Russian border with no valid one.

Note to self – must check tickets and travel plans more carefully.

In any case it is too late now to change the blog from Woodlands-to-Waterloo to Singapore-to-St Pancras… what’s in a name, right?

We felt elated at realising we had made it back and were ‘home’ and this time with no time limit, sad goodbyes or long flights to endure at the end. 

It was a day we have all been looking forward to and one Mrs S has been feeling very emotional about, especially knowing how much it means to her mother too.

We were congratulating ourselves on the St Pancras platform platform that we had made it back to the UK in one piece. Snaking towards the front of the taxi queue we were snapped out of our reverie by the sound of Kitty faceplanting into a pillar and splitting her lip open. Lesson: don’t celebrate too soon.

Finally we made it to the Marriot hotel in Swiss Cottage where a major Ben and Kitty meltdown was narrowly averted and we popped round the corner to see ‘white granny’ for the first time all together in a year.

Seeing “white granny” again…

Shattered as they were, the children really pulled it out of the bag for their reunion with Granny and we had a lovely time together. Kitty was very chatty, Ben was keen to get Granny outside and Jasper sat and told white granny and Neeley tales of our trips including details I’d felt sure had been lost on him.

We had tea and cake and ice lollies and played football in the sun and then it was time to go.

Football in the sun

Suppertime shenanigans

Where’s my son gone? Is it too late to sign him up for Singaporean military service?

One last push through supper in Primrose Hill and then the boys collapsed into bed and Mrs S disappeared downstairs to see her great old friend Yael.

So this was it.

Back in London. Strange and, for now, comforting. Though whether things live up to expectations or wanderlust sets in again, who knows?

There will be one more post to follow when we have had time to digest and reflect on the last 33 days, but for today, it was a case of survival.

And we survived.

Would I do this again? 

That would be sheer MADNESS…

 

 

 

Day 28: Copenhagen to Kolding: Seeing great friends and old beetroot’s volte face…

“MUMMY, SHOULD I fall asleep so they feel sorry for us again?” Jasper asked.

“He won’t feel sorry for us Jasper, he is fed up with us. He thinks we are idiots, doesn’t really want us on this train and we may well be getting off in a minute, so don’t settle down and make yourself too comfortable,” said I.

And so began one of the most remarkable turnarounds seen on this, or any, adventure.

The main players in this are the Invincible Shines, Mr Beetroot-face of the Danish Railway network and his only slightly less exasperated colleague, Mrs Harumph.

We’d climbed aboard the Copenhagen to Kolding train to factor in a visit to Claus and Bente – great friends in Singapore with whom we’ve kept in touch since they moved back to Denmark.

Great behaviour on the Kolding Express…

It was a sunny day, we were up bright and early, looking forward to visiting our old friends and their lovely children. It had all the makings of a great day.

“But this ticket is not valid.”

That all-too familiar feeling worked its way into my guts.

“I’m sorry,” I asked Beetroot-face, raising my eyebrows. We really didn’t need this.

“Where is your ticket. This is a supplement, it is not a ticket,” he insisted, rendering the piece of paper I had been nursing so carefully for the past few hours instantly worthless.

The you-have-got-to-be-bloody-well-JOKING look passed across my face before I had even realised it, and we were stuck at an impasse.

I didn’t have a clue what he was going on about and he clearly thought I was an idiot with an invalid ticket (and to be fair, we have displayed a bit of form in that regard on this trip).

Kitty squawked, Ben rolled around and put his feet on the chair, and beetroot-face pulled out his phone.

Mrs S suddenly twigged and it seems we should have stamped or activated our Eurail Pass before starting to travel.

This is not a valid ticket!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Swedes hadn’t noticed (or had been too cool to mention it) and nobody on the way into Copehagen had remarked, but Mr Beetroot-face wasn’t going to let this go. Or make it easy.

“The Germans will never let you travel with this,” he spluttered, after seeing our future destination was Hamburg. As if it was a German rail worker and not HIM creating the fuss.

I kept quiet. I didn’t need the lecture, I just needed old beetroot to fix this not carry on tutting at us.

“It is very expensive to get this stamped on the train,” he said.

Here we go, I thought, a shakedown, in Denmark of all places. But no, it was clearly just another angle from which to berate me for my stupidity. Another tool to poke into my side to heap on the discomfort.

He sighed. He shook his head. He went to find a colleague.

Mrs Harumph turned up a couple of minutes later.

“You haven’t got them stamped?”

“No we haven’t got them stamped.”

She shook her head. These two should enter the synchronized head-shaking world championships.

Once she’d tired of shaking her head, she checked the tickets, checked our passports.

“Where is the baby?” she asked, looking at the picture of baby Kitty in her passport.

“Here she is. She’s grown up a bit,” Mrs S said.

“That’s good,” said Harumph, who then told us some breakfast would be on its way, included in the ticket.

No more than three minutes passed before old beetroot was back.

“Can I see your tickets, please,” he asked.

I unzipped my bag and took out my tickets. Again. And handed them to him.

“They have not been stamped,” he said. “You know it is really, really expensive to have them stamped on the train.”

Was this some kind of joke?  “No, you know they have not been stamped. You’ve just seen them.”

Mrs S was thinking on her feet. “Can we get them stamped at Kolding?” she asked.

“There is no ticket office at Kolding. You will have to get off at Odense. But then you must get off the train because you must go to the ticket office.”

“But we have friends collecting us at Kolding,:” Mrs S said to his big beetrooty ‘so-what?’ face.

He shook his head again and disappeared, only reappearing to dump a wire basket of bread rolls and jams on our table. “It’s for you,” he mouthed with his mobile-phone clamped to his ear.

We debated our options while sending an email to Claus to inform him we had hit a spot of bother. His unshakeable optimism (“Don’t worry, we will fix it this end”) made us feel much better and I went to find beetroot.

I spotted him in a little cubby-hole near the loos, whispering to Harumph.

“Hi there, do you think we could get an earlier train tomorrow to the next station after Kolding on the way to Hamburg and get it stamped there before joining our train?” I asked him, outlining Mrs S’s clever plan.

“DO NOT WORRY,” old Beetroot shouted.

“WE ARE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN FOR YOUR FAMILY. BUT TODAY IS SUNDAY AND MANY OFFICE ARE CLOSED. BUT DO NOT WORRY,” he added.

WE WILL DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING FOR YOU! 

I was more than a little thrown by the 180-degree change of heart and attitude, and returned to our seats to share the news.

No more than five minutes later, the beetrooty one himself was there.

“I have found a very friendly woman in Odense,” he told us, puffing up with pride. “She will come down from the ticket office in Odense and wait on the platform and she will stamp it for you. So, I need your tickets.”

This seemed too good to be true, but sure enough he had called in some favours or pulled some strings and that is precisely what happened.

“People just want to get rid of us,” Mrs S remarked drily.  “Just get them off our train… just get them out of our country… get out of our lives… it is a powerful tool,” she laughed.

She might have been reading the mind of the young woman sharing our carriage. She had been twisting and turning in her seat, contorting herself to get away from the noise the excited Shinettes had been making.

Mrs S apologised to her. “Don’t worry I have got my earplugs,” she barked back. Lucky her.

“This is the best adventure,” said Jasper, proudly wearing the white and green hat he had been given at a Tivoli Gardens restaurant. “My Mum and Dad are in the ditch” the writing on it read in Danish.

The sour woman sqeezing her head into her seat with bits of foam rammed into her lug-holes could not dampen our spririts, though, and the Invincibles had done it again.

We piled off the train at the little town of Kolding and Claus, Bente, Freja (now 14) and Mads (a whopping 20) were on hand to pick us up and load us into their cars for the short drive back to their house. If Tivoli was heaven in Copenhagen, the Dyrings house was heaven in Kolding – with a sun-bathed garden, rabbits, chickens, a dog and CHILDREN.

Bente and Mrs S catching up in Kolding… 

The great thing about good friends is that it doesn’t seem to matter how much time goes by between visits and so it was with Claus and Bente.

Mette, 10-years-old when we first met her in Singapore and now 18, had stayed at home and greeted the weary travellers when they arrived home.

The family had been in Spain with 40 or so friends and family to celebrate Claus’s impending 50^th birthday (“I’m still nearer zero than 100,” he proudly pointed out at supper. “For a few more days anyway.”) and he had brought back the entire hind leg of a giant pig along with some Spanish beer and we feasted at lunchtime in the garden, catching up on all our news while the children chattered down one end of the table.

It was still astounding how lovely their ‘children’ are, now 20, 18 and 14 and how much time they have always had for our little ones.  From looking after Jasper and Ben aged 4 and 2 on the beach in Sentosa during one of our legendary Sunday night BBQs or entertaining our 8,7 and 2 year old with painted nails, swinging in the hammock, playing with them in the playground or transfixing them with Top Gear and super-complex space ship building games on the computer, they were as kind, patient and interested as they were when we first met them…and most importantly afforded us some ‘grown up time’ which has been so missing on this trip!

Metta and Freja have Mads in a spin as Jasper and Ben look on…

Claus had been slow-cooking his famous pulled-pork recipe and he transported it from the oven to the barbecue for the final few hours as we dined on his monster pig-leg, prawns, black bread, white bread and various other marvels Bente had rustled up in the kitchen.

We walked off lunch with a tour of their village and a visit to the playground where the children ran amok and  then it was time for Claus’s pulled pork and Bente’s homemade buns followed by homemade ice cream. To say they were a triumph would be a major understatement and everybody dipped in for seconds and thirds as we talked deep into the night, exchanging Trans-Siberian stories – Bente has done the journey twice – and ending with the foreigners trying to bend their mouths round the most unpronounceable Danish words and phrases our hosts could think of.

Claus’s famous pulled pork…

The Shinettes nodded off one by one and were transported into their beds until only the olds were left.

And then there were none.

  

 

 

July 1st 2013 – Day One reflections (just don’t expect this every day…)

So we survived day one, and it should all be downhill from here, right? The children were superstars despite being absolutely wired by the time we got into KL…

The JOY of arriving…

Truth be known, the only sense of humour failure was all mine — when it became evident Kuala Lumpur taxis are incapable of transporting anyone if they happen to be toting luggage any larger than an Hermes clutch bag. This, due to the fact their Proton boots/trunks are pretty much entirely taken up with LPG tanks. I know this now, but it took me a while to work out why cabbie after cabbie was turning his nose up at my bag-laden family and moving down the line. Still, look on the bright side, it was nothing ANOTHER lengthy wait in a shambolic queue at KL Sentral didn’t resolve.

Oh, NOTE TO SELF. Kitty really must alternate sitting on the left and right side of the aisles on the trains, at least until we get out of Malaysia. Today she was on the right side for the bulk of the journey – which meant for the best part of eight hours her left cheek and left cheek alone was pulled and pinched and pummelled by dozens of elderly headscarved “aunties”, cooing in Bahasa and tweaking the nonplussed Kitty’s face…

Coogee, coogee, coo… lemme grab that big juicy lambchop!

Ben puffed up with pride, showing his mum round our first hotel (a late addition to the schedule because he REALLY wanted to show Zoe where he stayed on his first big boys’ rugby tour). He was a little crestfallen to learn they did not have the “best burger I have ever eaten” on the menu for his supper, but he held it together waaaaaaay better than I did when I locked our passports and cash in the safe only to be unable to open it again. I know the bloody thing was broken but am equally convinced they think I am a total bonehead who cannot read simple instructions and work an IDIOT-PROOF room safe. Perhaps we’ll agree to split the difference. 

Mrs S and the Shinettes are all conked out now – even stay-up-all-night-if-I-can-Jasper – snoozing in cool, white linen as I type. These sorts of comforts will be a rarity on certain legs of this journey but not just yet.

There’s a morning at the Petronas Towers planned for tomorrow, followed by a spot of lunch and then we’re hitching up the wagons again for the push to Penang and a night in the glorious E&O – a beautifully elegant hotel and one of the real highlights for me. 

Before then, though, there is a good night’s sleep to be had (at long last)…

Some images from Day 1:

The sign our friend’s hand is resting on reads: “10,000 Ringgit fine for, errrrrrr, having the door open”. He can’t be blamed, though, he couldn’t read the sign what with it being obscured by him holding door open and all…

Women-only train coaches. A fantastic concept- I wonder, though, does he come here often…?

See you, Sam…

Ben says goodbye to his best friend Sam. Tears all round. Nice signed shirt, Ben…

 

Things we’ll miss #16 – Beautiful Asian sunsets…

Another amazing Langkawi view

Stop whining, Singaporean cry babies!

WHILE Singaporeans continue to gag and choke on clouds of acrid smoke billowing from Sumatra, Indonesia minister Agung Laksono’s helpful advice is, in effect, ‘shut up and grow a pair’.

“Singapore should not be behaving like a child and making all this noise,” the minister coordinating Indonesia’s response, told reporters. “This is not what the Indonesian nation wants, it is because of nature.”

By ‘nature’ I can only assume he means the wood of the matchstick which sparks the flames igniting the diesel poured over forests to cheaply clear them for more palm oil plantations – to better line pockets all the way up the food chain.

Quit whining – AP photo

While Laksono was tutting,Singapore’s air pollution index hit a new record high, soaring to 401 by Friday lunchtime. Any reading above 300 is “hazardous” while a reading above 400 is deemed “life-threatening to ill and elderly people,” according to NEA guidelines.

But sssssshhhhhh, don’t make a fuss, right Laksono?

Some outdoor leaving drinks I’ve planned for tonight may now be less festive than they could have been, I guess… Perhaps I should theme them an Apocalypse Party.

DRESS CODE FOR DRINKS

And here’s what it looks like.

Cough, cough, splutter…

If you could see my face, you’d see I am not smiling. On way to a meeting; wearing Reuters-issue safety gear.
Record levels of air pollution for Singapore again today… the kids’ school just sent a note to parents granting blanket permission to keep children at home due to the hazardous conditions. Half an hour in the “fresh air” downtown and I smelled like I’d been smoking cheap cigars all day…
Thanks a lot Indonesia…

Things NOBODY would miss #15

AND SO Singapore suffocates under a pernicious yellow cloud of choking smog.

Created by illegal land clearance forest fires in Indonesia, the “haze” drifts from Sumatra across the Malacca Strait, creating the city-state’s worst pollution crisis in more than a decade.

Asthmatics fight for breath; pedestrians walk the streets coughing into face masks; schoolchildren peer from their classrooms at lunchtime, all outdoor playtime cancelled.

An elderly man dons facemask to get his daily exercise in Singapore on Wednesday, while the sun struggles to burn through the acrid haze.

End-of-term parties are being scrapped by the hour. Ben and Jasper’s year-end sports days, and many other galas like them, have been called off, or reduced to hit-and-giggle affairs inside air-conditioned sports halls — small consolation for many, like Jasper, who had been expected to break his school’s record for the 600 metres in his age-group this week.

The air is thick and acrid, even indoors, and many are choosing to stay off the streets all together if they can.

No wonder.

The National Environment Agency has advised Singaporeans, especially the elderly, children and people with respiratory problems, to avoid prolonged exposure outdoors. The pollution index on Wednesday recorded its worst figures since 1997 – a year which, officials estimate, cost the region some $9bn in economic losses.

All this, simply to line the pockets of a handful of landowners, clearing forest for palm plantations.

The sooner the wind of change blows through Southeast Asia with regard to illegal fires, the better.

I’m very sad to be leaving this wonderfully vibrant, fast-evolving republic – but things like this do make it a lot easier.

Things we’ll miss #14

The eagles… throughout Southeast Asia. Amazing, majestic birds… this one was in Langkawi.

Things I *won’t* miss #1

The smokey haze which drifts down from illegal forest clearing by fires in Sumatra. When it gets like this, it smells like Bonfire Night every day… visibility is bad, and school sports are cancelled because of poor air quality. Sad and unnecessary, and Malaysia suffers even more than we do in Singapore…

This photo by Reuters colleagues is not a recent one, but illustrates the difference in the city’s financial district skyline on a clear day and when it is shrouded in this haze…