It had been a while. Pulling our failed 4 days in Switzerland last year aside, I hadn’t left Hong Kong for 2 years. The last traveling I had done was a weekend in Bangkok in March 2020. It was hard to actually make the call to leave, you never know what rules might change while you’re away or what hoops you might have to jump through to get back here. The act of booking a flight and jumping on a plane which I had once treated as casually as grabbing a taxi, had become intimidating, nerve-wracking, overwhelming, and complicated. I hesitated, put flights in my shopping cart, and never checked out. I researched and researched but didn’t book. In the end I held my nerve and actually pushed the confirm booking button, this was it, I was actually going to leave. It didn’t feel real, I assumed something would get in the way. My first stop was Singapore for a week of working from our office there. I needed a negative PCR test just to step into the plane. I still hadn’t had covid and it was pretty rampant in HK, so I hunkered down for a week at home, making our friends RAT test before they came to visit, I was paranoid, worried, and assumed something would go wrong and I wouldn’t make it. But on one fine Saturday in March, I made it out of HK on a one way ticket to Auckland with 5 days in Singapore along the way.

Upon arrival, I was allowed to go to my hotel but needed to stay there until I’d completed another covid test within the first 24 hours. I landed in the evening and had originally planned to order in some food, get some sleep and do the test first thing in the morning. I couldn’t do it, the temptation of new sights and sounds was too much, I managed to find a testing center open til 10pm, made my way there, did my rapid test and BOOM, freedom! I quickly found a restaurant nearby and had an epic Beef Rendang while absorbing the other-countryness of Singapore. I was tired but it felt just so so good to be experiencing new stuff, using a different currency, not knowing where to go or how things worked, figuring things out, and making my way around.

Early the next morning I met a friend from work for brekky and had that cool experience of seeing someone in person for the first time who you’d only met on zoom calls for months on end! She had a beautifully touristy day planned for us, starting with a “hike” around MacRitchie reservoir in the sweaty humidity that is Singapore. We then made our way to her favourite chicken rice place, it’s a boring-sounding dish but done right with all the right sauces and bits and pieces its super tasty and a must-eat in Singapore for sure. Our next highlight was Haw Par Villa, an almost unexplainably kooky park built by the inventors of Tiger Balm. It tells various myths and legends using figurines (each creepier than the next), and has multiple Tiger-themed areas as well as pretty ponds and grassy areas to chill out at. It’s so weird it has to be seen to be understood, well worth the visit in my eyes, but I also love those cutout tourist pictures where you stick your head through for a photo so… yea. We then finished off the day’s adventure with a mango shaved ice to cool us down. I left my friend here and made my way towards a dinner spot she’d recommended near my hotel where I tried Murtabak for the first time, a delicious stuffed bready pancake type thing, I took the lamb flavor served with a bowl of curry sauce for dunking, I’d also give this must-eat status in Singapore! Falling into bed I savored that kind of tired you only get when your day has been filled with new impressions.

I then spent a very awesome work week meeting tons of colleagues in person for the first time, enjoying a lot of great food together and doing zero-additional touristing - oops! I was a little on edge the whole week as I also needed to test negative on a PCR to fly onwards to New Zealand and there was plenty of covid going around Singapore at that time. I danced a little jig in my head when I got the text confirming my negative test result, and almost started to believe that I was actually going to see my family for the first time in more than 2 years.