Month: April 2025

The Subcontinental Drift#3

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I have stood fuming, behind people in immigration queues in India who appear to be trying to negotiate their way into the country. I get most impatient in check-in lines at the airport and in immigration lines. How hard can it be, I’m saying to myself. Have a valid passport, get a visa, fill in the immigration form, you’re in. Now it’s e-visas and we became that person who’s holding up the queue a few days back. We had our e-visas and all of the other required documentation so what could possibly go wrong. Something induced chagrin in our immigration officer but we still have no idea what. So after handing over passport, boarding pass, e-visa print-out and customs form, he did this :

1. Takes the paperwork and stares at it like it was a ransom note.
2. Consults his colleague in the next booth who shrugs – a problem shared is two problems so he’s not interested.
3. Gets up and walks off. Not a good sign. Fortunately he didn’t return with an officious looking gentleman in uniform, just a worried look.
4. Re-takes his seat and continues tapping his computer and shuffling paper.
5. Stamps passport – a good sign but then…
6. Continues to scratch his head and stare intently at the computer screen and the paperwork yet again.
7. Hands everything back without having said a word or even looking at me during the whole process. I say “thank you sir”, step into India and hope I don’t have to step back into non-nationality limbo (remember, we’ve left Australia) to rescue the Child Bride..
8. Repeats with CB’s paperwork.

At least we didn’t have to wait for our luggage to appear. After this rigmarole it was rotating on the carousel when we got there.

So Trump’s new tariff regime has been announced. I think our hotel here in Delhi must think we’re Americans because our bar bill last night had 4 taxes attached. S.C. was 8%, CGST was 9%, SGST was 9% and DVAT was 25%. I don’t know what any of those are apart from variations on consumption taxes but it increased the bill by about 30% which, apart from being rather excessive, doesn’t appear to make mathematical sense until you realise that the two 9%’s were 9% of the 8%. So the original bill of 6050 rupees became 8133.62. Our government, with only a 10% GST are obviously rank amateurs, especially at milking foreigners.

My first visit to India was 1986 and I haven’t been back since 2013 so it’s changed a bit. The bit we have seen so far in Delhi including the airport, has changed in some fairly fundamental ways especially with their Metro rail system. The place has evolved from the East India Company to the Jetsons. Indians have always been pretty tech savvy – look who runs or at least drives a big chunk of Silicon Valley. But whilst your average Indian can code a moon launch, ask them to drive between two white lines and see how far you get. Those lines represent wasted paint; nothing more, nothing less. How else do you convert three lanes into five if you can’t ignore those pesky lines.

As Geoffrey Chaucer sagely observed in 1395, “time and tide wait for no man”, and neither does Indian traffic. As I remember, the traffic rules aren’t. They’re just for guidance and once you get past vaguely sticking to the jeft side of the road, you ‘re on your own. I couldn’t help notice the dual speed limits – 70km/hr for cars and 40km/hr for trucks….on the same road. Now there’s a recipe for disaster. Not quite as bad as the urban myth about Sweden switching from driving on the left side of the road to the right in 1967 – cars this weekend, trucks and buses next weekend. If you’ve seen pictures of the traffic on the actual fateful day you’ll notice vehicles being hit from all directions. It’s why Volvos are so boxy. What did really cause a small problem in Sweden was that the buses all had doors on the left side so stepping off said bus into traffic mayhem was somewhat problematic I would think.

The Subcontinental Drift #2

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Man, Singapore has changed over the decades I’ve been visiting and you especially notice if you haven’t been for a while. It now epitomises what can only be described as architectural porn. If Lily Philips and Bonnie Blue were buildings, they’d be here. Men would be queuing up at their various entrances to come inside. These days the newer buildings especially, are extravagant and extroverted and for a modest fee you can go all of the way… to the top. At this point (because i just deleted a whole lot of R18+ material) I’m reminded of that famous joke – a beautiful woman walks into a bar and asks the barman for a double entendre, so he gives her one. And I can hear Led Zeppelin singing songs from In Through The Out Door. That’s enough; time to move on.

Do you know how hard it is to drive in Singapore? Okay, it’s not that the traffic is like it is in Boston (scroll down a few pages to find out) but it’s really hard to be able to drive in Singapore. The government wants to keep the traffic moving and the fewer cars there are on the road, the more room there is for the buses. As I have said before, if you close your eyes and step into the road in Hong Kong you’ll get hit by a taxi or a Rolls Royce (okay, maybe not as probable now as 25 years ago). In Singapore you’ll be hit by a single decker or double decker bus. Only a certain number of cars are licensed at any one time so when a slot becomes available,  it’s auctioned. So how did that guy driving the clapped out Honda Civic afford the 90 grand for a certificate to drive before even buying his car. Oh…that does explain it.

When you visit Singapore, Raffles Hotel is a venue for tourist pilgrimage. Not so much the hotel itself, where dressing for dinner requires a cream linen jacket, jodhpurs, spurs and pith helmet, but the Long Bar which much to the chagrin of visiting colonels, accommodates shorts, t-shirts and thongs (of the foot variety). But you are made to pay for these indiscretions because the management knows you are only there to sample the famous Singapore Sling so one for me and one for the child bride plus GST plus service charge sets you back cents short of a ton. And that’s Singapore dollars which used to be worth somewhat less than the Aussie and are now worth 20% more. Thanks Albo. The only compensation (and reasonably priced nourishment ie free) was peanuts still in the shell. On relieving the nut of its outer layer, said layer is discarded on to the floor – tradition, old boy.

On our way back from Raffles to our lodgings, we happened upon a bar/restaurant that looked suitable for our custom. It was serving Taiwanese cuisine which is a bit too Cantonese for my liking but the menu looked okay so we went in. After dozens of trips to Taiwan you can get used to anything. A pint of Heineken for me and a stubby of Tiger for the CB and we were set. It was a good sized establishment but there was no one else in there, only us. The bar down the street was packed. Was there an imminent Chinese strike on the cards which we hadn’t been told about? There wasn’t. You would have heard about it.

And now, in the immortal words of Monty Python, for something completely different. The worst thing that can happen to you on the road is to have your credit card stopped by your bank. It happened to us yesterday. This has happened to me a few times in my travels. For example, a night out with my marketing team in London many years ago, in a less than salubrious establishment, resulted in a frantic phone call from the CB at some ungodly hour when I was still barely capable of lying down without falling over. The supermarket had rejected her card and apparently our bank was a little miffed. So this afternoon a couple of texts from the bank set off alarm bells. I was pretty sure it wasn’t my fault this time but what??? This is Singapore and everyone is scrupulously honest, right. It turns out, a card which I thought had expired years ago and been replaced, was still active and someone was using it. Apparently I am now a member of the National Gallery of Victoria. WTFingF. After being on hold for 15 minutes on an International call, it was eventually sorted

What is it with us and bars? If you’ve read about our recent trek through north-east America and Canada, you’ll know that not everyone takes these things anywhere near as seriously as I do. We’re talking Vince Lombardi’s seriousness about winning serious. So we’re in a perfectly respectable hotel in Singapore with a perfectly adequate lobby bar. Call me old fashioned but one thing expected of bars, especially with happy hour draining away, is that there will be someone behind the bar to do what people behind bars normally do for people in front of bars. So for two consecutive nights I’ve had to go to the front desk and politely ask, on behalf of us and other patrons, the whereabouts of the barman. Each time they’ve tracked him down long enough to pour a couple of drinks then promptly f.. off again. There’s a much better party going on somewhere else obviously. And while we’re on this topic, we just got on our flight for which we have lashed out to sit up the front and they are serving Singapore Slings. For nothing. More champagne, my dear. That can either be a question addressed to the child bride or a statement addressed to the flight attendant.