Patrick Comerford
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter. – TS Eliot, Journey of the Magi
It’s not certainly not yet winter. But the journey was such a long journey at this time of the year. As Eliot might say, ‘A hard time we had of it.’
The journey from Stony Stratford to Kuching has been an arduous odyssey that took almost 48 hours from door-to-door and that involved two taxi trips, one train journey, four flights and five airports. Along the way there was one unscheduled hotel stay in Amsterdam but lost another planned stopover in Singapore, where we lost our hotel booking.
Our flights were booked through Air France and KLM and were supposed to involve a flight from Birmingham to Amsterdam late on Sunday, connecting immediately to a flight from Amsterdam to Singapore, arriving late on Monday afternoon, with a planned overnight stay in Singapore.
But I should have been aware of the red flags at the check-in process. Despite having booked in many weeks in advance, Air France/KLM told us the seats at the price we had booked were all gone, and demanded we pay extra to keep our booking on the flight from Amsterdam.
The queues for security at departures are still a nightmare at Birmingham International, and there is nothing pleasant about travelling from that airport these days. On the train from Milton Keynes, we received texts telling us our first flight was delayed by over an hour. We were not going to catch the second, connecting flight.
At Birmingham, we asked at check-in to be rebooked, and, it seems with great reluctance but with much waving of hands, we were eventually rebooked with an early morning flight from Amsterdam to Charles de Gaulle in Paris, connecting with a later morning, overnight flight from Paris to Singapore.
When we arrived at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam gave us a voucher for €15 each for food and beverages in the airport, but refused pointedly to help us find overnight accommodation. I pointed out our rights, and was told my rights were irrelevant, it simply was not within their budget to pay for our hotel overnight.
We were caught over a barrel. Other passengers had been offered a room in the Sheraton, but we were too far down the queue to count for anyone to bother about our plight.
By then, there only three rooms were left in the Sheraton Hotel. We were told if we kept the receipts we might (there seemed to be an emphasis on Might) be able to claim back our outlay at a later stage. We made the booking and went back to the KLM help desk in the transit area. They had closed, and the staff had left.
Talk about being left high and dry. It is not as though KLM and Air France did not know about this problem. They had flagged it up early on Sunday afternoon. We were abandoned to our own devices. Our rights did not seem to matter and we were left feeling were a mere inconvenience.
We stayed overnight in Amsterdam, the vouchers we were given barely covered the cost of two breakfasts on Monday morning, and, yes, we managed to make the connecting flight from Paris to Singapore. But we had now lost our overnight hotel booking in Singapore, and a visit I had been looking forward to was no longer going to happen.
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Six hours waiting in an airport is long enough to be bored, but not long enough to risk travelling into a city centre, look around and still get back in time for check-in for the next flight – particularly as our anxiety levels had been raised with the previous cancellations and rerouting.
Changi Airport is at the eastern end of Singapore and about 20 km from Singapore’s Downtown Core. So, we headed from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4 at Changi Airport, to make sure we were still on the connecting flight to Kuching. And then decided to enjoy the few hours we had been the terminals.
Changi is one of the busiest transit hubs in the world and one of the largest hub airports in south-east Asia, serving over 100 airlines and more than 60 million passengers a year. Its impressive amenities include a butterfly garden, a free 24-hour cinema, and a rooftop swimming pool.
We decided to have lunch at Jewel Changi Airport, a nature-themed entertainment and shopping complex where the centrepiece is the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, the Rain Vortex, surrounded by a terraced forest setting. The Shiseido Forest Valley is an indoor garden spanning five storeys, and the Canopy Park at the top level has gardens and leisure facilities.
Jewel was officially opened on 18 October 2019 and has about 40 to 50 million visitors a year. The toroidal glass-and-steel façade was designed by a consortium of architects, led by Moshe Safdie. The landscape architect was PWP Landscape Architecture, who co-designed the National 9/11 Memorial in New York City. The Rain Vortex was engineered by the water design firm WET Design. It has a 360-degree light and sound show projected onto it.
Jewel was planned to combine a marketplace and an urban park. The glass panels of the dome are framed in steel that rests on a complex latticework.
The Shiseido Forest Valley is one of Asia's largest indoor gardens, spanning five stories and approximately 22,000 sq m in the heart of Jewel Changi Airport. It includes around 3,000 trees and 60,000 shrubs of 120 species that live in high-altitude tropical forests from around the world.
The Rain Vortex at Changi Airport is 40 metres high and the world’s largest and tallest indoor waterfall (Patrick Comerford, 2024)
The Rain Vortex is 40 metres high and the world’s largest and tallest indoor waterfall. Recirculating rain water is pumped to the roof to free fall through a round hole at up to 37,850 litres per minute to a basement-level pool. An acrylic funnel at the bottom prevents splashing and insulates the sound of the cascade.
The toroid-shaped roof has more than 9,000 pieces of glass spanning 200 by 150 metres, with a sloped oculus as the mouth of the waterfall acting as ‘a continuation of the building … completed in a liquid form.’
At night, the circular walls of the waterfall becomes a 360-degree stage for a light-and-sound show.
To prevent excess humidity in the Jewel, the waterfall’s flow alternates between cascades and trickles that reduce air turbulence. The Changi Airport Skytrain connecting the terminals passes above ground near the waterfall, allowing passengers to see the Vortex and Jewel.
The park includes a suspension bridge, the Canopy Bridge, 23 metres above the ground which offers a panoramic view of the Rain Vortex.
Terminal 4 opened seven years ago in 2017, and has gained a reputation for its culture-centric boutique design and technology-driven innovations. T4 offers a visually immersive and theatrical experience with specially curated art and entertainment features by local and international artists.
The collection of art and entertainment formats was designed to be accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds. Inspired by the orchid, the national flower of Singapore, the interior design is shaped through symmetrical petal designs. The designs on the petal-shaped skylights, ceiling lights, marble flooring and carpets create a cohesive design language. The project is led by the SAA Architects Pte Ltd in collaboration with the award-winning UK-based international architecture firm Benoy Ltd.
The landscaping in the terminal covers 2,000 square metres, with 186 large trees, and 160 ficus trees form a ‘green’ boulevard along the boarding corridor, separating the boarding area from the common space at the departure gates.
The highlights of T4 include ‘Petalclouds’, a kinetic artwork of six identical metallic structures rotating overhead in the Central Galleria, spanning the 200 metre stretch linking T4’s public and transit areas.
The work is designed to evoke the impression of clouds moving through the sky. Each identical ‘cloud’ consists of 16 individual petal elements suspended on wires that slowly rotate the structures while transmitting power to lighting elements inside them. It was designed by the German artist collective ART+COM and undulates is in tandem with a soundtrack by the contemporary composer Ólafur Arnalds, aimed at creating a soothing antidote to pre-flight stress.
The Heritage Zone in the transit area offers a glimpse into the evolution of shophouse architecture from the 1880s to the 1950s, including the rich and colourful Peranakan heritage once often seen in Singapore’s Katong and Chinatown areas.
A row of boutique storefronts are designed to resemble the historic Peranakan shop-houses around Singapore. Each façade traces the evolution of shop-house architecture, starting with the baroque designs from 1880 to 1900, through to the post-war décor of the 1950s.
An LED screen embedded in the façade brings it to life with regular showings of Peranakan Love Story, a six-minute cultural theatre piece featuring an array of virtual characters that appear to mill about in the shop-house windows and living rooms. Narrating the story of an unlikely romance between two passionate musician-neighbours set in 1930s Singapore, the musical without dialogue is a collaboration with the Singaporean composer and artist Dick Lee.
T4 is also home to three physical art sculptures depicting a common theme of travel or aviation. Chong Fah Cheng, a sculptor from Singapore, created ‘Hey Ah Chek!’ in the check-in hall. The artwork shows a mother and her son hailing a trishaw after a visit to the market.
The French artist Cedric Le Borgne has created ‘Les Oiseaux’ (‘The Birds’) in the arrival and departure halls. The three bird sculptures are made from a collection of 3D-wire luminous characters that metaphorically represent the different emotions one tends to feel at an airport.
I could identify with the ‘Travelling Family’ by Kurt Laurenz Metzler, one of the many sculptures and artworks in the Departure Transit area at Terminal 4. In these sculptures, the artist seeks to capture the feelings of excitement and energy he felt with his family as they transited through New York and later at Changi Airport. It is representative of the familiar emotions passengers feel when setting off from an airport to experience the world.
The ‘Travelling Family’ is a set of aluminium sculptures Metzler created in 2017. He shows the joys and tribulations of a family on a journey, their excitement and frenzy that always go with travel.
This is Metzler’s fourth public sculpture in Singapore. His previous works, including ‘Building People’ (2008) and ‘Man on the Bench’ (2010), at Capital Tower in the Central Business District, and ‘Urban People’ (2009), at Orchard Road, a bustling shopping district.
T4 has been designed to make the airport visit a delightful experience that is fun, vibrant and full of surprises. I almost regretted the call for boarding. But I was happy to make the flight to Kuching, and we have arrived safely after a marathon than turned into an odyssey.
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