Miscellaneous preparations

Up later than I'd have liked today, natch.

Called MBNA to see if I can get my credit card re-issued early as it
expires in February. No, I can't.

Called T-Mobile to enable roaming. That was OK, although their recorded
messages suggest you should turn off data roaming to avoid unexpected
charges, whereas their web site (last time I looked) and the bloke on
the phone who I spoke to today both said that you don't get any data
unless you use the phone's browser to buy a data booster, so there's no
need to turn data roaming off explicitly (unless, I guess, you have
bought a booster but don't want the phone burning through it). It's so
freaking expensive that I doubt I'd buy a booster, but I will probably
turn data roaming off anyway. They can't put a cap on the account so the
bill can't go over say £50 a month, nor are they capable of issuing me
with a text warning when the bill crosses a certain threshold. I can
text BAL to 150 but - I asked - they will charge me a roaming text
charge for sending that text message just like any other. So basically
you have to check your balance on the web, if you happen to have a free
data connection. I already knew the whole roaming business was a
complete customerfuck anyway, of course. Obviously you can buy a local
SIM but I may or may not bother - in Georgia I probably won't, perhaps
in Thailand or India I will; basically I want this so I can receive
texts (which is free, fortunately) from family and friends in the event
of minor or not so minor emergencies, and also so I can get verification
codes from Google when signing into GMail, plus the ability to receive
and make calls in the event of serious emergencies at my end or back in
the UK.

Have booked a hostel (double bed to myself, shared bathroom) in Tbilisi
for Sunday-Tuesday nights; I paid hostelworld £5 for a gold card to
avoid the £1 admin charge per booking, as with my previous trips I am
sure I will use them at least a further four times during the next five
months, let alone the next year. Paid a 10% deposit now and the rest on
arrival, as usual; also this way I suppose if I do want to change my
mind I can forfeit the relatively small deposit and book something else.
(However, the hotel on expedia I was also considering now appears to
have no availability anyway.) The hostel offers airport transfers but I
shall take a look at the guide book at some point over the next day or
two and see if I think it might be easier to manage that myself. Arrival
time offered me the choice of 10am, 11am or midday, I chose 10am but I
don't know if I will be able to get into my room then. (It may depend
how busy they are, if the room is vacant the previous night then they
may let me in anyway.) They do offer free tea and coffee all day so I
always have the option of sitting around in the hostel keeping myself
awake on caffeine for a bit anyway.

As per my usual paranoia - I am sure I read this somewhere, I didn't
make it up out of nothing - I am not going to note down the name of the
hostel until I've finished staying there. Off the top of my head I
really can't say why this matters, but there you go.

Looking at the onward flights, I land in Bangkok early in the morning of
Tuesday 29th October. I guess I want to be back in London on about
Saturday 21st December. That's about 53 days (I am being fuzzy because
you sort of don't want to count the last day if you're flying back
then). Let's knock one day off for the flight Singapore-Delhi (let's say
Bangkok-Singapore is short enough we don't need to worry about it) and
decide to spend four nights in Singapore. That leaves 48 days between
India and Thailand. Perhaps unfairly - especially given I haven't
actually bought or looked at a guide to Thailand yet - I am inclined to
split that slightly less than equally in favour of India. (It may be a
bit silly, and perhaps I'm rationalising my preference, but with the
visa hassle for India, I am perhaps slightly more likely to visit
Thailand in a fairly casual manner on a future trip, whereas to go to
India I would probably feel I had to spend at least 2-3 weeks there to
be worth the visa hassle.)

Three weeks in Thailand would see my fly out on Tuesday November 19th,
presumably during the day and arriving in Singapore in time to do
something that night. So my four nights in Singapore would then leave me
flying out Saturday 23rd November. I am half inclined to give Thailand
an extra day or two so I get to have Friday and Saturday night in
Singapore. Let's plough on as-is for now and see how it goes.

I would arrive in Delhi the same day I left Singapore. Four weeks in
India would see me leaving on Saturday 21st December. It's vaguely
tempting to try to get back a day or two earlier in the hope of catching
up with friends (who tend to be around mostly during the week), but
Christmas being Christmas I'm not overly confident any of them would be
around, certainly not enough to make it worth losing a day or two's
holiday. I might choose to stay in London and travel back up to Skegness
on Christmas Eve, which would give me the Monday to maybe see people.

That split is perhaps pushing it a bit too far in India's favour, and I
think the weekend in Singapore argument resolves it by suggesting
(subject to flight prices varying hugely day to day) I should extend
Thailand by two days and cut India back by two.

So that gives me these propose dates:
- Bangkok-Singapore Thursday 21st November
- Singapore-Delhi Monday 25th November
- Delhi-London Saturday 21st December

Let's crank up the flight websites and see what's on offer.

Bangkok-Singapore is a short, cheap flight anyway. ITA offers as
cheapest flight on 21st November £68 with Jet BKK 13:25-SIN 16:55, and
those times look pretty good too. (Date makes little difference on ITA.)

Singapore-Delhi doesn't seem very date-sensitive judging from ITA, so
let's go with Monday 25th November. Absolute cheapest is £156 via CMB,
10h all in. For £187 Air India do a direct flight SIN 0915-DEL 1230.
That departure is a bit earlier than I'd like, but it gives me plenty of
daylight to get to my hotel in Delhi on arrival. Also it will encourage
me to have a quiet Sunday night in Singapore, and I am assuming that in
Singapore the transport to the airport is going to be relatively easy.
We'll see what expedia can do but on ITA that Air India flight looks
about the best option regardless of how much money I'm willing to spend.

Delhi-London doesn't seem very date-sensitive either, so let's go with
Saturday 21st December. British Airways do a £336 flight DEL 1230-16:15
LHR direct, which looks pretty good. Absolute cheapest is £246 via RUH,
17h 25m all in; for that price difference I'll take the direct flight.

[I don't know where CMB and RUH are, though I might guess they are
Ceylon - duh, it's Colombo actually I think [filled this in later!] -
and Riyadh. I'm using the airport codes here to save writing anything
inaccurate while also not bothering to look them up.]

For Bangkok-Singapore expedia offers some £61 flights via Air Asia at a
variety of times; these seem to be from DMK not BKK. That is indeed in
Bangkok (just checking!) and I guess that would be fine. If I can find
somewhere to book the Jet flight shown on ITA then that's slightly
better times IMO; expedia can offer AirAsia DMK 1315-SIN 1640 for £70 if
I can't. (I think Andy said the opportunity to add-on a hotel when you
book with expedia is sometimes worthwhile, whereas I'd assumed
otherwise, so I should perhaps investigate this before I book anything,
especially if I am going to try for something nice.)

For Singapore-Delhi expedia's absolute cheapest is £165 via Colombo.
They don't seem to offer any direct flights comparable in price with the
ITA Air India flight; the cheapest direct is £252 SIN 19:35-DEL 22:55,
so I think if I can find somewhere to book it the ITA one wins there.

For Delhi-London expedia's absolute cheapest is £278 via Moscow (15h
20m). They are offering the same BA flight shown on ITA for £346; I will
hunt around but it may be that ITA is slightly off on that and that's
the actual price I'd pay to book it.

So, what is expedia offering by way of add-on hotels? Absolute cheapest
are some hostel-type things, it's hard to just write down a single
cheapest price as it's all a bit fuzzy. There might be some kind of
hostel place which would give me a double room (not clear if it would be
just for me, or I'd have to pay double) for £63.54 a night. I guess if I
want a hostel I can probably - I will check in a bit - do it cheaper and
more flexibly myself via hostelworld. Let's move up the price range.
There is a hotel offering a "superior room" for £30.18 a night, not sure
if it's a great location or not (Geylang). Sorting by "best value", I
can get a "superior room" at a different hotel "in the heart of
Singapore City Centre" (Little India) for a tad over £100 a night. That
does include free wifi, although it then goes to say there is a
surcharge for wifi in the rooms (it's a hotel, naturally they chisel you
left right and centre).

The cheaper places in Geylang seem to offer genuine free wifi (this is
important, but not as important as I perhaps make it sound just now!)
for a tad over £50 a night (I do wonder if the £30 a night thing was
with the 20% discount for staying just one night, not clear).
Incidentally, it's also not super clear if this is a cheap deal with the
flight or not.

Quick web search suggests Geylang is the red light district (to be fair,
this is mentioned right on the expedia hotel pages). Rough consensus
seems to be that it is safe but it's not clear if it has good transport
links or not. Some say you'd be nuts to stay there are there are other
nice areas which are cheap, others say it is a bit more real than other
parts of Singapore.

Frankly I think I need to get a guide book (electronic of course) and
have a skim before I decide what to do. Of course in some sense booking
my initial Bangkok hotel is more pressing, because I will be there much
sooner, but the question here is deciding roughly what I want and what I
expect to pay so I can see if there is any combined flight+hotel deal
which will save me money.

OK, having had a browse on amazon bought Rough Guide to Singapore. It
was the most expensive they have, but for slightly hazy reasons I
figured I'd go for that one. (Perhaps because I think the formatting etc
on the electronic Rough Guide to India is much better than on the
electronic Lonely Planet Georgia..) Also it was the most up to date,
being a 2013 edition.

Hmm, as far as I can see expedia only allow you to do a flight+hotel
search if you want a return flight. Let's re-search for a flight and see
if it offers any hotel add-ons (although when I was looking at the
prices above, it just seemed to sit there with some kind of searching
animation for ages). Yeah, it's doing that again. Sod it.

I have a couple of hotels in mind at the budget end of the range
(£250-260 for four nights, free wifi, fairly good location, small
windowless rooms but WTF) but I am not going to rush in to book them
just yet. I might do some booking later today and it might even include
this, but I'm not quite that rushed.

Let's just have a try at the multi-stop ticket. expedia let you do this
as well, I just never noticed/bothered. Bwahahaha! The *cheapest* on
expedia, without paying attention to desirability of the flights, is
£1098. The individual flights I picked out above come in at about £591
(adding up the ITA prices just to get a quick figure).

opodo comes in at £501 for the cheapest (which has a 22h 10m flight from
Bangkok to Singapore) and £580 for the next cheapest (which has a 16h 5m
flight Bangkok-Singapore). Basically unless calling up some airline
would somehow massively beat this, I think the multi-stop ticket is no
good at least for the particular combination of flights I want here.
Maybe if I were doing more flights on the ticket (e.g. London-Bangkok as
well) it would be better, but as mentioned earlier (I think) the lack of
flexibility in choosing individual flights also sucks. I will consider
the possibility for the Latin American part of the trip but for this
part, it's not going to be a multi-stop ticket.

I'm going to send this and have something to eat; I've been building
this up over the afternoon/evening so far. I think the next most
pressing booking is a hotel for my arrival in Bangkok, as that's the
nearest unbooked thing which I want to book before I leave home. After
that it's the flight on to Singapore and the hotel there; I might well
book the flights up today or in the next day or two, before I get any
unpleasant surprises with price hikes and to give me the best chance of
getting aisle and/or emergency exit row seats.