Skiing

Skiing — St Anton, Austria — Singapore to Zurich

Nick Morris

Mar 3, 2014 — 3 min read

Is this my craziest ski trip ever?

March 2014

So, this was the start of a crazy ski trip.

My starting point was Malaysia, and I was heading to St Anton in Austria. Getting there required a flight from Singapore to Zurich, Switzerland — followed by a train from Zurich to St Anton. Would it work? At the time, this was my longest flight so far to go skiing.

Taxi to Singapore Airport

The trip didn’t start well; the taxi arrived an hour early, and I hadn’t finished packing. The traffic to the airport was horrendous. What should have been a 50-minute trip from Malaysia to Singapore Airport took 2 hours and 30 minutes. Traffic was at a standstill through most of Singapore due to road works and accidents.

Singapore Airport

I like Singapore Airport. It is modern and efficient; if you know where to look, it has some great food. But the airport is also quirky. It has a habit of putting on odd displays and exhibitions. On this visit, there was something strange going on in terminal 2.

What was that all about?

On this visit to the airport, I did have an odd incident. At the security check, a bunch of keys in my travel bag caused a problem with the X-ray scanner. The keys have been through dozens of security checks all over the world and have never caused an issue. Most odd. No idea why.

Singapore to Zurich — Some flight stats

The flight from Singapore was on a Swiss Air Airbus A400–300. The total distance to Zurich was a little over 6,400 miles (ca. 10,300 km), and the flight took about 13 hours.

The takeoff from Singapore was interesting. From power up at the end of the runway to takeoff, planes usually take around 35 seconds. The Swiss Air flight took over 40 seconds for the wheels to get off the ground. The aircraft must have been at maximum fuel and load.

Zurich airport — Wi-Fi and the Observation Deck

At Zurich Airport, I had 8 to 10 hours to kill before the train to St Anton. So, what to do?

Surf the net

Zurich airport is a lovely modern airport with some good shops after security. However, their Wi-Fi policy is terrible. The Wi-Fi was the usual story: one hour for free and then an exorbitant price for extra time.

In 2014, you got a free 60 minutes, and then you had to pay — 1-hour cost of CHF 6.90, 4 hours CHF 9.90. They had the system so locked down that Starbucks was not allowed to offer free Wi-Fi. If you went to the airport lounges, you got handed a little sticker with a username and password with only 30 minutes of access instead of having free Wi-Fi. After your 30 minutes, you had to ask for another username and password. Totally nuts.

Watch the planes

I did get quite excited about an observation deck, as I thought I could spend some time watching planes. However, the ‘open’ free area didn’t have any views of planes.