Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder coming to you from

lovely and very warm Singapore. I'm going to talk about getting here. Well my goodness, the flight

paths over Russia and Ukraine are of course closed.

And anybody who has a look at the map will see that the swiftest way to get to Singapore

is to go out over northern Europe, across Belarus, over quite a lot of Russia, then a great deal of Kazakhstan,

end to end, and then over some of China and Southeast Asia, and then you are here.

That cannot be done at the moment. Russian airspace is closed.

Furthermore, Ukrainian airspace, of course, is closed. Furthermore, Ukrainian airspace of course is closed.

That means that all the planes are forced into a corridor that's effectively south of Crimea.

You tend to go cutting a corner of the Black Sea and then going over northern Turkey.

And partly there's all sorts of delays for air traffic control reasons.

Partly also, it's just a long way around.

So it took over 13 hours to get here.

And I just thought that's too long and I've been

sleeping well excessively since I got here because there is simply exhaustion after that long

long flight so what I want to talk about is something which I've long recommended but don't seem to get to do myself due to pressure of time.

And that is the marvellous do-it-yourself better-than-business-class arrangement of daytime flights.

And here's how it works.

I mean, my flight left, well, it was late, and finally left at

about nine o'clock in the evening and got into Singapore, about six in the evening. And during that

13 hours, well, down the back in economy on a ramp plane you're

never going to get much sleep however if i had done the civilized thing it would have been much easier

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