Singapore, again!

Nice to return for another edition of the IESE Global CEO Program in which I am doing some facilitating each day this coming week. It was a little tense to get here - see later!

It has been a 21-hour door-to-door trip with a 7-hour time zone shift loaded onto another 21-hour door-to-door Rio to Barcelona trip with a four hour time difference last Monday. I don’t think I have ever done so many kilometres before more or less in one direction in one week - over 20,000 km (half the circumference of the Earth) from Rio via Amsterdam and Barcelona to Singapore - 15,700 km direct, if you were doing it as the crow flies. Barcelona to Sydney, which I’ve done a few times, is about 17,500 km.

An added bonus was that the plane, three quarters of the way over the Med, deviated south from its standard route over Gaza and Jordan (presumably for security reasons) and flew directly over Cairo. I saw the Nile for the first time since pre-pandemic.

Previously, we had had great excitement on Friday as I did my electronic ICA visitor application for Singapore and was confronted with the need to declare that when I arrived there today I had been in a yellow-fever listed country (Brazil) within six days before arrival (the incubation period of the disease). I was within that window by about eight hours! To enter, the requirement is to have a WHO yellow fever certificate. I knew I got one over twenty years ago but had no idea if I still had it or where it was. We searched the whole house and found it in a leather bound box called ‘The Gentleman’s Box’ which contains a whole range of curiosities from my and my late father’s life!

The relief was short lived as it bore the date June 2002 and stated a ten-year expiry limit. Some frantic googling established that the WHO had resolved in 2016 that a single shot at any time lasted for a life time . . . but would the strict Singapore government accept that. There was an indication in their literature that they would but nothing explicit, and articles along with calls with doctors in both Scotland and Spain suggested that many countries were more fickle than others and wanted an updated certificate. After consultation with IESE, I decided to travel rather than delay the trip by a day and miss the start of the program. The penalty would be to go into quarantine in Singapore - whether for the missing day or the whole six days was not known.

So, it was bated breaths on entry (mine and DD’s in bed in Barcelona at 4am) that I was taken aside from the automatic passport gates and had my yellow fever certificate examined. It passed the test without comment, or even a close study of the slightly grubby yellow booklet, but it was still nail biting as I waited and tried to look fever-less cool! They took more face photos and thumb fingerprints before leading me down a corridor to the left with a ‘Come this way!). My companions cheered as I emerged from a door at the end of said corridor into land side of Singapore!

For the curious, you can’t just go out and get a new vaccination as it takes ten days to come into effect. Also, the Singapore consulate in Barcelona and embassy in Madrid were both closed on a Friday afternoon to check requirements.

Still, all good and all set to go!