We aren’t ordinarily a five-star hotel family, but we needed a hotel room with enough space for two cots, and the discount deal we found for the Signature Suite at the Fairmont Singapore turned out to be only a little more than the cheapest reasonable alternatives. So we treated ourselves to a luxury. After all, the point of stopping in Singapore was to relax and recover.

The foyer of the Fairmont is cavernous and tranquil. The subdued lighting and rich textures generate a powerful atmosphere of serenity that contrasts with the surrounding hubbub on the streets. The layout of fountains, couches, sculptures and service desks is unexpectedly organic. And it is populated with immaculate, smiling characters, none more cultivated than the diminuitive and exquisitely deferential maîtresse d’hotel, who gravitates from guest to guest like an adoring satellite. It is easy to see why people are willing to pay the full price to stay here.

We reached our room and ordered a litre of milk via room service for an impressive S$24 (which was A$20 at the time). At 1:00am local time, with kids to re-settle, we weren’t complaining. And we did get the twins back to sleep, but Loxon’s finely tuned internal clock had inexplicably recalibrated to Singapore’s timezone — he awoke on the dot at 5:40am, his modal wake-up time in Australia.

Reasonably priced milk was, in fact, not far away. The Fairmont adjoins the Raffles City shopping mall, replete with supermarkets and restaurants, so there is no necessity to leave the building if you prefer to stay cocooned. The mall is by I. M. Pei, designer of the Louvre’s glass pyramid, and includes a lounge area on the top floor. A fitness products company has thoughtfully set up a trampoline adjacent to the lounge, providing the perfect way for young ones to release some pent up energy.

Here Wiki waits his turn, while Loxon demonstrates his squat-jump technique. The other bouncer is Natasha Sommer. Yan and Natasha were on their way through Singapore heading to the Beijing Olympics, and we were delighted to catch up with them for lunch and a swim.

By far the best feature of the Fairmont was the swimming deck, which has two circular pools. The smaller one is wading depth and ideal for kids. Having whet their whims for water at the Bondi Junction Meriton, Wiki and Loxon went forward in leaps and bounds in the hot, humid conditions. Wiki, spurred on by a Dutch boy, even experimented with leaping into the pool from the side, which Yan managed to capture on video.

We didn’t try to be tourists in Singapore, instead relaxing as much as possible before the second and longer leg of our journey. We did shop briefly in the famous district along Orchard Road, but found the prices only mildly cheaper than those in Sydney. With the subsequent fall in the Australian dollar, Australia is possibly the cheapest place in the world right now for consumer electronics, at least until inventories are exhausted and prices adjust to the exchange rate.

We also discovered a handy use for modern Internet cafés: with screens as large, and bandwidth as quick, as they are these days, it is a simple matter to entertain your child while catching up on email. Open a window on one half of the screen with a cartoon (in the language of your choice) playing from YouTube, place the headphones on the child’s head, then use the rest of the screen for yourself. Even discounting your own ‘net use, the child entertainment is about the cheapest per hour you can find anywhere.

The stopover was well worth the extra time it took, and we were well-rested when it came time to catch our flight to Frankfurt. The plane was a 747, much less impressive than the A380, but for us more practical. Business class has a central bank of three seats, and pairs of seats at the windows. This arrangement allowed us to seat both the boys away from an aisle. The seats, when folded down, are not far from fully flat in any case.

We managed to make the thirteen hour flight coincide with the kids’ nighttime sleep, so they slept for about half of it. They were then well awake as we descended into a sunny morning in Frankfurt. Sabine, Marion’s sister, collected us from there in her seven-seater Mazda 5 (having three seats in the second row means you still have five seats after folding down the rearmost row to accommodate luggage). It is lucky though that Mark had resisted indulging in the sumptuous business class meals, because someone had to squeeze between the child seats on either side of the middle row for the ride to Mannheim.