WHEN the plane landed, I was ready to grab my bags, clear immigration and get started on my four-day holiday in Shanghai.
Instead, more than an hour after landing, I was still stuck on the plane with about 30 other passengers, long after the others had gone.
We were given face masks, told to put them on, and later shepherded to a hotel two hours away from the city.
All this because I was seated a few rows from a man with fever.
Soon after SQ 830 landed at the Pudong International Airport on Saturday afternoon, health officials wearing personal protection equipment boarded the aircraft and walked down the aisles with a handheld thermal scanner.
At each row, they stopped and pointed the scanner at every passenger.
They passed me without incident, but came to a halt just a few rows behind and descended on a man, who looked Asian and in his 40s.
He was running a temperature of 38 deg C.
With the World Health Organisation declaring the Influenza A (H1N1) a pandemic, the authorities were not taking any chances.
We were told that until they could rule out the virus, we would have to be kept under quarantine, even though my temperature read a very normal 36.7 degrees.
My group, which also had several cabin crew, included a mix of Singaporeans, Japanese, Chinese and Indonesians.
Masks on, we were marched out of the plane and onto a bus, where we picked out our bags through the window from a parade of suitcases.
The hotel set aside for quarantine purposes was tucked away in the dusty Bao Shan district industrial zone, a full two-hour drive from the airport.
It had a simple name - the b Hotel - and the conditions there were even simpler.
Instead of smiles, the hotel staff wore N95 face masks and were decked from head to toe in protective garb.
As for the luggage, well, there was no eager bellboy and we had to lug our bags into the rooms ourselves.
People gave us a wide berth. They seemed to stop breathing when we walked by. Even our passports were sealed securely in separate Ziploc bags.
We were told not to leave the hotel until the all-clear was given. In fact, we weren't even supposed to leave our rooms.
The television signals were too weak to be able to watch much TV, but the Internet, air-conditioning and showers were working.
Dinner was brought to my room by men in space suits, and was a spread of delicious tempura prawns, spicy pork with bamboo shoots, Chinese spinach, rice and a side of melon soup with pork ribs.
According to a flight attendant, whose colleagues had been through quarantine on previous flights, release could come overnight if the passenger tested negative for H1N1, or only in a week, if positive.
Thankfully, I woke up the next morning to hear that the passenger in seat 47K did not have H1N1 and we were free to go.
I finally got to my boutique hotel right in the heart of Shanghai city's bustling shopping strip.
A precious day of my holiday had gone simply because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The burning question for me was whether there could have been more done to keep passenger 47K off the flight in the first place.
At Changi Airport, thermal scanners catch inbound passengers with fever, but not outbound travellers.
With H1N1 now spreading worldwide, why not try to catch everyone who could have the virus, whether they are entering, or leaving, Singapore?
