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Published: September 1st 2008
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Cooling down
Singapore Botanical Gardens Hi all, just a quick update covering our last couple of weeks in Singapore and S.E. Malaysia.
After a pleasant 8 hour flight from Brisbane we landed in steamy, sultry Singapore - 'The City State' just 36 miles north of the equator. Tina's never been before but my last visit 15 years ago was as a penniless backpacker and my memories were not that fond. Fortunately, this time around was much better.
Singapore is a striking blend of the ultra-modern opulence of the downtown business district, with its skyscrapers and the plush top-end shopping malls of Orchard Road, contrasted with the shabby racousness of areas like Little India and Chinatown with their street-front eateries, chinese baroque architecture and burning offerings and incense sticks on every street corner.
Staying in a Chinese enclave to the east of the city meant that every mealtime was an adventure for us. We'd generally eat at 'Hawker markets', huge covered areas with a variety of food stalls serving all manner of wonderful concoctions. You can get just about anything you want to eat, as long as it comes with rice or noodles. With all the menus written in Mandarin our choices were pretty
much down to put luck. When there was an English translation items such as 'Fatty's wan ton mee', 'Bo-Bo Cha Cha' or 'Hot/Cold Quing Tang' left us just as mystified. Whilst we both love chinese food, after 5 days of it for every meal even a McDonalds started to look tempting. The most difficult meal for us was always breakfast, the local favorite breakfast dish being porridge. Except it wasn't of your Quaker oats variety. Pork Porridge, Frog Poridge, Century egg Porridge etc, and I'll leave it to you to guess the name for male chicken with porridge.
Anyway, we had some pleasant day trips out to the Botanical gardens, Little India with its temples and street markets and generally wandering up and down Orchard Road trying to stay out of the heat by visiting the ubiquitous shopping malls. even the locals seem to find the heat and humidity here oppressive and draining.
After 5 days we caught a bus over the Singapore straits and into Malaysia. A 2 hour taxi ride north through Palm oil plantations brought us to Mersing where we had a 3 hour fast catamaran trip to the small island of Pulau Tioman. Apparently
'Time" magazine had named Tioman in its list of Top 10 islands in the world although we weren't too sure what criteria you would use for such a list.
Anyway, list or no list, it definitely was very pleasant. Lapped by limpid turquoise waters, fringed with coral reefs and with an impenetrable central spine of moutainous forests it certainly is visually stunning. The beaches are frequented by metre long Monitor lizards and we were quite often joined for breakfast by a troupe of local monkeys. There were also bats and flying beetles the size of bats to contend with.
One of our main reasons for visiting though was because of Tiomans reputation as a dive site. With a water temperature of 30 degrees and vast coral reefs lying just off-shore I decided that it was time for me to finally get signed off as a diver and was really pleased to complete my certification whilst having the chance to undertake some stunning dives. Meanwhile Tina enjoyed the beach life and some great snorkelling with, amongst other marine creatures too numerous to mention, some turtles.
Whilst we probaly wouldn't put Tioman in our own top 10 islands, at
20GBP per night for a super de-luxe room, the diving and snorkelling alone were worth the price. So all in all a very pleasant and rewarding 9 days.
We then headed back to Singapore and our new hotel just 200 metres from the world famous Raffles hotel. Singapore is currently gearing up to host the first night time Formula 1 Grand Prix and there was a palpable sense of excitement here as the street course is prepared.
We visited the Long Bar at Raffles for a Singapore Sling and upon entering arguably the most famous bar in the world it was like stepping back into the colonial 1880's, apart from the price of the drinks!
We had some fun another night trying a 'steamboat' for dinner at a local street restaurant. Basically you are given a huge bowl of steaming broth on a hot plate into which you drop raw fish, seafood, vegetables, meat and dumplings. Once the items float in the broth they are cooked and you remove them deftly (or not) with your chopsticks and gobble them down on an eat as much as you can basis. Great fun but probably not something we could
Singapore Slingers
Long Bar, Raffles Hotel. face every night although the huge queues for them attest to their popularity.
A few more visits out to see the sights and that was Singapore pretty much done for us; Singapore Cricket Club and the riverside, Hokkien and other various temples, Raffles' landing site, the infamous Bugis Market where we bought a "Happy, Smiling Cat who waves and brings you good luck' and had our fortunes told by a Parrot,
Tomorrow its a flight to Kuala Lumpur for us and then onto Indonesia for a jaunt through Sumatra and Java before ending up in Bali for a well deserved rest.
Hope this finds you all well
Love
D&T
Calamity Corner
This episode is referred to by Tina as "your Vicar of Dibley moment" and she then proceeds to laugh hysterically every time she thinks about it.
We were returning to Singapore through a monsoon-like downpour and because of some construction work our taxi dropped us off 500 metres from the border crossing. Threading our way through the back alleys past the construction site, with me as path-finder, we safely negotaited some shallow puddles. Unfortunately, the next one I stepped into literally came up to
The Old & the New
Hokkien Temple and Singapore Skyscraper my middle. With my backpack on I was unable to get out of the hole unaided and just bobbed up and down on the surface whilst Tina sweetly enquired "what are you doing?"
In order to get to me without falling into the hole herself, Tina had to grab hold of a chain link fence and siddle along a narrow precipice all the while hoping that her own backpack wouldn't topple her over on top of me. Hearing all the commotion and the rattling of the fence several builders came to see what all the fuss was about but rather than offer any actual help they just hooted and cheered encouragement from the sidelines clearly enjoying the crazy antics of the 'Foreign Devils'.
We finally made it to Passport control, soaked, bloodied and dripping copious amounts of muddy water from our backpacks much to the amusement of the Customs officers.
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kevster
non-member comment
A porridge made from male chickens you say.....
... Rooster porridge? Bantam porridge? Cockerel porridge? *scratches head* ... *gives up*