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Published: February 23rd 2008
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Our last day in Singapore - we decided to visit Sentosa Island which lies five hundred metres off the south coast of Singapore. Sentosa is billed as “the city’s favourite resort getaway”, so as you can imagine it’s a mixture of Alton Towers with a bit of beach thrown in. Attractions on the island range from “Underwater World” - a massive aquarium, “Volcanoland” - a fantasy journey with an erupting volcano, “Musical Fountain and Magic Sentosa” - a sound light and laser extravaganza. None of these attractions attracted us funnily enough!!! We decided to take the cable car over to Sentosa rather than the MRT and found ourselves sharing a car with an Indian family who were in Singapore on a stop off as part of their cruise. The Cable car ride gave quite a decent view of the surrounding area and despite it stopping halfway across (for some unknown reason), we quite enjoyed it.
We came to the conclusion that the only thing of interest to us on Sentosa was the tour of Fort Siloso. Fort Siloso was built in the 1880’s as a Military Base to protect
Singapore which was then a British Colonial Port. The guns on
Siloso were later used to defend against the Japanese during WWII and it was also used by the Japanese as a POW camp at one point. The tour is a self guided one; you get to poke around in the tunnel network, see what a colonial barracks would have looked like and try out a mini assault course. The final part of the tour is the surrender chambers which has talking waxwork figures that re-create the surrender of both the Allies and eventually the Japanese.
After taking in so much history and culture it was time for lunch, we opted for sushi at a trendy sushi train restaurant, the food was lovely. After a quick look around the shops we hopped back onto the cable car and headed for the shopping malls on Orchard Road (again) to buy a digital camera for our mate Saj back in Goa.
“Night Safari” - these two words kept cropping up everywhere. The Lonely Planet guide reckons that many people count it as the highlight of their trip to Singapore. We’d read about it on loads of travel websites and blogs so we thought we might as well give it a try; we
hoped it would be a good alternative to a night on the tiles!!!
When we arrived we were surprised at the amount of people there. It took 15mins to queue and buy a ticket from one of the six counters and then another 35 mins to actually board one of the trams that takes you around the 40 hectare park. On board the tram you are given a guided tour of the park and are asked not to use flash photography because this disturbs the animals, and also not to try to pet or call out to any of the animals that might approach the tram - Tigers and Lions etc are kept in proper pens by the way and can be viewed close up through glass walls. To say that the Night Safari is a popular attraction would be an understatement! It was worse than Blackpool Pleasure Beach on a glorious Bank Holiday weekend, there was no way you could manage to see the animals in what is supposed to be a close representation of their natural habitat, purely because there are too many people shouting, screaming, banging on glass and trying their hardest to pet the animals. Believe
Night Safari
Dodgy photo at the so called Safari me the adults were worse than the kids!!! We were quite gutted not to have seen any tigers on the tram ride so hopped off at one of the stops and worked our way back to the tiger enclosure in the hope that we’d spot a couple. By this time it was getting late (11.30pm), the park was due to close at midnight so most of the noisy tourists had gone home. Luckily we were the only two around at the Tiger enclosure, we kept really quiet and after about 10 mins the biggest most powerful looking beast came out from his hiding place amongst the trees. He spotted us and started spraying all around, marking his territory while keeping a watchful eye on us!! After a couple of times of doing this he leapt towards the glass wall where we were standing, hovered on a log that had his massive claw marks indented in it and stood looking straight at us; then he turned around, lifted his tail and sprayed straight at us!! As we made our way back towards the park entrance we could hear his wild growls in the distance - either that or a tourist had gone under the wheel of a tram!
So, off to the Hotel to do some packing and try to get a couple of hours sleep before our early morning flight to Mumbai. Would we return to Singapore?…..well it wouldn’t be first on our list of Asian cities, it just doesn’t have the buzz of Hong Kong or Bangkok. There was no WOW factor for us but in saying that we did have a good time. The people were nice, the food was good and if you really, really love to shop you can’t go wrong.
We are currently planning our next trip - six weeks backpacking (oh yes, we can’t resist it - promise not to neglect our health and hygiene too much though). We’ll be heading off to Bangkok early May for a few days to pick up a visa for Vietnam and if all goes to plan we’ll be flying into Hanoi on or around the 10th May. If anyone’s interested we’ll be doing our best to update the Blog; Vietnam is a big place with LOADS of things to see, we’re also hoping that we’ll find time to pop over the border into Cambodia for a while so time permitting you can catch up with us on here.
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