Singapore

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The flight to Singapore was the shortest flight I have ever been on despite the delay we had due to a storm over the airport! When we arrived at the hostel the girl there was sooo friendly and gave us lots of information about where to go in the local area and what to visit in the city - she basically planned an itinery for us, which was great and save us time researching things!

Thursday evening we went out and tried some of the local cuisine. I had vegetarian rice dupplings, a very strange but tastey food! They are made of glutinous rice and what I suspected was sultanas or raisins of some sort. I also bought some of the local "desserts" from a shop down the road. They are sweets also made of rice - very difficult to describe!! They taste like nothing I have ever tried before!! I also bought so trufles from a shop called "awfuly chocolate" which were very yummy!

On Friday we went into the city. We caught the bus to Chinatown, and had a look round the Chinese market. I bought a necklace and had my name engraved on it in Chinese. The stone which it is on means eternal health and happiness 😊 We then visited the Chinese heritage museum which tells the story of how the Chinese moved to Singapore and the awful things which they encountered. Many died on the boat over and were thrown over bored and very yound children would come and work for such little pay. They was a big gambling and opium trade and a lot of prostitution. It was all quite sad to read about and despite feeling really sick today I couldn't help but count myself lucky! Next we saw the oldest Indian and oldest Chinese temples in Singapore, which were some very interesting buildings. It then started to rain very heavily, so we took shelter at the temple for a while before rushing to somewhere to eat. After the rain eased off a bit we headed to the marina. Its a pretty cool place, and really modern. We took some good photos here just a shame about the grey cloudy skies! We went through a massive shopping mall with all designer top end shops to go to the "Art and Science Museum" which turned out to be a misleading name, as it had nothing to do with art or science but just held one exhibit on the titanic so we decided not to go in. We walked over the helical bridge which is supposed to represent human DNA and got soaked again in the rain. We then went on the Singapore flyer - the world's biggest observation wheel (like the London eye but bigger!) It had great views of Singapore but again shame about the cloudy skies and rain on the windows in our photos.

On Saturday we went to Singapore zoo. It is a rainforest zoo so some of the animal range semi-freely, but nothing too dangerous and most have moats around areas of trees, but it was good to see the animals weren't caged in. The zoo has a lot of orangutans which was definitely the highlight for me! They had a main section with climbing frames and trees but they can also leave this and roam through nearby trees and across the ropes. It was brilliant to see the able to move around so freely and I caught the feeding session where so of the orangutans came right down to the groud to the keepers and there was a talk about them and an opportunity to get your photo taken with them - which I couldn't resist, and as my camera battery had died by this point I ended up buying the photo too. It was probably the only time I will ever get to be soo close to real orangutans! Other good things at the zoo were the lions, tigers, elephants, chimpanzees and many more!!

Afrer the zoo we night to the night safari which was a few minutes down the road. Here they take you on a tram ride through the park and there are opportunities to get off an explore different trails. If the name isn't a bit of a give away...its at night and therefore in the dark! This made it kind of eerie but pretty cool. Some of the animals were a bit difficult to see due to this but we got to see most of them and the tram would drive right past them. Again most of the animals weren't in cages and we saw things such as rhinos, hippos, deer, buffalo ect. We then went to the animal show in a big outdoor theatre where the keepers put on a show with some of the animals and get them to do various tricks. One poor guy got pulled out of the audience and had a MASSIVE snake of some sort placed on his shoulders that curled all around him!! By the end of this we were pretty shattered and got back around midnight.

On Sunday we went for a walk to the beach, where there was a lovely view of all the boats out at sea and it was just really peaceful, before catching our afternoon flight to Perth, Australia!!!!

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