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Published: August 10th 2007
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There are 3 main types of backpacker. There’s the up first thing, pack in lots of sightseeing and activities and relatively early to bed. Then there’s the opposite: sleep most of the day, get up in the afternoon and then go boozing each night. Finally there is the strangest of the lot, who get up late, go to bed early and spend the handful of hours in between lounging around the hostel ‘saving money’. Perhaps travelling to them means just being away from home rather than actually seeing anything or doing anything whilst there. Anyway, there are a lot of the third type in our current hostel, one of whom even had a mid-afternoon nap; we are working hard to confirm membership of the first type and were up at dawn and got to the Singapore Art Museum before it opened. We went for coffee and sat next to a really boring pair of pilots who spent half an hour or so discussing landing approaches at various airports and fuel levels. It’s good that they are always looking to improve by bouncing ideas of one another, but a bit worrying how many times they mentioned some safety manual and said “Hmmm,
perhaps I’d better read up on that bit”.
The art museum was well presented but not really to our taste. Several collections of modern-ish local artists, and we were very grateful to have opted against the guided tour which was going tortuously slowly. Next up was a place called ‘Battle Box’, a kind of underground lair used by the British in World War 2. The complex of tunnels and the themed museum were interesting and quite well done, but the clear highlight was our 71 year old tour guide. He must have looked, well, about 71 really. That’s despite him beginning with stories about how everyone thinks he’s so much younger. Perhaps someone told him 10 years ago that he looked 61 and he hasn’t realised that time has moved on. But that’s beside the point of this story. You see he was a young child in Singapore when the Japanese invaded, and has been left with some very strong (and obviously understandable) views. But whether a tour guide should be referring to Japanese visitors to this attraction as ‘those old Japanese monkeys’, or tell people that the YMCA hostel should be called the ‘torture chamber’ because that’s where
the Japanese did their torturing, is another matter. As detached tourists we actually found it quite refreshing to hear someone saying what they actually thought rather than a verbatim recital of a polished corporate-speak marketing brochure. And he was completely genuine. It was similarly interesting to hear his negative opinion of the world’s greatest ever conversationalist and Pol Roger Champagne drinker, Winston Churchill. He finished by claiming to have seen 3 ghosts of Japanese soldiers in the 10 years since the complex opened (the Japanese committed suicide en masse to avoid capture) and… HE SAW A FOURTH ONE THIS MORNING. What an amazing coincidence.
We had a spot of lunch at a market with a ‘Doran Korean Food’ stand, wondering if their investors were found all over Europe, and wandered around Sim Lim Mall which is dedicated to an awful lot of electronics. We sat on beanbags and drank Blue Mountain coffee, this time wondering how our budget was getting on.
After a quick shower and an attempt to look a little smarter we visited the bar on the Swisshotel’s 70th floor for some amazing views and Tiger beer. In the evening we had tickets to see part of the Singapore Music Festival called ‘MOSAIC’ and it was fantastic, so much so that Gemma bought a CD of it, even managing to push her way with all the other fans to get it signed by the artists.. The act included a Japanese double-bass player who has somehow turned his instrument into a very effective solo act. After Ed had gone through a painful questionnaire the questioner (a schoolboy) started asking the double-bass player what he thought of tonight’s performance before his boss pointed out his mistake!
And last but by no means least, back at the hostel we met up with Meredith, an American girl we got to know and like in Namibia, but after such a hectic day all we could manage was a couple of Tigers and then bed.
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