Asia, By Ikea

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Apologies if the nonsense to photo ratio goes to DEFCON III in this article - I just couldn't be bothered lugging my camera around Singapore. Lots of lovely photos of Bali and Lombok coming in the next report, plus the odd briny tale of adventure and derring do.

To my recollection, which is not always the best, the only time I have been served a pint of foaming ale by a completely stark naked barman was in the Tumbledown Dick, Farnborough, Hampshire. I had just left college and was sharing a flat with two other young men of (fairly) like mind, in a splendid mansion-like property slap bang in the heart of middle-class, middle-management commuterdom. Our large property was divided into four separate flats, with a grand drive, allocated parking spaces and leafy gardens. Although we were really very well behaved we apparently let the side down somewhat, at least according to our neighbours. We mainly put this down to occasional visits from "Mad Bob", a Scottish IT Contractor at my office. Our street, and in fact the whole area, was also very leafy and serene. A squirrel couldn't fart without curtains twitching.

Which makes it odd that our nearest hostellry should be the Tumbledown Dick, a place very definitely from the other side of the tracks (or dual carriageway in this case). As it was the early nineties, before Father Ted, we had just been to an all-you-can-eat Pizza contest. We rolled into the Tumbledown with our bellies hard with Pizza, emulating Cool Hand Luke, hoping the beer might help dissolve some of the greasy thick-crust base we had been devouring. It took a double take to realise the smiling fellow behind the bar had no shirt on, and several seconds more to realise he was completely in the buff. As we struck up conversation he revealed it was his birthday and he was celebrating. So, it seemed, was the other barman.

The human body is amazing; Just as the eye normalises different colour temperatures in a way that camera film cannot, so our minds quickly adapted to this altered reality. We sat around our table quietly reliving moments of Pizza glory, discussing tactis and strategy and generally chewing the cud, whilst our two naked friends pranced around the bar like a naturist Batman and Robin, fighting crime (empties) and dispensing justice (beer).

The reason I bring all this up is that visiting Singapore again reminded me a little of our suburban safe-haven in affluent Hampshire, and on thinking a little further I realised that our time in Hong Kong had reminded me more than a little of the Tumbledown Dick.

Singapore is Asia as done by Ikea; or if you prefer Conran; or maybe Huxley, Aldous. But then this is not necessarily a bad thing. Last time visited was shortly after the night above, when I had fled the country to try to rid myself of the awful trauma (remember that things appear closer than they are when underwater, or seen through a glass of beer). I was actually coming to the end of a years travelling and was low on budget and longer on time, I quite disliked the place. It was expensive and it didn't take much scratching beneath the surface to reveal the same chaotic inefficiency we had experienced in so many much poorer places. This time however, with less time and a little more money, we've been pleasantly surprised. Despite the cost, which is actually less than HK, we found it nice to be whisked along the efficient subway, accompanied by pleasantly attired if slightly glum looking "alpha plus pluses" and "beta minuses", to emerge in the Brave New World of Singapore's litter free shopping precincts and fashion malls. After the last couple of months we had no problem with everyone speaking English and everything gleaming brightly in the tropical sun.

Singapore wasn't on our original schedule, but it turned out the cheapest way to get Northern Australia from Hong Kong - actually Macau. It also gave us the chance to add an unscheduled holiday in Bali and Lombok, before our scheduled rest in Australia. Our visit to Singapore was a game of two halves, a day before and a say after Indonesia.

Thanks to Adrian, the kindly proprieter of Food and Fine Wine we had somewhere to stay for the first two nights with friends of his.

As we arrived at their house in the pleasant expat area of the city we were really quite impressed - the words mansion sprang to mind, but a mansion on a suburban scale. We were extremely grateful to our hosts for providing the kind of comfort more usually associated with five star hotels, and, as they are shortly returning to England, using us as a device to help drain their wine cellear.

Singapore seems to have a lot of advantages if you have a family and are raising kids. We watched in awe as the nine year old daughter went through her QMOD maths with Daddy. QMOD is a Japanese method to develop strong mental arithmetic and numerical familiarity in children, spending only ten minutes or so a day. It took us more than several seconds to warm up the number engines in our brains but even then we couldn't compete with the speed of the answers being banged out - 11x14 ... 154 ... instantly. Ok, so that's a relatively easy one, and most were once you knew the trick, but then mental arithmetic often is. "Consonant please Carol". Both children were doing it at different levels, appropriate to their ages, and it certainly seems a workable system. I'm quite convinced that confidence with numbers at an early age is likely to help education in general later on.

Awe, envy and jealousy aside, what else did we get up to ? Oh yes, shopping. For some reason shopping in Singapore seemed just that little bit easier than in HK - partly because most of the big shopping centres are in one place. As prices in HK keep rising due to lack of space, Singapore's prices start to look more attractive - measured over a range of products (independently) it now seems to be the cheapest place in Asia, although only second or third for electronics.

To mark the dawn of a second mid-life crisis I decided it was time I really got to grips with technology and bought an mp3 player - a Nokia 3210. The salesman told me it was state of the art, although I'll have to wait until we reach my nephew and niece in Tasmania to work out what music I should be putting on to it. Then, still not able to bring myself to shell out for and EFS 10-22mm super-wide lens I let myself down gently by buying an underwater housing for Kim's digicam, a Powershot S1 IS. The price here was 2/3 that at home, and there was plenty of availability so we could test it before buying. The price will be recouped over 5 rentals of a camera from a dive centre, and it's already accompanied us on five dives - I'll post the results in the next blog).

Happy with our assorted purchases and feeling very much like Posh and Becks about town we went for sundowners at Harry's bar, now famous for being frequented by Nick Leeson prior to his being singled out as the fall guy for what looked suspiciously like institutional incompetence. This was followed by a vastly overpriced Singapore Sling in the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel, poured Blue Peter style from a ready prepared jug just to add insult to injury. We then headed over to Little India in search of a good British-style Ruby. The Banana Leaf had been recommended by the tourist board and when we got there it was full of both Indians and other ethnicities so we gave it a go. Much as we tried to like it, on reflection, it was rubbish. But it didn't spoil our day, and we returned at a civilised time to find our host chilling in the garden, where he promptly fed us another bottle of much appreciated and for us preciously rare, good wine.

Cut to two weeks later. On returning from Lombok on our extremely comfortable and pleasant Silk Air flight I emerged into Singapore Airport with an "aaaah, that's nice." This pleasure suddenly turned to a frown. There had been an editorial in the local paper handed out on the flight about Singapore's search for an identifying emblem. The author had asked a Frenchman what he thought of Singapore Airport. The reply had been "very functional and efficient, but it lacks soul."

Normally I love the French but after a couple of run-in's recently I'm having a bit of a downer on them. Hang on - I don't want an airport to have soul. I want it to be clean, safe, easy, fast and efficient, with great food courts, free internet, fast friendly immigration and fast cheap transport into the nearest city centre, all of which Singapore have. I want it to have a structurally secure roof. If I want soul I'll go to a jazz club, a soup kitchen or the top of a mountain. I want an airport to be a DisneyLand for business people (which most of them are these days) with a friskotek for families and backpackers.

Several years ago I was flying to and from Paris an awful lot. If I flew Air France I got to use the swanky new Terminal 2F. Terminal 1 is a cylinder, with its axis running vertically - now having a cylindrical terminal with a horizontal axis, that would be cool. Anyway, a cylinder is not necessarily a problem - just stick four elevators at 90 degree intervals around the circumference. But no, that is too easy for this architect ( I hope they weren't British ;-) ). You enter, and you have a fifty-fifty guess as to which way your check-in desk is. If you get it wrong you do a full lap of the circumference. Then, after check-in, you have to go up a couple of levels to departures. To do this, you have to go around as much as another 180 degrees of circumference to where an escalator travels up through the middle of the cylinder, so you have ample time to admire the architect's ego. On arriving on level 3 or whichever, now vertically above where you entered, you'd think passport control would be straight ahead. Oh no, you then do another circumnavigation of the cylinder as departures is opposite the end of the escalator. Now you'd think that having been once and paid your dues there might be some executive quick route for frequent travellers, but no, you go through this process every single time, making sure your soul is fully topped up with gallic flair before landing back in Blighty where nothing works properly but at least we have good comedy and music.

But then, I realised, they're not really talking about airports, are they ?

For about US$1 we took the fast metro straight from the airport terminal to Bugis, about five minutes walk from Sleepy Sam's hostel. We had booked in before we left for Bali and left a rucksack with all our cold weather gear with them, which proved a very good move. On arriving we were a bit shocked and unhappy to find our double room was really just a bit of the dormitory fenced off with a partial wall. However the rates were only a little higher than the dormitory and after a reasonable nights sleep we chilled a bit. The hostel, although a bit cramped, is really very good with excellent decor and lots of attention paid to details. Incidentally decent Singapore hostels are the most expensive we have encountered yet, matching Moscow and St Petersburgh.

The rest of our time in Singapore we spent relaxing and organising ourselves, with a couple of hours in an enourmous bookshop that seems to have every book ever published in the middle of a Japanese department store on Orchard Road. We didn't manage the highly recommended night safari based around the also highly recommended zoo purely to save money, and instead bought some bread, ham, pate and cheese at a supermarket and sat and watched DVD's in the hostel, like true backpackers.

Only one further observation I'd like to make about Singapore. Along with Uganda it is an authoritarian single party state. I don't pretend to understand anything of either country's constitution but they seem nearer to dictatorships than democracies. For individuals who oppose the state this is clearly not good. For most others, in these two particular cases, benign dictatorship seems to be working well. In Uganda the infection rate of HIV in women has dropped year on year for the last eight thanks to a massive marketing and education campaign which we witnessed. The results in Singapore speak for themselves. Now, I fully appreciate the need for checks and balances, after all, what would keep an administration busy if they didn't have those to bypass and subvert? I also understand that, based on Warren Buffet's principle of "never invest in a company that cannot be run by an idiot, as sooner or later one will", benign dictatorship cannot be considered a long-term political ideology. I'm just mentioning these relatively successful "dictatorships" as a balance to the triumphal and condescending crowing about democracy of many in the western media, which at times makes me feel sick in the stomach.

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Photos

Raffles
Excuse me, you can't put that tripod there.[Click].Ok.[Click].Sir, you'll have to move.[Click].Yeah, no problem.[Click].Please move sir.[Click].Why?[Click] ... you get the picture.

Raffles again
On a day when the PR people didn't seem to mind itinerant photographers.

Aspiration
What the traders shoot for, near Harry's bar. To quote George Best - "Most of the money went on booze, fast cars and girls. The rest was just wasted."

Comments

[john]

your starting to ramble

[Jaimie]

Will e-mail soon!
Hiya! I promise to get organised and send you a big e-mail soon. Have just got back from the Tour and the Alps and have got post-holiday blues. I am planning to package myself into a brown paper parcel and send myself over to where you both are!!!! Jaimie xxxxxxxxxxxxx

[Marky-Hoggy]

Rammmmmmmmmmmmmmmble
Ramble my arse - this is shockingly dull, where are the pictures of naked dancing girls and monsterous drinking challenges... We expect more! To be fair, Marky hasn't even read it yet - he just saw all the text and quickly realised it was way beyond his boredom threshold! At least i can recognise my limitations Dr Hague!!!!!!

[Cumberland Sausage]

Ramble
You ain't seen nothing yet.