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Published: November 20th 2015
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Forget it Jake!
...it's Chinatown! I drive the Lovely K nuts with this every time we set foot in a Chinatown... Finally on the move again, first and last stop to be Singapore with Borneo being the main destination in the middle...after 30 hours of travel (Asia is sooo far for us Central/Eastern Canucks) we arrived at some dark late hour to a quiet town on the cusp of back-to-work Monday, with wonderful heat and humidity thrown in for good measure...after checking into the hotel we wandered down to Clarke Quay for a well-deserved pint and soon made our next discovery: 15 SGD small bottles of Tiger...d'oh! We then realized we hadn't done a lot of homework for Singapore, we were only to be here for less than 48 hours at the front end and 24 at the back, what could go wrong?? After some expensive pints we headed back to the hotel, wondering if we would be bankrupt before we left in a couple of days...
Woke up to a slow morning of jet lag, scraped ourselves out of bed and it was off for some exploring...our hotel was in a great location, easy walk to both Clarke and Boat Quays, as well as Chinatown...decided on Chinatown as our first stop, lots of fun, pretty relaxed compared to some Chinatowns
we have visited...mostly souvenir stalls, Indian-run tailor shops and restaurants, quite civilized...stopped in at one spot to discover both pints and food were much more reasonably priced so with a sigh of relief we parked ourselves and had some lunch...
Figured we should try and see some things while we were here so we jumped on the Hop On/Hop Off bus and let them tour us around town for the afternoon...got off at the Botanical Gardens as the Lovely K was keen on seeing it; very cool I must say...first off it's free to get in (only have to pay to get into the Orchid exhibit) and the grounds are expansive and quite beautiful...it was mostly green, I'm guessing it wasn't a flowering season when we were there but a nice hang nonetheless...
Made it back to Boat Quay and just chilled there for the rest of the evening; it's a more relaxed hang than Clarke Quay with a string of patios lining the riverbank...took advantage of Happy Hour and then had a bite to eat before calling it a day...
Following morning we checked out of the hotel...our flight wasn't until that evening so managed to
Waterfall
...at the Botanical Gardens... squeeze in a boat tour and the obligatory stop at Raffles Hotel for an extremely expensive Singapore Sling (they invented them there apparently) before heading off to the airport..
Made it back to Singapore the day before we were set to fly home...had most of the afternoon so decided to check out the famous Marina Bay Sands hotel (yes, the one with the infinity pool spanning the three towers). Massive doesn't begin to describe it, we decided to head up to the rooftop restaurant for a pint to check out the views and it did not disappoint...probably one of the highest vantage points in Singapore, and if the haze hadn't been there I'm sure the views would have been even better...(side note: apparently the Haze is an issue every year: Indonesian farmers I believe set fire to crops and forests for some reason and the ensuing smoke drifts all over Malaysia, Singapore and supposedly as far as Bangkok...schools were closed in Western Malaysia for a couple of days while we were there due to air quality, and we frankly didn't see a whole lot of blue sky the entire three weeks we were in the region....)
Next it
was onto the subway and back to Chinatown for some last minute tacky souvenirs and lunch...really just hung out most of the afternoon watching the world go by before heading back to the hotel and winding up this year's road trip...
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RENanDREW
Ren & Andrew
Is there anything more exciting that the start of a trip? :)
Looking forward to your adventures in Borneo!