Because I had been very efficient in doing all the things I wanted to do, I had managed to do all of my must-visit places in Singapore in five days, mainly because I had no problem at all doing the four WRS zoos in two days rather than three. This meant I had one more day (today) since my flight out is tomorrow. There was one more place on my list that I thought I would probably drop because it's quite far away and seemed a bit weird to get to on the bus, but I thought I might as well try: Sungei Buloh Wetlands. Seemingly, the bus only runs to the wetlands from the MRT on a Sunday which is today so that's good. It was quite a long way around on the MRT, basically ... read more

I've been thinking about the existence of the nation of Singapore. The whole country is built entirely on caloric surplus. Very little of what the country does, pretty much nothing, has inherent value for people, and it depends entirely on the caloric surpluses of the world allowing these inherently worthless and intangible things to be given extreme value. It's a very interesting route of thought to go down that leads to some difficult and unanswerable questions about much of modern society, and Singapore really epitomises this whole concept and idea. A lot of this thought is inspired by John Green's excellent new podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed which is inspiring and deeply troubling at the same time and mixes a positive tone with an extremely depressing one. Well worth a listen. It's certainly a complicated route of ... read more

I decided today to visit Singapore Zoo and do the bird park tomorrow l, primarily because one of my top targets for the zoo was not captive, but I wanted to see one of the wild colugos that live there and I didn't know whether I might need to visit again later of I missed that. There seemed to be lots of ways to get to the zoo, including various direct buses on MRT and then bus options (but no nearby MRT) and the easiest seemed to go to the Khatib MRT station from where there was a direct shuttle bus. The latter part of the MRT ride was above ground and through the apartment-filled suburbs. Although I had been warned that this was not advisable, I decided that I would do the zoo, night safari, ... read more

I got an Uber from my aunt's house down to the airport. She was willing to drop me off, but she would have had to cancel work and that would not have made economic sense relative to the price of the Uber. It was a bit of a challenge to get an Uber though, because there were none nearby when I called one and the issue with Perth is that it has such sprawling sparsely populated suburbs so if there's no Uber nearby it can be tricky. I got a driver eventually and I had left plenty of time to get to the airport but the nearest driver was 15 minutes away so he can't have made much profit given Uber's margins with coming all that way to pick me up. Apparently he rejected the ride ... read more

Before I start the Dryandra day today, I'll briefly talk about yesterday which was very interesting, but probably best included with this post rather than on its own post. During the afternoon, I visited some parks in the Perth city and saw a number of birds that are really cool and unusual for Perth but not new for the year including Gilbert's Honeyeater, and Little Eagle. Also particularly exciting, and a lifer, was a Baillon's Crake. I assumed it was a Buff-banded Rail at first which I have seen in wetlands in Perth city before, but it was actually a Baillon's which is cool. Also in the city, in the evening I went spotlighting in King's Park which was very cool with Southern Brown Bandicoots, rabbits, a Common Brushtail Possum and, most excitingly, a Tawny Frogmouth ... read more