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Published: November 8th 2006
There is a joke among the locals here that Singapore is a fine city. Yeah, I know, I wasn't exactly rolling about holding ma sides either, but the more and more you stay here, the more you understand the joke. You get fined for EVERYTHING here. Littering ($1000), eating food on the subway ($500), smoking in a non-designated area ($2500), these are just a few of the many indiscretions that you can be convicted of in Singapore, you can even be fined $500 for chewing gum. Yep, chewing gum !!
As you might expect, Singapore is spotless, I'm talking imaculate, there's not a trace of crisp bags, McDonald's boxes or empty cans of Tennents Super. Everyone is terrified of picking up one of the numerous fines handed out. Not that there's a very large chance of you getting caught mind, Policemen are few and far between here because there is little or no crime either, another plus point to having such a strictly enforced set of laws in place. The only problem is, you don't really feel like you are in a proper city, with different parts of the place having it's own character or characters, everyone lives pretty much
the same way, because they are told to. There are signs up in the subway telling people to wait for people to get off the train before you get on, it seems sometimes like even stuff like common courtesy is government enforced here.
Now don't let the above make you think that we don't like Singapore, we love it. For all the rules and regulations that folk live with here, they still have a beautiful place to live, especially at night. The whole place pretty much comes alive after the sun goes down, especially down at the Marina area where the various Quays try and outdo each other for style and flashiness. These places of course, were waaaayyy out of our price range, $25 dollars being the standard entry to each club or pub in these areas. We managed to find our won local bar though, more about that later.
On our first day, we got ourselves settled in to our B and B, and after all the places that we had stayed, this was like a palace, huge big double bed, massive TV with 25 channels, free internet, the works, we reckon we were a bit spoilt
but after the journey down we'd had, we reckoned we deserved it (aye, 'cos this last month has been murder right enough). We had a great view of the port from the dining room window and a terrific view right up into Chinatown from our bedroom window, only problem was that, thanks to those pesky Indonesians, who were illegaly burning forests in Kalimantan, a massive thick haze had plonked itself over Singapore and the whole of the South of Malaysia. The locals ain't to happy about this as you might imagine.
We took a walk to get bit of Singaporese culture in us, but to be honest you have to look pretty hard, because Singapore is a fairly new country, it doesn't have a lot of culture, plenty history mind, but not a lot of things to do and see. A few of the brochures we had accumulated mentioned the Merlion, the sea creature that resided at the Marina's edge and was the islands protector, so off we went to marvel at this awesome beast. It's a big concrete, half lion, half mermaid thing that constantly shoots water out of its mouth into the Marina. It's not as big
as you would think it would be, but it is definitely popular, it was mobbed with tourists, getting their picture taken in front of it, so we joined in. When in Rome and all that...
Our second day was a bit of a wash out to be honest as Lee's stomach was doing somersaults so we organised ourselves to go into town properly the next day and have a look around. It was on this wee donder around town that we found our new local. We'd gone into a mall for some lunch and to cool off and when we came back out, we were in the mood for a glass of wine. We found this wee place, you might have heard of it, it's called Raffles.
We had a couple of glasses of wine there and decided to explore Raffles a bit more. It's massive by the way, it was renovated on 1991 and they spent millions on the place, all the shops around the side are Louis Vuitton, CK, Tiffany's. Not a Lidl in site for this place. They've even got their own museum on the premises, which was well worth a look round, anyone who
was anyone had stayed there, Liz Taylor, Gene Kelly, Rudyard Kipling and of course, let's not forget Somerset Maughn (?????????). Back down stairs for another glass of wine and it was decided that we would return that night to have one of their famous Singapore Slings. Once we'd got home and got changed, and got back to Raffles, we worked out that we had spent the better part of three hours sitting drinking and were about to spend another 4 hours there as they ahd alive blues band on in the Long Bar. Raffles is cool, pure and simple.
Now Lee and I like our zoos, so it seemed a bit of a no-brainer to plan a trip to Singapore's famous park. We'd read about it plenty of times before we had left and it was definitely worth the trip. You don't feel like you are in a zoo at any point to be honest, the animals have their own purpose built evironments to live in and they don't have any cages for the animals, they replace the cages with moats so you can see everything really close up but not caged in. In the case of the monkeys
and Orang Utans, the trees have grown over the moats so instead of cutting them all back, the zoo just let the apes go wherever they want in the park. They get fed three times a day so they know where to come back to to get fed so it works for everyone.
Now as some of you may know, I have a mark on me that means I get picked out of crowds at shows to make a fool of myself in front of the audience. This was no exception. We went to see a "Wonders of the Wild" show when we got there, and it started off with this wee warrior type guy doing his little dance and shooting a few darts at balloons from a blowpipe. So he does his stuff and it's all very impressive and then makes his way over to this woman in the front row and pretends he is going to do something to her, while he's doing this, he's given me the blowpipe and leaves me sittting there. I then get the call to join him up in front of everyone to do a bit of dancing, blowpipe shooting (very cool
by the way) and some shouting in a high-pitched voice (not quite as cool). Oh aye, the show was good as well although I'm not sure Carlos the seal was too impressed about being upstaged by a Scottish White Giraffe.
Now since Lee and I have been going out, I have heard all about the Manitees that she saw in Florida, and how cute they were and we'd read that they had them at Singapore Zoo so there wasn't really chance that they weren't getting a visit from us while we there. We popped round to see them and there's a woman standing with a box that says $5 donation on it. Turns out that we could go in and feed the Manitees for only £1.70 of your Breeteesh Pounds. That made Lee's day to be honest and I'll confess it didn't do mine any harm either, they're lovely big beasts, dead friendly too, especially if you have a big handful of carrot and potato on you.
The zoo lets you feed loads of the animals around the place, it must be a stonker of a money maker but they seem really into their conservation there so you
can feel good about yourself while you're lobbing turnip at 300 Hamadryas baboons, it's good fun.
Now normally at the end of a days walk looking at animals, it is customary for Lee and I to hit a bar to get a glass of wine and then hit the sack 'cos we're normally shattered. They make it a bit diffficult to do that here though. See, next door to the zoo they have the apparently world famous Night Safari. The idea being that during the day, everyone really wants to go annd see the Lions, Tigers, Cheetahs and Jaguars doing there stuff, but because it's 35 in the shade, all that cats want to do is sit about playing cards and chilling out. So next door to the night safari you go to really see them. It works too because the safari is pretty much better than the zoo itself. It's a completely seperate zoo and you get taken round it in a wee train thing that you can hop on and off when you want and take diffferent walks to see everything. Did you know there was such a thing as a Fishing Cat ?? I didn't, but
they have them here and they are mental. They don't seem llike the best fishermen on the planet to be honest and they just get wet most of the time but it looks like fun, I reckon the zoo is the best place for them too as judging by their fishing skills, it won't be long until they are on the endangered species list !!
Singapore has an island about 500 yards from it's southern coast callled Sentosa Island. It's pretty much a man-made island and is probably meant to be their equivalent of Disney and folk from Sinapore are immensely proud of the place so we took ourselves off for the day to see what the fuss was about. It costs S$3 to get onto the island and another S$50 odd dollars tto get into the park and this includes entrance to the dolphin show and aquarium. We have to confess here that the big children in us got the better of us here as they had a luge ride that is basically a sledge on wheels that you steer down this 600m track. We had 4 goes. We ended up racing side by side down this thing
battering small children and their parents out of the way as it all got a wee bit competetive but we enjoyed ourselves anyway. We headded off to the dolphin show after that and it was a bit of a let-down to be honest, a couple of tricks that any self-respecting Disney dolphin wouldn't lower themselves to and then they got three folk from the audience to walk into neck-deep water to get their photos taken with them, that was it !! The aquarium was ok, but we'd been diving with half the stuff in there only a week or two before (check us oot eh ??) so it only made us want to go diving again even more. The day was finished with a laser light show that was pretty impressive from a "I like how they do that" kind of way but as entertainment it's a kids only thing. And the mascot Kiki is one mascot the world could do without.
That was the last of our adventures in Singapore so we organised a bus ticket each to Kuala Lumpur for 2 nights. If anyone is thinking about getting to KL from Singapore any time soon, the bus
takes shorter to get there than the train, it takes about 5 and a half hours which for all the Hearts fans reading, is about half the length of a flight to Prague and for all the Hibees, it's about the length of the car journey to Stranraer.
KL is up next, update to follow.
P.S - there are more piccies for this blog see the next page
L & G
xxx
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Lorna
non-member comment
Looks great!
Still jealous, looks like you are having the time of your lives. It is great to see the photographs! Love to you both. Lorna xx