We were all awake by 4.30am on our first morning in Singapore. Even a big travel day and going to bed 22 hours after our alarms went off, wasn’t quite enough to combat the time difference! We dozed and read until a reasonable hour then wandered off to find breakfast at our sister hotel around the corner.
Originally we’d hoped to see our Pukerua Bay friends, the Lewis family, who have lived in Singapore for the past few years. And who we last saw in Indonesia. They were in Thailand for the weekend (as you do!), so unfortunately for us we weren’t able to catch up. When we discovered this several months ago, we decided to keep our time in Singapore concluding that it would be a way to ease back into international travel with somewhere familiar.
We weren’t sure how we’d be feeling that first morning, so decided to take it a bit easy. We started by heading to a nearby station to get metro passes. We learned that you can pay directly by swiping your credit card at the gates - super-easy except for the kids who don’t have credit cards, so we picked up a couple of visitor passes for them. Ironically, given the cashless mechanism for using the trains, you needed cash to load credit on the cards!
We navigated the metro to the Botanical Gardens, a world heritage site. Eleanor had commented the day before that nature is everywhere in Singapore. She’s right! It’s a big city of five million people, and they are particular about creating and protecting easily accessible parks and green areas. And people get out in their athleisure wear to make good use of these spaces.
We explored some of the huge gardens, checking out plants from all over the world. There’s a large seed bank that might come in handy for civilisation in future, but hopefully is an insurance policy we won’t need to claim on. We also popped into the pay-to-enter orchid area. They are truly stunning flowers that come in more shapes, sizes and colours than I’d ever appreciated. My grandfather grew orchids, I wonder if it was his trip to Singapore that inspired him. The kids particularly liked the indoor room for orchids from cooler climates. Actually, we all enjoyed a bit of relief from the heat.
That afternoon we made our way to River Wonders, an offshoot of Singapore Zoo, to spend some time with the creatures of big rivers - the Amazon, Yangtze and Mekong in particular. It also happens to be home to the pandas, including red pandas, Leo’s absolute favourite.
We arrived just in time for the manatee feeding. They are my new favourite, and being a manatee keeper is my new dream job! They form an orderly line and wait patiently as the keeper walks up and down the row handing out lunch. Eleanor and Leo could learn a thing or two about mealtime manners from the manatees. Afterwards we watched them dive to the bottom for more food propelled by their amazing tails.
On the river cruise we met jaguars, monkeys and the striking giant anteater who came out to stretch his legs just as we came past. The kids chose to sit in the front of the boat where there’s a chance of getting saturated. I think a bit damp is probably the more accurate description, although Leo did learn it’s better to face forward unless you want a wet bum for the next 20 minutes or so (you do dry off quickly in this heat!).
In total we walked about 12 kilometres that day, so not as low-key as we’d thought. I’d forgotten how much walking you do in big cities and definitely need to build my travel fitness! We were starving and thoroughly ready to sit down by dinner time.
Fortunately Little India came to our rescue admirably. The portion sizes were bigger than we thought, so we’d over-ordered. We ate like we hadn’t been fed in a week (it was all so delicious!) and still had leftovers. With very full tummies came tiredness so we put one foot in front of the other back to the metro station and on to the hotel to tumble into bed. All the while wishing for the ability to click our fingers and magically be in bed with clean teeth! I was fast asleep before 8.30pm.
Adrian wasn’t as tired as the rest of us so decided to walk the 15 minutes or so down Boat Quay to Merlion Park at the waterfront. I didn’t even hear him go! Marina Bay Sands hotel (the one that looks like a ship on top of three towers) put on a nightly light show. We’d wondered about going before we got too tired, but as it turns out we didn’t miss much - Adrian saw it and thought it was quite over hyped for what amounted to some flashing coloured lights set to a classical soundtrack mostly drowned out by the DJs at the nearby bars. Still, good for people watching and atmosphere if nothing else.
Since Leo was very keen to see it before we left, and as our taxi driver said… ‘if you haven’t seen the Merlion, were you ever really in Singapore?’, the next morning we walked the same path Adrian had taken. The main observation from this kids was that the Merlion is bigger than they’d expected. It was good to see it (again for those of us who remember our last visit!) and to stretch our legs before our flight to Tokyo.
Lunch and blanket - happy days!
No comments:
Post a Comment