Annoyingly, the flight was delayed by 2 hours owing to the late arrival of the plane. Amazingly, this turned out to be the only significant delayed flight I had in the entire trip which is pretty remarkable. I guess this was the ying to my weather-luck's yang. [Definitely the right way round, as it has not been difficult for me to take massive enjoyment (maybe sometimes only in retrospect!) from my bizarre weather experiences whereas it would take someone of strange disposition to take pleasure from airport delays!] This did mean that I would be landing at midnight but, fortunately, I got on the very last underground train to leave the airport and take me near to my hotel, so no harm was done. Singapore is within one degree of the equator and so even at midnight it was some 26 degrees and humid.
Singapore was only ever going to be a transit location for me, but while I was here it would be stupid not to do my best to look around. Alas, it doesn't take long to realise that Singapore is merely a massive temple to retail therapy. [Sorry girls, it's a 13 hour flight away]. Even I can be tempted into shopping if the right sort of stuff is being offered and I can tell you there is no shortage of electronics/gadgets shops. I had to use every last crum of willpower to stop myself buying all sorts of things from a device that would let me take my camera underwater to a set of portable speakers for a minidisk/discman. Certainly, if this had been earlier in the trip [before beer, bopping and bungying blew a hole in my finances], I may well have succumbed and given my relative lack of bargaining talents would most likely have ended up being ripped off mercilessly.
Mercifully, there is a little more to Singapore and being such a small nation it is not dificult to find places. I found the most fun was to be had by simply wandering around the city centre and admiring some of the massive buildings and the colonial touches hidden away amidst. Far and away my favourite discovery was of a cricket pitch sited implausibly, yet marvellously, bang in the centre of town. Massive skyscrapers form the backdrop for either end whilst the national Parliament/Senate sits at square leg. How brilliant of my British forebears to get their priorities absolutley right when it came to zoning!
View of cricket pitch looking towards town centre.
And the view looking the other way is not exactly different!
Amongst many run-of-the-mill skyscrapers there are several rather striking ones with this structure being perhaps my favourite.
Feeling in the colonial mood, the day would not have been complete without sampling the famous Singapore Sling cocktail at the very place it was invented, namely the Raffles Hotel. This place is a wonderful English throwback to the Colonial Twenties with several differently-styled bars all serving up the aforementioned drink (amongst a wide selection). It has been commented before that I would have been very much at home as an English ex-pat in the pre-war colonial era. I am not sure if this is a compliment or an insult(!) but I certainly felt very happy just watching the world go by for an hour or two over several of the distinctly more-ish cocktails.
The smart front entrance to the famous Raffles Hotel. Needless to say, I found my way to the bar through a different route.
There are a few more sights to Singapore including excellent Indian and Chinese quarters which both present a multi-sensory experience as ears, nose and eyes are all enchanted. As a fan of both respective cuisines I had little difficulty in allowing taste to make it four out of five senses but I was happy to draw the line there!!!
One of the many Hindu temples in the Indian quarter.
One of the many Buddhist temples in the Chinese quarter.
There is, thankfully, one part of the place that is not built-up and this is the Bukit Timah nature reserve - possibly the only expanse of primary rainforest located within a major world city. There are several Nature Trail walks that one can do within the area and, naturally, I set off on the longest one which takes you on a round-about route up to the highest point in the country at a modest 164m.
This is the highest point in Singapore. However, it seems rather unneccessary to give the altitude to the nearest centimetre and even more bizarre to give longitude and latitude to hundredths of a second, which by my reckoning equates to 30cm. Which side of the rock do you reckon they are referring to?
Singapore is famous for being a fairly strict society and I wasn't going to trespass here!
After about 20 minutes and when I was approximately at the furthest point from the way out, the sky also decided to remind me of my latitude, though perhaps not quite to the same degree of precision. As I started, I had wondered why there were lots of people ending their walks and virtually no one starting. Of all the people in the world, I should be one who knows that in the afternoon near the equator there is a thunderstorm. It is almost like saying there is sun in the desert - it happens nearly every day. Yet again, I had contrived to be in the wrong place. What's more, being on the highest point in the country surrounded by large trees, rain was the least of my worries. Luckily, I found a modest shelter and the storm passed pretty quickly with its silver lining instantiating itself in being able to wander back through the mud accompanied only by birds and insects.
So that would be why they call it rainforest.
And that was it for the island-state that is Singapore and I even managed to pass my day and a half there without being fined for any of the trivial matters that are criminal in Singapore such as chewing gum, jay walking and, unbelievably, not flushing a toilet. Singapore is not really a technical island anymore as they have built a causeway/bridge over to the mainland where it is Malaysia and this is where my bus now took me.
The causeway from Singapore to Malaysia.
Continue to Malaysia.
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