Zoos take up a lot of real estate. I don�t know how Singapore found room to get it built. They fill in the coastlines to make more usable land, but the zoo�s right in the middle of the city.
The trip�s for business purposes, so our first full day is spent in the hotel, taking notes from our business-friendly speakers. This is my fourth Asian country in a week (after Hong Kong, Macau, and Mayalsia), so I�m getting accustomed to hearing about tax breaks and expatriate life and how nice it is to have 90 degree weather in January.
Most all of the 20-odd people on the trip decide to go to the Night Safari this night. The few people who didn�t travel in a big herd we ended up running into on the safari�s paths; they had just come on their own.
We take Singapore�s subway - very efficient and new and clean, similar to Hong Kong�s - to the stop where we could grab a bus. We pop outside, and immediately a woman in bright orange beelines over to me. Hearing about the aggressiveness of prostitution in certain parts of Singapore, I say �No thanks� before she can even say �Night Safari?� Whoops.
She�s part of an independent company selling tickets to the zoo here at the train station, in exchange for a free bus ride the final mile or so. I decide not to tell the girl that I thought she was a whore. We all buy our tickets here, which is only slightly risky since Singapore might kill people who defraud tourists. Prostitution�s legal here, but selling phony zoo tickets might be a capital offense. It�d be a much riskier bet in Malaysia.
Singapore�s highways look very much like American ones, only with people driving on the left. Where does Singapore find room for this greenery between lanes? Where does it find room for a giant zoo, for that matter? The city�s very efficiently planned out. Infrastructure�s being added now with a 6.5 million future population in mind, not the 4.5 million it currently has. I can�t say that about New Jersey.
I relax as soon as my ticket is accepted, and I enter the zoo. It�s lit with dim light everywhere. I hadn�t thought about bringing any light sources with me this trip.
There�s several flashes of light coming from one corner of the entrance area. We walk over to see a contingent of bumaputra (native Malays, possibly Indonesians) in loincloths breathing fire. The fire breathers are one of the advertised attractions. I had assumed it�d be half an hour of corny magician build- up and then a heartburn joke. But no, these guys are blowing fire like they were being paid by the wattage. One or two guys were spitting alcohol into a torch at any given time. We�re watching from 30 feet away, and we could feel the heat surging from the stage at times. They even have their version of the Olympic torch- passing: four people spitting sequentially into the previous person�s flame, carrying the flame across four different mouths. How these guys do three shows a night and keep their lips, I dont know.
I try and fail repeated to get a suitable picture of the fire breathers. My camera is now, I don�t know its functions, and to find the low-light-but-no-half-second-delay button is hard when you�re afraid you�ll be set on fire momentarily.
My group jumps on a tram tour, which will take us by most of the big animals we want to see. I get my camera ready.
Almost all of the animals you�d ever want to see are on display here, standing right where you can see them. Rhinos, tigers, lions, elephants, water buffalo. The zoo has found a half-light it puts over the food that lets you see the animals rather clearly but doesn�t make the animals think it�s day. The bigger animals have moats and disguised fences preventing them from jumping onto the tour bus, but the various antelope species could walk right up to us if they want. Some of them are right across the path from their prey, like the red fox right across from the tapirs. There must be invisible fences used with these animals: how else could you ensure that the big antelope on display wouldn�t get bored and leap all the way to Chinatown?
To keep the animals in their habitats, some jungle airlocks are used. Our group finds the first one of these, with a chain mesh door so thick I assumed it was a utility access. Our group begins to go through, holding the door open for the rest of the group. Fifteen feet ahead, we come to a second door, like the first but locked. A sign on it says it only opens when the first door is locked. It�s to make sure there�s not a completely open series of doors between the main tourist trails and � whatever creature we�re about to visit.
We try to close the door, but our group has now been shoved into the room by a big Japanese tour group, who are so big they won�t all fit in this antechamber with us. Three of four of them stand in the doorway, and every effort to pull one of them through just results in another happy guy taking his place in the doorway. This is how the Japanese pack onto subway cars, and we�re not able to communicate to them. The zoo signs are in multiple languages, but the Japanese tourists can�t get close enough to read the sign since our sardine-like group is stopping them from reading it in the dim light. Eventually the tail of our group manages to communicative/shove enough people back through the door to close it, letting us get out of this room.
After all that, we enter a pathway with no animal life. I missed the sign of what�s in here. Bird? Monkey? Flying squirrel? Hodag? Whatever it was, we didn�t see any of it. We went through another airlock, this time ahead of the Japanese group, and picked up the trail as it walked through the dangerous animals under glass.
The Japan Tourist Board JTB (SP) sponsors several of the animals. The lion is sponsored by Coca-Cola. Some of the animals are glassed-in, with fans blowing cool air by the good viewing spots. These tend to be for the animals that could eat you. We see a leopard the size of a great dane with his back against the glass. He doesn�t seem disturbed by the whispers and tapping on the glass and eventual shouts, so the glass must be fairly soundproof. Or he�s used to idiots.
Our group makes it to the bat cage, the highlight of my evening and the dred of everyone else�s. There are Malayan flying foxes in here, each one weighing pounds instead of grams. The lit-up info plaque has the details on them. �It uses its keen eyesight and excellent senes of smell to locate food. By consuming fruit and flowers, it helps to pollinate flowers and dispose seeds.� This is written in all four of Singapore�s official languages: English, Chinese, Malaysian and Tamil.
You go through a steel grated door, then a drapery of plastic chain, then another steel grated door. It�s another jungle airlock, but with the added chains to stop any bat that tries to use its echolocation. Several of my group begin announcing that they�d skip this room, as if they could sense the bats fluttering around in their hair. While they hem and haw, I go through the doors.
A steel catwalk runs across a little stream surounded by trees and bushes. Oranges and bananas are placed on some branches, just underneath the dim lights. The bats need to get in the spotlight to chow down. The first spotlighted bits of fruit are unoccupied, but one with a crowd around it has my first flying fox hanging off it.
The flying foxes are big, a pound or two each. The bats have black bodies with reddish brown fur over their backs and necks. Their snouts are long, to get deep into a piece of fruit. They have huge dark eyes, the better to see you with. Their feet look very sharp.
Flying foxes� food don�t fly, so they stay still and get much bigger than their American cousins. eat and grow big. Society in general works this way as well: when we were hunters and gatherers, our whole lives were just survival. Once we figured out agriculture and knew how to make a stable food source, then we had the ability to get big and fat.
The catwalk takes me by a dozen illuminated pieces of fruit, most unoccupied but with three of four being devoured. �That one�s a boy,� a girl said, looking at a giant set of dangling bat testicles. Bob Barker hasn�t been here yet.
The bats move around like monkeys in the tree, using feet and hands to swing from branch to branch. They prefer to be upside down, but also seem OK being right side up so long as it gives them fruit access.
I took picture after picture. Photos on this tour were restricted to flashless taking. Most everyone has digital cameras now, and the automatic twilight setting requires a lot of aperture time. It turns into 19th century photography: you need to stand absolutely still for five seconds, and so does your subject, or you end up with a messy blur. And even if you do all that, you�ll jut end up with a dark blur.
Not being able to take pictures allowed some degree of freedom. With a big memory card and a charged battery, you begin taking pictures of everything remotely interesting. Things you�d never look twice at in America are now photo ops: street signs, random trees, a billboard.
I could pick up one of these bats if I wanted. If my arm spasmed, I would pick up one of these bats. There are signs everywhere saying the bats will not harm you unless you provoke them � such as by plucking them from the tree. I don�t think this zoo would work in America. It�d be an hour before some brain surgeon picked up a bat because he wants to throw it like a football, and then he�d sue the zoo for endangering his life. It�s like caving: common sense required.
Leaving the bat sanctuary was another jungle airlock: steel grated door, another curtain of weightless plastic chain, steel door. Adios, bats.
The gift shop has the usual mix of zoo stuff: animal pens, little knickknacks, T-shirts, stuff you�d get bored of owning five minutes into the bus ride back to the hotel. About 20% of the stuff involves polar bears, which I think would die this close to the equator. The pens and mass-produced stuff are at about the same prices as American gift shops. But the handmade stuff is ridiculously cheap. Hand-made leather animal statues up to a foot tall � elephants, tigers, lions � are about $15 US. Bamboo xylophones are all of $10 US. None of this stuff is made in Singapore, obviously, but importing it from Malaysia or Indonesia costs much less than having some guy in America ship it overseas and add his hefty markup. I have no desire for any of this stuff, or even any way to bring it back without crushing it, but it�s interesting to see that these items that sell for a hundred bucks back home cost as much as a Ben and Jerry�s ice cream cone (being sold right next door, and ironically is probably imported from America).
I make very sure none of this stuff involves bats: if there�s bat stuff, they�ll have a sale.
Once back at the hotel, I double and triple check to make sure Singapore doesn�t have any caves. It�s confirmed: I�m not missing out on anything karsty. I don�t know if I�ll be back to this part of the world; I need to do everything the first time.
Three days later I head back to America, ready to tell the little American bats about their big cousins. Have they thought about having more fruit in their diet? There�s no shortage of orchards in upstate New York to choose from. Maybe an apple a day will keep the white nose away.