Llew Wanders the World

My first Singapore experience took place some 2500km from the country: a trip on Singapore Airlines. Many friends and acquaintances have raved about their service, so I was a bit disappointed that my flight took place between 01:55 and 07:00. Somehow, I managed to stay up for all of it, and I can confirm that the rave reviews for Sinagpore Airlines are justly deserved. The meal (Waldorf salad, red beef curry with rice, fresh baked bread, and tiramisu) was the best airline food I’ve ever had. They even had cans of Guiness in economy class. I also enjoyed the in flight entertainment which allowed you to pick from dozens of films, music channels and even Nintendo games for viewing/play on your personal monitor on the seatback in front of you. Even after the lights went out, the crew continued to be wonderfully attentive. I probably drank 2 litres of orange juice though the night.

All this was very pleasant, but the fact that I stayed awake to enjoy it all meant that I wasn’t in top form for my actual ARRIVAL in Singapore.

In addition to the wonders of Singapore Airlines, I’d also had friends rave about Singapore’s Changi Airport. And once again, it was for good reason. Aside from enough retail shops to make most city malls blush, the airport boasted a free movie theatre, a mini-motel, showers, a massage centre, prayer rooms, even FREE internet terminals.

After spending a while admiring the interior of the airport, I breezed through Singapore customs, though despite the fact that I had no reason to be, I was still made a bit nervous by the warning on the Singapore visitor entry card.

At this point I was terribly tired. Thankfully, my first actions in the city were made very simple by the fact that my mother and father would be arriving that night, and had already booked a hotel. All I needed to do was head down to the MRT (subway) and make my way there. Which I managed. Just. At one of the interchange stations I actually managed to fall asleep while waiting and stay asleep during the arrival of my train, waking up just as it was departing.

Eventually I did get to the hotel at perhaps 10:30, and reveled in the pleasure of taking a bath (if you’ve read regularly, you’ve probably already realized that I believe this to be one of the great luxuries that you miss out on in hostel living.) After this I slipped into my OWN wonderful bed for nap. Which lasted for for six hours.

Upon waking, I realized that I’d left my trusty Tasmanian walking stick at the airport (I’d was unsurprised at the fact that it needed to be checked luggage, but I thought they overdid it a bit by swabbing it with a chemical compound to check for explosives.) I called the airline and made arrangements to pick it up later in the evening.

With this taken care of, my first order of business was to find some food. Thankfully the Newton Food Centre, the best known agglomeration of (government licensed like pretty much everything else in Singapore) Food stalls in the city was nearby. Though they were just opening up for the evening, I managed to get a delicious dinner of Nasi Goreng (fried rice with egg and vegetables) with a fresh pineapple juice before continuing my wander down the street.

After passing some nondescript business and retail areas (in fact the only thing that made them look different from a western city was the huge number of taxis on the road, the clothes hanging on poles outside the windows of tall apartment blocks, and the relative newness of most buildings) I finally arrived at a place where something was happening. Hordes of Indian people (Singapore is a multiracial city composed primarily of Chinese, Malay, Indian and European people) were sitting out on in the open space near the MRT station doing… Well, nothing in particular. Just sitting, chatting and presumably enjoying their evening after a hard day’s work.

I continued my wander into Little India, surprised by what I saw. Before arriving I’d heard from many sources of the legendary orderliness and regimentation of Singapore, and the heavy fines for even the smallest breaches. Here, however, people were jaywalking left and right, walking out in the streets and even (gasp!) spitting on them occasionally.

Little India was alive with action, but the most active place of all seemed to be a small park area near the edge of the neighbourhood. I made my way to the edge of the noisy throng gathered there and slowly made my way forward. The centre of the action was a squarish dirt court, perhaps 15m on a side. On this court, two teams of seven were playing some sort of game. The teams each occupied half of the court, and occasionally an opposing player would cross over and sometimes (not always) his opponents would attempt to tackle him.

From chatting with fellow spectators and watching for an hour or so, I learned a bit more (although my knowledge is still pretty fuzzy.) The game is called Kabbadi, and the teams take turns sending “raiders” over to the opposing side. The raider aims to touch one or more of the opponents and then return to his own side. If he succeeds, his team scores a point. If he fails (is tackled or pushed out of bounds) the opponents score. It seemed as though the opposing team could only attack the raider once he had touched one of them. I’m probably missing some important point here, but even with this minimal knowledge, it was still a very entertaining game to watch. Sadly it was too dark for pictures of the fast paced action.

After watching some more kabbadi, I wandered back into the nearby street market, which was still bustling at 20:00 with only twilight left in the sky. The variety of goods for sale was amazing, from used clothing to old computer components, to antique gramophones to preserved blown up porcupinefish.

By the time I was done, it was almost 21:00 and I headed out to the nearby “Arab Quarter” (as the Singaporeans call the area actually occupied mostly by Muslim Malays.) Sadly by this time most everything had shut for the evening, so I headed back to the MRT and hopped on to go back to the airport and recover my walking stick.

During the ride I couldn’t help but notice a few things that had partially or fully escaped me during my exhausted ride into the city. First was the modernity of the system. Not only were the trains beautiful, new and efficient, but so was the fare collection system. All transactions took place on a touch screen which allowed you to simply point to your destination and have a ticket issued. The tickets were contactless smart cards. That is to say that you just needed to wave your ticket near the appropriate point and the gates would open up and allow you into the station. The other notable feature of the system was the advertising. Singapore’s government seems to be into public health in a big way. Entire cars were devoted to encouraging citizens to eat more fruits and vegetables and less fat. Other advertisements elsewhere made it clear that the restriction on sneezing or spitting is a public health matter rather than an aesthetic one. Still others advised sick people to stay at home and out of public spaces.

Between absorbing all of this and doing a bit of reading I made the trip out to the airport and back to the hotel in no time. Before heading to my room, I stopped for a late meal at the Food Centre, this time having tasty chicken satay (barbequed meat on sticks with delicious peanut sauce) and a starfruit juice from the same vendor as before.

I was about ready to go back to sleep, but really didn’t want to until I’d seen my mother and father whose flight was due in at 23:00.

Around midnight, a knock finally came on my room door. I sprang up, the sleepiness quickly draining out of me, and opened the door, overjoyed to see my smiling mom and dad for the first time in over four months!

We talked for a few minutes with them telling me a bit about their trip over and the latest news from home, and me recounting events since my last weblog entry. Before too long, however, they were more than ready for bed. They’d just finished with 18 hours of flights and several more of stopovers during which they’d slept very little. And while I hated to say goodnight after so little talking, I was growing tired too, so off to bed we went.

The next morning was another story entirely. Everyone woke feeling (if not looking) full of energy and we headed out for a walk in the city. The warm weather (perhaps 27 degrees and quite humid) meant that we didn’t mind the clouds and the possibility of rain.

The first portion of our walk was a repetition of my previous day’s, but with lots more time spent wandering about Little India. The neighbourhood was a little less frantic than the previous evening but was still plenty active. I was amazed at how… Indian… Little India seemed. Singapore may be a multi-ethnic city, but in the heart of its ethnic neighbourhoods you could be forgiven for not realizing. You scarcely saw a non-Indian face (much less a fellow tourist) in the neighbourhood. As we wandered about the monsoon precipitation finally arrived (Singapore has two monsoon seasons a year, and we were right in the heart of one of them.)

Far from being unpleasant, the light rain was delightful, and in any case we managed a few minutes out of it while visiting the various temples in the area. First was a beautifully decorated Hindu Temple, right in the heart of Little India. A bit to its west was a Buddhist temple that contained an absolutely MASSIVE Buddha statue. Surrounding the base of this were several smaller statues at which offerings of various sorts were made. Among the most popular were candies. It seemed a bit incongruous to see statues of the cross legged Buddha strewn with Mentos and Tic Tacs.

It would make a nice segue if I said that the candy had stirred our stomachs, but in fact our hunger needed no prompting, since we’d had no breakfast and it was now around noon. We walked down the street, and had just made it under cover when the rain turned from a light drizzle into a genuine downpour. Thankfully we found a good place to eat (by my time-tested technique of walking into the first one that was open) and sat down. Our lunch was an absolutely delicious Indian meal, my personal highlight being the chilli pakoras (large chilli peppers deep fried with a lentil-flour batter.)

After lunch we continued our wander to the Arab Quarter, but save for a few shops realized that we couldn’t go IN anywhere, since myself and especially my mother weren’t dressed appropriately. Nonetheless, the country’s most important mosque was still beautiful from the outside. (Interesting fact: The black ring just visible below the dome is made from recycled black soft drink bottles.)

From the Arab Quarter, our walk took us into the historic district. The most interesting building in this area wasn’t historic at all… It was a two year old office building. The exterior featured life size bronze statues of prominent figures form the arts and sciences. We had an entertaining time trying to identify them without reading their name tags (as discussed then, it’s easy to sculpt a recognizable Winston Churchill: chubby guy with a cigar making a V sign with his fingers.) The interior of the building was spectacularly ornate, taking most of its inspiration from New York’s Art Deco skyscrapers.

While it wasn’t as overtly spectacular, the perhaps the portion of the historic district that was most exciting (to my mom and I at least) was the Long Bar (that’s my mom at the bar) in the spectacularly luxurious Raffles Hotel. The only “must do” that my mom and I had for Singapore was to visit this place and enjoy a Singapore Sling at the place of its invention. And we did thoroughly enjoy it. Despite its colour, it’s actually not terribly sweet and fairly refreshing.

After our pause at the bar, we tried to head down to the lobby of the hotel for a look but were hampered first by signs that pointed to its location “as the crow flies” not accounting for gardens, swimming pools, walls and so on that were in the way. When we finally found it we were further hampered by the fact that there was a dress code for male visitors, and my shorts and sandals didn’t meet it. Ah well.

The walking trip carried on through the historic district to the mer-lion statue. The merlion is exactly what it sounds like: A legendary animal with the head of a lion and the tail of a fish. This is where the sensible part of the story ends. The merlion, which is supposedly the emblem of Singapore, and the legend behind it (basically that long ago a merlion swimming around the island’s waters scared off an invading fleet) were actually invented by the Singapore tourism board in the 1970s. So successful was their invention that a few short years after its invention the legend became part of Singaporean history as told to many visitors.

After our visit to the faux-mythical beast, we wandered through the business district of the city with its towering buildings, concrete canyons and busy streets. Here, even more than in the historic district, Singapore’s orderly nature was in full evidence. The streets were all very clean and well paved, the intersections all well signed and signaled, the people bustling, but in an efficient, regimented manner. It was just this that made these areas, and much of the city not quite as interesting as the ethnic neighbourhoods.

Thankfully, our next stop was Chinatown. At first glance, it actually seemed rather less exciting than Toronto’s Chinatown. As it turned out, it was equally interesting, but in a different way. Singapore’s Chinatown was clearly considerably older than Toronto’s, but missed some of its hectic character and some of its interesting (if occasionally unpleasant) smells and sounds.

During our walk around, we came across a large number of rather incongruous ornamentations: Christmas decorations. It struck me as very odd how this country with such a small Christian population has so embraced the holiday, especially when we’d so recently passed several Chinese temples.

Wandering towards the end of Chinatown, we discovered what is, apparently, a Singapore delicacy: Meat Floss. The first sign interested us, the second intrigued us, by the time we saw the third we were very happy that they had a tasting basket in front of the shop. We tried a bit. The small square pieces of meat cut from a larger sheet tasted like bacon.

The next delicacy we sampled was later in the evening, back at the Newton Food Centre after our walk through Fort Canning (a large park in the centre of the city) and Orchard Road (the spectacular main shopping street in Singapore.) This delicacy was chilli crab. Sitting down at a random stall in the food centre, we made the mistake of ordering without specifying the sizes we’d like, and without clarifying the prices before delivery.

This led to us ending up with a large quantity of unappealing crab (though my dad did make his best effort at enjoying it) as well as some mediocre dry chilli chicken and some (thankfully) edible stir fried vegetables. As if to a insult to injury, the bill came to S$47, more than we actually had with us. Thankfully the hawkers (proprietor of the stalls) accepted American dollars at a very reasonable exchange rate. Before leaving I cheered myself up a bit with a durian juice and milk (tasty, but with an odd, vaguely unpleasant aftertaste) from “my” juice lady before we headed back to the hotel.

Thankfully the next morning we were in better humour and able to laugh off before heading out to Bukit Timah nature reserve. First we boarded the MRT, taking all three lines to arrive at our destination stop. This trip took us far (as far as is possible on a 15km wide island) to the north of the city centre and into dense residential districts. The architecture of Singapore’s apartment blocks is spectacularly interesting. While it doesn’t have the postmodern oddity, they do their best to make each group of building unique, using colour and such architectural details as interestingly shaped roofs, balconies, or decorative relief on the outside to distinguish them. The residential buildings were also interesting in that they were clearly all built as larger complexes. Each complex would consist of 3 to 5 buildings in the same style with perhaps 1000 units between them.

I nodded off a bit in between admiring architecture and transferring trains, but before too long we disembarked (or “alighted” as they say in Singapore… One of the most interesting things about the city is that its English is sometimes more British than in Britain.) After alighting, we waited in an orderly queue for the bus that would take us to the reserve.

After 15 minutes on the bus, we hopped off and headed up the short road on the way to the reserve. As we walked, we caught sight of a long tailed macaque (a medium sized monkey) running across the road and then up into a nearby tree. “Aha!” we thought. This must bode well for wildlife viewing during our walk in the forest. Not only was Bukit Timah the site of almost all of Singapore’s remaining primary forest, new species are still being discovered there, a mere ten kilometres from the heart of a bustling city of 4 million! (Three new species of frog were discovered in the reserve in the 1990s.)

As we entered the park, climbing the concrete road up a steep hill, we saw numerous Singaporeans climbing up the hill or walking down backwards (we tried this later and discovered that it was much easier on the knees.) Apparently while many locals use the trails in the area for exercise, few just go for walks to enjoy the beauty of the forest.

And the forest was indeed beautiful, with pretty ground covering plants below, and tropical hardwoods towering above, their roots buttressing them, hanging down from branches or spreading over huge areas to draw water. As we reached the top of the hill, it started to rain heavily and we paused at a shelter, enjoying the sound of the rain on the sheet metal roof.

It didn’t seem ready to stop any time soon, but the rain had eased off, so we continued our walk around the park, especially enjoying the few areas where the trees had temporarily thinned and we were afforded views out over the misty hillsides.

We continued walking, taking a side trail that led up to the Bukit Timah summit. Not only was this the highest point in the reserve, it was in fact the highest point in the entire country of Singapore. Despite all my hiking in the Cooks, NZ and Australia (as well as elsewhere on previous trips) this marked the first time I’d stood on the highest point of any nation.

You may have noted by now that I haven’t mentioned seeing any animals since the macaque near the park entrance. This is because we didn’t really see any. The highlights came right near the end of our walk, when a giant forest ant crossed the trail, and when my mom almost stepped on a huge millipede. While the trip wasn’t a great success in this department, we still headed home happy, happy to have seen some of the little remaining Southeast Asian rainforest.

Before returning to the hotel, we had some business to attend to. In anticipation of three weeks trekking in Nepal with no electricity, much less access to a computer, I planned to take advantage of Singapore’s spectacular electronics deals and buy a new memory card and a few more sets of rechargeable batteries for my camera. My mom and dad were looking for one or more mp3 players as gifts. Having done some pricing the day before, we got our shopping done quickly, and managed to enjoy a few final views of Orchard Road, one of the world’s great shopping streets.

At the worst of times, Orchard Road is impressive, with Gucci crammed next to Prada, next to Rolex, next to Bang and Ollufson next to Louis Vuitton, next to Tissot and on and on and on. In December it becomes even more spectacular with Christmas lights and decorations absolutely everywhere. The store displays and the extravagance of the street lighting eclipse anything I’ve seen in a North American city before. I couldn’t help but continue to find it odd, though admittedly very pretty.

With this all done, we took one final trip to the hawker stalls at the Newton Food Centre, this time sticking to Malaysian style food, and absolutely loving our final Singapore meal of murtabak (a sort of pancake stuffed with meat and onion) mee goreng (fried noodles), prawn noodles and Tiger beer. We rounded it out with a mango juice for me (absolutely delicious), and a soursop juice (good) for my dad.

We got to sleep as early as possible, since we had to head to the train station early the following morning.

In the morning we got al packed, then caught a taxi to the station. The train station looked much less modern than the rest of Singapore, especially when compared to the airport. Nonetheless, it was very easy to get our tickets. As suggested by my parents’ travel agent, we only purchased a ticket as far as Kuala Lumpur, since the price of the ticket was the same in Malaysia, but in Malaysian Ringit instead of Singapore dollars (making it less than half the price.)

After buying our tickets, we had a short wait in the station, which we used to procure some snacks for our long journey up the Malaysian peninsula. Before long we were ready to board.

It was a tiny bit disconcerting that Malaysian customs officials only took a cursory look at our documents and didn’t even stamp our passports, but we supposed it was up to them… We settled back in our seats, ready to enjoy the trip.

The train slowly pulled out of the station, and within half an hour we’d crossed the island of Singapore and the causeway to the mainland, and we were in Malaysia…

Tags: Malaysia and Singapore

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 11th, 2004 at 10:13 am and is filed under Malaysia and Singapore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.