The Traveling Martens

Singapore

Singapore Zoo and Orchid Gardens, April 27, 2005

It was a short flight from Bangkok, but Singapore seems like it's on another planet. The weather and palm trees are the same, but everything else is different. We haven't been here long yet, but Singapore is the cleanest place we've ever seen. The people here are Chinese, Malay, and other races, so there isn't one culture, but everyone speaks English. We are the only Americans we've seen here, but there are lots of European tourists, as this is a major stopover for Europeans flying to Australia. Our hotel is on Orchard Street which is full of malls and new, air-conditioned stores full of high-end brand names like a Rodeo Drive. Totally different than the dirty street stalls selling knock-offs in Bangkok.

For dinner last night, we went to a side street here which is full of restaurants and bars with outdoor seating and lounge music playing in the background. We picked a good restaurant- vodka pitchers were on the menu!

This morning, we headed to the zoo. We took the tram and then a bus, so we got to see a little more of the island. The residential neighborhoods are incredible. All of the housing is apparently built by the government in planned communities and then sold to the residents. All the housing is high-rise condos, each condo is painted in matching colors to all of the other buildings in that neighborhood. Each area has its own schools, pool, and facilities. Even the sides of the highways here are immaculate. There are rose bushes covering the guardrails, then a few feet of bermuda grass with trees, then a swept sidewalk, and then ferns past that before the wild shrubs and trees start. The zoo itself is one of the top in the world, and unlike any we have seen. At one point, we walked around a stone wall and found ourselves just a few feet from half a dozen lions. We both almost freaked out, but calmed down after a while. All of the animals are kept in outdoor environments, with just a few feet of water or low fences separating us from them. The white tigers and the jaguars were some of the highlights, as they were playing like kittens. We also had to stop to let a group of orangutans cross the sidewalk in front of us.

We also went to the orchid gardens near the zoo. All varieties of orchids grow in the wild here, many of them 15 feet tall, and one variety is the official state flower here. There were rows and rows of different colored and shaped orchids.

Dinner at Boat Quay, Singapore, April 30, 2005

We went to the Boat Quay area in downtown Singapore for dinner. A large river runs through Singapore city and out into the ocean, and Boat Quay is a section of the city with dozens of nice restaurants and a walkway along the river. We took a river tour in a "bum boat", which is a low, flat boat which used to be used to ferry cargo along the river. We saw many of the government buildings on the water, and a large Merlion statue at the end of the river facing the ocean. The Merlion is Singapore's national symbol and is a mythical animal with the head of a lion and the body of a fish.

Sentosa Island, Singapore

The next day, we went to Sentosa, which is a small island just off of downtown. We actually got to the island by riding a small, glass cablecar, just big enough for the two of us, out of the 20th story of an office building, across the green water, and over to the island. The cable car was 300 feet up in the air, and was definitely a little freaky, but gave us wonderful views of downtown Singapore city, the harbor, and several smaller islands. Sentosa is a small resort island for the locals, and we walked around the whole island, seeing several gardens, Merlion statues, and beaches. We walked along one beach which is the southern most point of continental Asia. We went to the aquarium on the island, which had a huge overhead tank full of all kinds of sharks and eels. The aquarium also had great displays of tropical fish, jellyfish, and seahorses. Next, we headed to the pink dolphin show. The pink dolphins were fun to see, they were a light gray on their backs, but had bright pink stomachs and sides.