Singapore

So we've just finished up in Tioman, and its time to leave the island paradise and head to our next big city, Singapore. For once our route planning paid off, and the journey from Mersing to Singapore was a pretty short one. The main hassle was negotiating the border control; they've build a huge series of buildings on each side of the causeway that links Singapore island to the Malaysian mainland. I think we had to change buses 6 times before we finally arrived in down town Singapore. The Rough Guide pointed us to a road near the centre with a lot of hostels on it, but sadly we soon found out the government had closed most of them down. Only one was left, and were sitting pretty on their monopoly, charging big bucks for really rubbish rooms. We were too tired to get a bus to another part of town, and as we only had a couple of nights there it couldn't be that bad.

The room was still a stinking pit of despair when we woke up, and sure enough we had little bites on our arms and legs where we'd been visited in the night. Oh the joys of backpacking! We cheered ourselves up with a trip to the Singapore Zoo, which was absolutely world class - probably the best zoo either of us have even been to. Their main attraction are the cage-less enclosures, with the creatures separated from the public using moats or at the worse perspex dividers. They also did some really good shows, like this one showing off how elephants worked in lumber camps before machinery took over.



The zoo was positioned on a peninsular, so the animals didn't have anywhere to escape if they managed to get free, which meant the whole thing was really scenic and really well designed. Each different area was lavished with details, and we couldn't help take a load of silly pictures with everything we could find around the enclosures.



(Fortunately the real monsters were behind 6 inches of croc-proof glass.)

So full marks to the zoo, definitely one of the highlights of the trip so far. That night we hit the other side of Singapore - the shopping. In a fight between Singapore and Malaysia to see who could build the fanciest shopping centres, we think the Singaporeans would just about edge it, as their version of Oxford Street is quite something.



I'm not quite sure why any city needs 18 branches of Louis Vuitton on one road, but the shopping-crazy people of Singapore seem to think this is a vital necessity. It was all a bit rich for us, but it was great to walk through some of the buildings, the designs are amazing even if you do feel a bit overwhelmed by the consumerism of it all.

After all that excitement the next day we chilled out and went to the cinema and lounged around the shops. That night we hit the ultimate Singapore tourist trap - drinking a Singapore Sling at the place were they were invented.



The Raffles Hotel was suitably grand, but their bar was basically a 15 quid-a-go cocktail producing conveyor belt. Inventing a cocktail has given them a license to print money (the cocktails weren't even mixed in front of you!) but it was quite good fun as so many people were there doing exactly the same thing.

The Raffles Hotel was suitably grand, but their bar was basically a 15 quid-a-go cocktail producing conveyor belt, but it had to be done!

From there we went on a stroll around the city's waterfront, which is definitely up there with Hong Kong in terms of amazing night time strolls.



We tried to get another drink around the harbour, but couldn't find anywhere that would sell us a bottle of beer for less than 8 quid! (You can get the same beer for 50p back in Malaysia.) Not wanting to completely destroy our budget we resolved to save drinking for Australia. This was the first time we'd had to pay more than a pound for a drink so it was quite an unwelcome shock to find ourselves somewhere more expensive than London.

Another unique part of Singapore is their "inventive" laws, you can get fined for just about anything so we spent the first few days trying to avoid any of the following offences:

• Failing to flush a public toilet


• Consuming chewing gum


• Crossing the road within 50 metres of a crossing

There are probably even wackier ones we didn't come across, but the road crossing one was a right pain because sometimes the traffic lights would take a good 5 minutes to change. Having honed our traffic dodging skills on wild roads of Vietnam, it felt quite ridiculous to wait 5 minutes for a green man on empty roads.

Singapore was only a flying visit so we didn't really get to see all that it had to offer, but to be honest it wasn't very well set up for backpacking with the lack of budget hotels and expensive drinks, attractions etc so we were both in good spirits when the taxi turned up to take us to the airport. We'd taken the "go overnight, it'll save you a nights accommodation costs" advice again for the flight, but we were beginning to smell a rat on this strategy already. The hostels all kick you out at 10am or noon at best, so you end up not doing all that much because you are stuck with your daypacks loaded for a flight (with the main backpacks sitting in the hostel, praying not to be interfered with.)

Having seen the wondrous shopping centres of central Singapore, we were ready for their airport to be a shrine to commercialism the likes of which we'd never seen before. Somewhat unbelievably the airport was a real let down - I'm not sure if we were at a bad terminal or something - the best we could muster was a 7 Eleven (to be honest this is by far our favourite shop in Asia) and we struggled to find somewhere to sit, so in the end we had to wait it out just outside the boarding gate. We boarded around 8pm, and by this point we'd been faffing around for twelve hours and were pretty tired, so we were looking forwards to watching some movies and getting some shut eye.

The rest of the story will have to wait for our next post, next stop, Australia...