Singapore: 29Feb – 3Mar 12

I flew from Perth at 4pm and arrived in Singapore at 10pm with Singapore airlines, which isn’t on the budget side of things. We got dinner and movies, oh what a treat after flying the last four flights budget. Although I should remember to take socks next time I fly as they always air condition the heck out of airplanes and I end up shivering in flip flops and no jumper. But on this I got a blanky, woo. I watched the latest Twilight movie, yes I love them judge me as you will, and got some food so all in all it was a good flight, and the air hostesses wore these cute outfits...

Coming in to land and getting the first view of Singapore was really exciting, it was all so new and foreign to me. I saw masses of skyscrapers and apartments and everything was bright and densely packed. We flew over the harbour and the bridges, all brilliantly lit up. I’ve also never ever seen so many boats and ships! There were literally hundreds of them, all lit up like Christmas on steroids.  

I had booked a hostel in the main backpacker area, Little India. There were trains and busses but since it was 10pm I thought I’d splash out on a taxi as it’s not that fun to mess about with public transport late at night in a new and strange place, although there is a train that goes straight from the airport into town so I that was a little lazy on my part.  The taxi cost around £10 and had the air conditioner set to icy. Singapore is an easy place to visit because everything is in English, and there is no scamming or confusion going on with public transport. It’s run by strict rules so for a tourist it couldn’t be safer. The driving was manic and hair raising as I was told to expect, with the driver changing lanes at super fast whim with no hint of indicating and driving within an inch of the bumper in front at 80mph, so I kept my nosed pressed to the glass and on the totally new and exciting scenery around me. The air was hot and humid and really does hit you like a wall when you come out the airport, plants and trees and shrubs and vines were bursting out of every possible space, and everything was in bright Technicolor. This was the most foreign place I had been and I was properly excited. 

The driver set me down on Dunlop St in Little India where the shops and bars were still open and bustling. It wasn’t hard to find my hostel, The Prince of Wales. I honestly had no idea what to expect from hostels in Singapore at all, so everything about this place would be a new experience. The hostel was above the Prince of Wales bar and the reception was the bar counter. There were a couple of Singaporeans playing 90’s type grunge with their guitars on a small stage in the corner. The guy behind the counter took my details and then showed me through the bar, out the back door and right there at the back entrance to the bar were the bathrooms with showers (unisex, just what everyone wants. Not). So if someone strained their neck while supping a pint they could catch you in your towel brushing your teeth. It was more like an outhouse too with a plastic not-very-solid roof over the bathroom area.

He took me up the stairs into the dorm which was just one long room with about 22 bunk beds in it, with sections partitioned off. You kept your stuff on shelves along the wall, and then there were lockers, couches and internet on the near side of the room. The ceiling was covered in whizzing fans but it was still pretty darn warm and muggy in there. I dropped my bags, grabbed a locker for the valuables and set out to have a look around the area. All the shops were still open even though it was around 11pm. The pavements are like obstacle courses, uneven with storm drains, stairs, people, chairs and shop wares all piled on them so you pretty much have to walk in the street. There were loads of shops selling cheap electronic accessories, veggie stalls and internet cafes. Little India,  according to the guidebook feels like being in Mumbai, although I’m sure much more serene and organised than that huge crazy Indian city. I walked all around the block and then came back to have a cold Corona from the hostel bar (quite expensive, SG$10 which is around £5) and sat on the tables outside to watch the passersby. When I got back upstairs there were a few more passed out bodies in the room so I turned out some lights, put in my earplugs and fell into a pretty good if not hot and muggy sleep.

The next morning I came downstairs for the free breakfast which was served outside and was hit with some pretty interesting smells. It’s so hot that the contents of the bins outside were starting to rot, and someone was frying egg on the outside griddle with some really old oil which smelt like old socks rubbed with blue cheese being fried. But you can’t turn down free breakfasts while backpacking! So I had blocked my nose and had some toast and egg and fruit.

I got a map with some good walking itineraries for Singapore and found one for little India and set out to explore. I went through the streets full of people and shops and food. I found a couple of temples, the famous department store that ‘had over 150,000 products on sale’ but mainly to get some air conditioned air after the sweltering heat outside, Indian markets selling all kinds of plastic junk, clothes ‘made in China’, flip flops, saris, bindis, incense, sunglasses, religious gold statues and fake strings of flowers. This wasn’t the pristine, clean, rich Singapore I had heard about but I liked it.

 I was walking under the canopy of the market when I had my very first taste of the monsoon rain. All of a sudden the sky opened and buckets and rivers of water fell out the sky, with everyone ducking for cover and then placidly watching it pass. There were claps of thunder and cracks of lighting and then more sheets of fat rain, all very exciting for me! The only problem was, I found that the whole of Singapore is covered in pavements of tiles. Tiles, water and flip flops (or any kind of shoes for that matter) just do not go and I went slipping and sliding all over the place, and had to walk really slowly and carefully. I found a nice air conditioned vegetarian restaurant and had some ice tea and ate vegetable tandoori, which was a skewer with tofu, green pepper, potato, tomato and pineapple covered in yummy curry paste and then grilled. It came to around £6.

I walked gingerly back to the hostel through the slippery streets, and watched the rain go down from under the canopy in the hostel beer garden. It’s so funny it’s as if they’ve chosen the most slippery surface possible to pave the streets – smooth tiles. I grabbed an umbrella from the hostel and set off to the Arab quarter which was right next to Little India. There is a huge old mosque there and some bustling streets selling Arabic wares, including some coffee shops with people smoking hookah pipes. It’s great that within 20 min walk of each other lie two totally different, heavily cultural communities. Variety and tolerance is so good for a city. I had some coffee in the Arab quarter, bought a bag and found a tiny retro toy shop, where the owner had recreated a 1950’s soda pop stand which didn’t really go with the Arabic scene but was cool anyway.

I walked back to the hostel again feeling happy about seeing two really vibrant parts of Singpore. I was going to stay with an old friend from school and her boyfriend that night who are living are there, but that was only at 9pm and it was 5pm now. So I thought I’d squeeze in one more site this part of town, Orchard Road. I made my way through the underground (huge underground system, easy to navigate with air conditioned trains, the single tickets are around £1.70) and came out at Orchard Road station, where it was still raining and the pavements were now lined with smooth glass sprayed with soap. Okay not really, but they did have some paving stones in smooth glass like tiles! What the heck, watch out for broken necks in Singapore everyone!

Orchard Road is the famous shopping street of Singapore, and the shiny wealthy oppressiveness of it is overwhelming. As I came out the station, I was hit with huge glass malls and towering swirling glass centrepieces. Dior, Gucci, Chanel, Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton... you name it. There were dressed to the hilt doormen standing at entrance, presumably to stop muddy footed, ripped jeaned, wild haired budget travellers like me through the door. Not as if I’d ever want to go in! I just wanted to look and ponder over the weirdness of it all. 

I walked up and down gawking at all the opulence and then realised that I was ravenously hungry. I spotted across the way some shops in the basement of one of the big malls, and found my way over and then inside. This wasn’t the wealth of the outside but a proper Asian market/mall. I found a food court inside and had Vietnamese dumpling soup which really hit the spot. Food is wonderful, it can take you from grumpy tired and achy to bright-eyed and bushy tailed with a simple restocking of the stomach. Even though I felt restored, I had had enough of the spending-on-needless-overpriced-crap glint in everyone’s eyes, and made my way back to the hostel to pick up my things and meet Su in Greyling, about a 20 minute train ride away.

I came out of the station near the house with all my bags and a hand drawn map of how to get there. The streets are huge and are sometimes two streets going opposite ways but named the same thing. So I had a bit of a time trying to find which direction I was walking in, but got to the Vietnamese on the corner by their flat eventually. This was more of the South London-esque part of Singapore, where if you want to afford to live in a nicer flat you need to go out of the posh city. I liked the area, there was everything you needed and it had a good atmosphere. We dropped my stuff off and went out for some beers down the road. Two huge Cobra beers were only £5 so it was quite cheap. We chatted the night away and got pretty tipsy, and just to get more into the vibe some nice rats poked their heads out the bins to say hello. It was really nice to see Su after so many years, we went to Lady Grey Arts Academy near Lesotho South Africa, and it had been a good 11 years since we saw each other last. We stumbled home cheerfully drunk, although I felt tinge of guilt as they both had to work the next day and it was quite late.

It was bliss to wake up in their flat in a double bed in my own air conditioned room. I slept in, did some writing and then set out for some more city wandering, and within two seconds was drenched to the skin in another massive downpour. I stayed under the canopy of a shop for about 40 min with a group of rowdy school kids since I had no umbrella and waited. Finally it let up enough for me to run to the underground. I did something really annoying though and left my wifi enabled phone at home, and as I couldn’t connect at Su’s place I was going to find a coffee shop and mail my friend Bulweya from my high school who was also living there. I found some wifi coffee shops but none that had a computer too, so I couldn’t mail or call! Argh, what a silly girl. So I wandered around the Civic centre looking at all the colonial buildings, and then to the Marina which is Singapore in its full force of glory. Huge glittering skyscrapers and banks, everything smooth cool grey slate and dark marble (still slippery as anything, although no broken neck yet) and big ornate bridges and hotels with parks and a lake, and then a huge centrepiece of a building on the opposite bank. It was like something out of the future, a big glistening spaceship in world where there are no poor or dirty people.

I wandered around until it became dark and I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was getting gently soaked through and so went back to Su’s house only getting moderately lost on the huge intersection by her house. 

We went to the supermarket near her house to get some things for dinner, and I got really excited at all the new and exotic fruit they had there. Tiny fun-sized bananas, star fruit which is shaped like a star when you cut in slices; dragon fruit which is bright pink with green wings on the outside and then white with black dots on the inside and mango’s that looked like lemons. We added apples, oranges and papaya to the mix and made the most heavenly and colourful fruit salad. Everything was ripe, sweet and juicy. We then got some Vietnamese from their local on the corner and had a delicious dinner, drank icy white wine and reminisced till the early hours.

The next day I was leaving to Malaysian Borneo. I ate some ripe avocados with lemon, pepper and salt and some seriously yummy papaya and mango which will kill any hangover I can assure. I could live on a diet like that forever. Su and I took a taxi to East Coast Park and had some lunch and a wander down the beach where families and rollerblading teenagers were out in force it being a Sunday.

I kind of feel for Singaporeans, as there isn’t much to do with themselves beside go to malls. Su told me even the poorer people do this, probably because they are air conditioned and nice to look at. It’s too hot to do much outside activity, and it’s so built up that there isn’t space to do that anyway. There was a small strip of beach on this park but other than that the only other beach was for the posh crowd where you had to hire a ‘platform’ or buy expensive drinks. There are islands and parks dotted around but mostly it’s massively built up and a city for the wealthy. Foreigners seem to get comparatively to home, much higher salaries, and I think they pay hardly any tax so it’s a good place to be for a while if you want to earn some serious mulah.

I jumped in a taxi for another nail-biting ride to the airport. Time for the jungle...

Here are all the photos.