11-29-19 - Welcome to Singapore!
/Day 166. Kyle & Leanne joint blog.
Singapore bound. Today we have a quick 1.5 hour flight from Kuching to Singapore but it will take a solid 6 hours door-to-door.
We will have 2.5 days there before we head home for the holidays. Leanne was in pure agony on the last flight to Kuching with her left ear infection putting her in massive pain for half the flight. She’s hopeful a week on antibiotics relieved some of the pressure in her inner ear. She still can’t hear that well out of it.
The flight is jubilantly uneventful and, once in the airport, frugal John suggests we grab an inexpensive lunch in the airport. Singapore is known as one of the most expensive cities in the world.
After Subway sandwich order, we grab GRAB taxis (the Uber of Asia) from the airport in a complete downpour. There is that monsoon season! We have been eerily fortunate that rain hasn’t stopped much of our trip thus far but the luck might end in Singapore according to the week’s weather report.
The teens somehow managed to persuade Kyle into staying in the iconic yet pricey Marina Bay Sands, famous for being a hotel featured in the movie Crazy Rich Asians. It’s quite the splurge but we have been enjoying the last six weeks in relatively inexpensive countries and accommodations. Heck in Malaysia we fed the whole family dinner one night for a mere US$40. As we approach, the hotel seems to arise out of nowhere. There are three buildings rising up 60 stories with an infinity pool on the roof connecting them. It looks somewhat like a surfboard was laid down on top the three buildings.
It’s raining hard but that’s not stopping most of us from hopping into the hotel’s famous rooftop infinity pool (the highest and largest infinity pool in the world). Nothing like laps at 57 stories high. The storm clouds and lightening put a dark, mysterious hue over our photos but we are just over joyous at just being here.
We compete for space with the other dozen or so folks with their iPhones in hand to catch photos at the edge of Singapore skyline. It’s the kind of place that just screams “Instagram” if a pool could talk. At any moment in this pool, at least three dozen iPhones are upright in the photo-ready selfie position.
There is a light on a pole spinning around. After an hour in the pool, Kyle has an ah-ha moment. That must the be warning system when lightening is close by. Yes, it has technically been lightening but it seemed far away over the city and there are lifeguards here who are not telling anyone to get out of the pool. Still, we have no desire to finish the first half of the trip getting burnt to a crisp so we head out of the pool.
It’s about 3 pm and Big Sauce John still has plans for exploring Singapore today — pool or no pool. We head out in the pouring rain for the Art and Science Museum which is a contemporary building shaped like a white lotus.
We decide to go to the new exhibition called Future 2219, an exhibit that predicts what the world and Singapore will be like 200 years from now. Suffice to say, it dismally predicted humans will be living 200 meters underground and jellyfish will rule the world. After an hour there, we thought we could be now be clinically depressed. It was a shocking downer.
So onto something more uplifting, John graciously leads us to the Garden by the Bay, an extraordinary indoor garden system that made Leanne’s heart sing. It is a nature park spanning 101 hectares in the center of Singapore. The conservatory complex comprises two cooled conservatories – the Flower Dome which is the largest glass greenhouse and the largest columnless glasshouse in the world and the Cloud Forest.
We enter the Flower Dome first and it’s an impressive, massive glass dome with plants and trees as far as the eye can see. The dome is divided into places all around the world with each having the plant and tree species indigenous to that place. There is a special Christmas exhibit where they’ve created the North Pole and the associated Santa, reindeer and elves amidst trees and plants. It looks more like Christmas in the tropics but we appreciate it none-the-less as we haven’t seen much in the way of Christmas decorations in Asia.
Next we visit the Cloud Forest which is designed to show the different rain forests from around the world. They have the largest indoor waterfall in the world at 35 meters. This is a highlight that reminded us of Croatia’s Plitvice National Park with its hundreds of waterfalls and lakes. Photos below, but it’s hard to give it justice.
Now it’s dinner time. Of course, we need to top off our return to a major urban center with a visit to a Hard Rock Cafe. We take a public double decker bus and learn about how bad the traffic in Singapore can get on a Friday night. An hour later, we emerge near the cafe. Over dinner, Justin has prepared a quiz for us to see how well we knew our country fun facts from the 20 or so countries he’s been teaching us these past months. He would give a fun fact and we’d have to name which country it was. There were some tricky ones but we did pretty darn well in fact.
It’s late and we’re tired so we skip the bus and opt for a taxi back to the hotel. When we are back in our rooms, we hear a concert in the garden below. We later learn than Singapore has more than 2,000 free performances at the Esplanade. Since a coffee sets you back $10, I’m not sure if you are ahead or behind with free jazz.
It seems as if you are automatically cool and hip just being here in Singapore. Really like the vibe so far. A utopian feeling here, despite it being pricey for us Americans.
