Singapore

Delhi

We spent the night in Delhi before flying out to Singapore early the next day. For those of you who have been to Delhi, you will understand why I don’t elaborate on this idyllic den of vice. For those of you who haven’t, then you can count yourself lucky you haven’t been ripped off.  Delhiites are infamous throughout India for being completely morally corrupt. Dan and I stayed at the Marriot in Gurgaon and had several issues with the hotel and staff, (which I won’t bore you with) but due to our excellent complaining skills, managed to get ourselves 20,000 extra Marriott points.  It really does pay to complain!

Singapore

We landed in Singapore airport and immediately a felt sense of calm. Singapore airport is a beautiful and ORGANISED airport.  A cheap and yet efficient airport bus picked us up and dropped us off directly at the hotel. Driving through the city, the main thing that stuck me after being in India for two months was the cleanliness. I always thought I would find Singapore be a very sterile city as I like a bit of dirt in my cities, but it was incredibly refreshing to see no garbage on the streets, no line of men peeing on the side of the street, no piles of dog (or human) excrement on the street, no beggars or homeless people on the street and no-one chasing you down the street trying to sell you yet another useless trinket. Don’t get me wrong-I love India but it is also nice to leave. I did however miss the aroma of spice in the air.

After arriving at our hotel, we ventured off for a late dinner at a food court close by - the selection while a little bewildering (serpents head anybody?) was most exciting to gluttons like us. I was quite surprised that  it really was not as clean as I would have thought it would be.  I think what put me off this particular establishment was the fact that majority of the patrons seemed to like leaving large mounds of meat scraps and bones on the table after they were done eating - not exactly appetising!

The next day, Dan and I woke up early and decided to take the cable car into Sentosa Island. Sentosa is the equivalent of a very large theme park. There are several different activities (or ways to part with your singapore dollar) including the aquarium, 4D rides, luge and skylifts (luges are essentially bobsleds on wheels), butterfly park, light shows etc. As we had limited time, Dan and I decided to visit the Aquarium, the Luge and finally the Skylift (far to lazy to walk back up the hill).

The Aquarium was your standard salty water, fish smelling, lots of little kids with ice cream hands type of thing  incorporating the common or garden dolphin show. What was impressive in the acquarium was the large tunnel which you could walk through featuring some very large sharks (no white sharks to my distress but probably to the relief of the ‘experience’ divers in the tunnel).  

After a spot of lunch at the on-site food court (no Nemo burgers sadly) we got the free bus to the luge. This was pretty cool for lazy types like us - fast adrenaline inducing downhill fun via a windy track with zero effort required and then a ski lift contraption back up for a another try (again zero effort).

We took the cable car back to the main Island and decided to explore Chinatown. We went to the Hawker centre and looked at the many things we could potentially buy if we had luggage space and jobs.   Thoroughly depressed, we then went off in search of the historic Raffles Hotel which apparently is a must-see when visiting Singapore (embarrassingly Dan seems to need to take lots of pictures of such sights, eliminating anybody actually thinking that we might be staying there - that and our North Face fleeces). To quote Wikipedia as I am far too lazy to describe it for you - ‘Raffles Hotel (Chinese: 莱佛士酒店) is a colonial-style hotel in Singapore, dating from 1887, and named after Singapore's founder Sir Stamford Raffles. Its aluminium-finish and simple geometric designs gave a stark, modernist contrast to Victorian architecture and classical architecture’. So yes, it was very nice and then we had dinner in the adjoining shopping centre as our budget no longer allows for expensive dinners (sob).

We carried on our walking tour of Singapore and passed the amazing building which is the Marina Bay Sands. Singapore has some really beautiful architecture and the Marina Bay Sands is no exception. It was opened very recently in 2010 and consists of three essentially curved buildings with what looks like a very large concrete ship on it. We unfortunately didn’t have time to visit it but gives us something to do next time and some more aspirations as to where we would want to stay!

We were knackered after all this - so we tried a couple more shops, a mad market and then hopped on Singapore's very efficient and clean metro service home.

Next morning, we hopped on the flight to Bankok dreaming of all the chillis awaiting us-our own version of heaven.