Singapore

Flew down to Singapore from K.L., a short 50 minute flight. Singapore is more humid than K.L. was, seeing that it is a small island state.

After getting my bearings there my first night, I basically just found some food and relaxed in the air conditioning in the hostel.

The next day, I headed out, walking the 15 minutes or so to the LRT station. I am continually impressed with the LRT setups of cities around the world compared to what we have at home. Singapore's system was no exception. It reaches far across the city, is impeccably clean, and widely used by all kinds of people. It is busy all the time. No graffiti, no damage, clean, on time and cheap make it an outstanding way to travel.

I first headed over to Sentosa Island, which is an island that has a lot of attractions that locals use as a bit of a holiday island. It has a cable car or train that connects to the island. I opted for the cable car, which is several hundred feet off the ground. The great thing about being up there for the approximate 5-10 minute ride, was the fact that you could see across the city, and all over the multiple ports that Singapore has. There is literally hundreds of ships as far as the eye can see, all waiting to come into the harbour to load and unload. Going hand in hand, there are also several hundred incidents of Pirates (yes, Pirates) attacking and storming boats every year. Most don't succeed I was told, but some actually do.

Sentosa was nice, but the biggest attractions were to be seen by walking around the island, and seeing as I was already a sweaty mess, even when standing still, I opted against hiking around in the bush for the better part of the day. I took a few pictures, including that of the Merlion, the tourist symbol for Singapore, featuring the head of a lion and the body of a fish. It's no giant Vegreville Pysanka, but it was nice. After that I decided to go back onto the cable car and into town.

I found out gradually that there is not a lot to see and do in Singapore, unless you like shopping and shopping malls. People in Singapore love their shopping malls. They are everywhere, and there is something for everyone's tastes and price range. However, Singapore is not as cheap as Malaysia, where the dollar is trading at just over a 3:1 ratio. Here it is around $1.33 Singapore Dollars to $1 Canadian Dollar. The better part of the day, I hung around Orchard Road, just looking in shops and doing some free reading in the book stores.

The one thing you do notice in Singapore is how clean everything is. There are large fines for all kinds of offences that would make a mess, no matter how small. Littering is around S$1000, spitting is around S$500. They don't allow food or drink on the LRT, another S$500 fine, and if your caught with a flammable fluid on the LRT, it's S$5000. I wondered if that included something small like having a lighter, but it's probably better not to find out.

Going back to the hostel, I ran into a few people from England and one from Canada, and we decided to head out for the night. One girl suggested we go to the Raffles Hotel, which is where the Singapore Sling was invented, somewhere around WWI. We did go there, and had one. It was good, but not S$25.00 good, like they charged. Going out is not cheap here, as I found out later as well. A simple pint of beer is S$13, with prices going all the way up to S$26. So therefore, drinks were few and far between, but we managed to stretch the night out, getting back pretty late.

The next day, it is back to Kuala Lumpur, last stop before Africa.