sweltering in singapore

Alex at breakfast with the orangutans
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The idea was that we would break ourselves into Asia gently with a few days in Singapore (it also happens that Darwin to Singapore is about the cheapest flight out of Asia).

We had booked to stay in a guesthouse in Little India, not knowing when we booked that we were there during Deepavali and it seemed that the whole of Singapore's Indian community were outside our front door most of the time.  Still I enjoyed the location, if only for the close proximity of $1 dosas for breakfast.

mostly stuffed with pork floss

A comfy looking bottom
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Our first day in Singapore started with a big let-down, our flight came in at 4am, before the trains started running into the centre of town, but we thought we'd get some nice sleep as www.sleepinginairports.com gives Singapore such a high rating, there was talk of cinemas, and big soft chairs with removeable cushions to have a sleep on.  Well we didn't find any of those in the terminal 2 departures area, so we put our feet up in a coffee shop and waited until it was light outside before venturing in to our hostel.

Alex with her empty Bread Talk bag
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Had a little wander around up to Orchard Road (the Oxford Street of Singapore) to buy a Thai guidebook.  Then worked our way home to have a 3 hour nap before heading out to a nice museum and then Raffles hotel for Singapore slings and G+Ts.  Our Singapore book confidently stated that we should head to the Billiard Bar for an authentic atmosphere, sadly it seems that since the guide was written the bar has been turned over to a Vegas style buffet, so we gave that a miss and headed to the more famous Long Bar.  Where I was most excited to find that there were lots of free peanuts, and that accepted etiquete is to throw the shells on the floor (or after you've been there for about 2 minutes at each other).

Try to look at this proboscis monkey for 10 seconds without laughing, go on, try
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Next day we headed out early to the zoo.  We had a breakfast date with some orangutans.  The zoo in Singapore is excellent, and they do a breakfast buffet thing (which you normally need to book in advance) where you sit down enjoying your breakfast and they open a gate and a pair of orangutans climb through and sit on a perch just a few metres from your table to start their breakfast (which was more fruit based than ours).  A very touristy experience, and one that is very children based, but then we still feel like big kids so it was only fair that we could join in.  The photos we took were a bit rubbish, because of the need to keep getting up to grab more fried eggs / dim sum/ noodles / watermelon / curry / croissants etc.

Lights in Chinatown
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The rest of the zoo was good too, lots of primates, mostly not in cages, but 'free' to roam around, as far as the edge of fenced moat surrounding their trees that is.  There were some spider monkeys amongst them, but they made Alex a bit sad as she wasn't allowed to hug them and bite their tails as she did for a month in Bolivia, so we had to move on.

Back in town we went out for Singapore's famous fish head curry.  Which I have to say wasn't worth the hype (and expense).  When was the last time you went out for a curry made with fish heads that was 3 times the expense of an identical curry with chicken in?

Amazingly Alex had already come down with Delhi belly by our third day in Asia, and she hadn't even had any fish heads.  So I went out on my own to do some shopping and things on our final day.  After a late lunch in a curry house where we got stuck in a long afternoon thunder storm, in the end we decided to leave and got drenched on our way down to Chinatown, where we browsed the shops and went to a Hindu temple.  The evening was another feast, this time the Singaporean speciality of fried carrot cake (not a cake and not made of carrots) and some sweet, glutinous rice balls at the hawker stalls on food street.  Followed this with a wonder around the fancy Clarke Quay and Boat Quay areas before another underground ride home.

Quite liked Singapore overall, but three days was probably enough.  The best thing was the amazing food courts (and there are not many countries where you can come away saying that).  Every shopping mall (and there were lots of those too) had a huge variety of food stalling selling Indian, Chinese, Malay and Thai speciaties along with Singapore's own finest food.  Including the weird Ice Kachang, a desert consisitng of a pyramid of ice shavings covered in 4 or 5 sweet sauces, all served on a bed of beans and sweetcorn.  And Alex's favourite food shop was a bakery called BREAD TALK, that made all sorts of exciting bready things, mostly stuffed with pork floss.