Singapore [I]

Lush. Green. Verdant. Clean.

You get out of the airport and all you can think (apart from about how bloody tired you are) is how incredibly beautiful Singapore is. There are trees everywhere and flowers too. Also, they're the kind of trees that really look like how trees should like. Great sweeping boughs, lush greenery and the occasional epiphyte. These aren't scrubby or that kind of camouflage faded green/brown that you get in some places.

Also, the city is clean! I mean they have a reputation for their laws (which they are the first to poke fun at with their tourist t-shirts about them) but it's still a shock to wander the streets and not see rubbish or graffiti. Even the buildings are generally clean - unlike Auckland's CBD where some of the buildings really do look like they need a good scrub. This only really changes when you get down to Chinatown where the streets are narrower and the footpaths even more so. By the time the stores have signs and stuff out on the footpath you sometimes end up travelling short distances along the road. The anti-jaywalking isn't enforced like rumour suggests though. The locals seem quite happy to cross the road whenever opportunity presents. It's more that when you look at eight busy lanes of traffic, crossing at the lights suddenly seems like a great idea. The other cool thing about their infrastructure is that a lot of the main crossings have little digital readouts that tell you how long you've got left to cross!

So anyway, I get dropped off at the hotel early, like just before 9am in the morning, only to be told that the room won't be available until 2pm. All I want is a shower and a bed; looking at the waterfall pool through the lobby window was hellish. Instead, I transferred as much crap from my backpack to my suitcase as I could (I swear I'm going to have almost broken that poor bulging suitcase by the time I get home) and decided to head out to see the sights. There's nothing like washing up in a hotel restroom to make you feel like a real traveller. It was nice to emerge looking less like a grave-rising flesh-eating night-walking zombie and more like a real person.

The main objective was to try and find a digital camera. Fortunately, Funan DigitalLife Mall was pretty much next door. Their a specialist computing/camera etc... huge mall. It took me all day trawling there and the shops nearby to discover that cameras are:
a) cheaper back home if you use PriceSpy and go through the less well-known stores
b) the model that I wanted was considered obscure and no longer sold in Singapore
c) my cellphone and phone cards don't work in Singapore so I couldn't call Dad for advice
d) there are almost no internet cafes in Singapore! I eventually walked to the tourist info centre and found a stand-up terminal there that I could search models on.
The up-shot is that I bought a Canon A610 and after a day of walking, shopping & getting distracted decided that having a nap was more important than going back to buy a camera and therefore have no photos from the first day. Still, I'm in Singapore again on my way back :P

The camera would have been particularly useful to have that evening; especially since it turned out to be dead easy to use (and I finally have a camera with zoom; it's bliss!). So my first night there, after an hour long nap, I run out to grab dinner and then back to wait for the coach.
[The food by the way is fantastic!! Sadly I grabbed dodgy Turkish curry as the first hot food I saw when I left the hotel but the foodcourts at the many shopping centres are best. They do local cuisine, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian etc.... The food is gorgeous and cheap; about NZ$3-4 if you're choosing Asian food rather than their take on European food. There are restaurants as well that are more pricey but they can happily be avoided. BBQ Pork buns with pork fluff are also really yummy!
The other prevalent thing there is fruit juice stalls. It's so hot and muggy that you get thirsty really quickly. Caffeine and soft drinks aren't awfully popular although there are coke machines and coffee places within a ten-twenty minute walk. Fresh juice is far more popular - like sugarcane and lemon, green apple blended with ice or chilled coconut milk (served in coconut)].

So the coach comes and off we drive towards Malaysia. Before we reach the border we turn off towards the Night Safari. It's a 40ha park filled with animals that tend to be more active at night. There's no visible fences except around the larger predators - well, they're not actually visible but since they have special viewing platforms you're pretty sure that they are there. The rest of the animals have water barriers, cattle stops ont he road once or twice, psychological barriers, changes in vegetation, or none. It's weird hopping on the optional tour ride they provide because the first animals that you're seeing are really just foreign mountain sheep or goats (so the southlanders would feel at home!). But then there's giraffes, zebra, flamingoes, crocodiles, rhinos, leopards, tigers etc.... We had to stop once and wait while a tapier lazily shuffled across the road.

There are walkways across the park that you can stroll along in the dark with some low lighting spotted out along the way. You can understand why the park has a disclaimer about not being responsible for injury and any medical aid being given out of sympathy only and not acknowledgement of liability. The attitude seems to be that if you're stupid enough to try and walk up to a wild animal that's guarding its young than maybe the gene pool would be better off without you....

The tiger was gorgeous! I ended up just sitting on the ground and watching him until it was time to run for the coach.

Random fact: Flamingoes stand on one leg to control body temperature and so that their young can feed. Apparently pink flamingoes have pink milk.

There's a breed of Indian Crocodile that have the dodgiest looking snouts ever! It's not just me - the sign says that their snouts are believed to have aphrodiasical qualities...

There are leopard cats that look like leopards if they were house cat size. They are incredibly cute and apparently incredibly vicious and untameable by one year of age.

There was an entire clan of otters that loved visitors. They'd be off doing their otter thing in the undergrowth but come running as soon as they heard the 'tram' or people walking by. They chittered, they chatted, they performed. At one point they did a 'human pyramid' on the log and all I could think of was the episode of Family Guy when Stewie infiltrates the cheerleading squad (I watched it on the plane); well, that and that there were enough for a soccer team. I#m telling you, put them in tiny little Spurs shirts, give them a ball and they would put on a hell of a performance!