JBs World Tour Web Report Extravaganza
Part 1 Singapore
[intro][Singapore][NZ-North][NZ-South][USA]Singapore - 24 hour stopover
Flight to Singapore was fine on Singapore airlines, we took off at 10pm, so overnight flight, slept a fair bit, arrived in Singapore at 7pm local time due to time difference, and took a superb comedy taxi to our hotel which had a flat screen TV in the back, showing an endless loop of Mr Bean episodes (I assume he has alternate dodgy comedies depending on which country his passengers are from :-). Our hotel was about two minutes walk from Orchard road which is the big shopping area.Went for a wander as we felt we had to do something other than just flake out at the hotel, so had fast food rice bowls at Yoshini (sp?) which is the Japanese equivalent of McDonalds, so meal deals come with fish soup and fruit salad (instead of fries and a coke), which was funny, and we felt a little more adventurous than succumbing to the dreaded M !!
After whatever meal we had (jet lag eh!), went for a bit more wandering, Singapore is incredibly clean, but very busy, I had no idea that it was such a small island, from memory 40km wide and 24km top to bottom, so is not much larger than the isle of wight, yet has 4 million people living there, plus tourists !!!
Whilst walking along the Orchard road, which is 2 lanes each way and very busy, we saw a woman trying to cross the road between proper crossings, she was behind the hedge so I could only see her head, and a black civic was approaching, and beeped its horn before slamming on the brakes, it then beeped the horn again, and looked like it stopped braking, so I assumed she had moved out of the way, then heard a crunch as the car ran into here, and saw her shoes go flying up into the air ! A load of people gathere round, including a couple of police officers, who are dropped off by a bus, which then goes round and picks them up later rather than clog the road with more police cars, which seems a good idea for inner city policing ! Anyway, we walked back down a few minutes later, and she was on her feet, and looked like the police were charging her for jaywalking, so we assume the law in Singapore is if you beep twice you can run people over, so for the rest of the trip, we were saying 'beep, beep, splat' when crossing the road, as a reminder :-)
Stopped for a coffee before heading back to the hotel as we were all knackered, time was probably only about 9.30, so all went to sleep, then woke a couple of hours later, so all had a cup of tea, chatted and read, then back to sleep for a few more hours, a bit more chatting/reading about 4am, finaly all slept until the alarm went at 8am ! Jet lag eh ! Its a funny bugger !!
Tried to get up reasonably early, booked a coach tour from the hotel, and a taxi to the airport afterwards, and succumbed to the dreaded M for breakfast (pancakes and hash browns), and took tube over to other side of town, walked past the famous Raffles hotel, which looked exactly as I expected, so got a good snap in front of it. We then walked onto SunCity which is a huge mall complex, and has the largest fountain in the world in the middle of it (called the fountain of wealth), the main fountain is the large ring visible in this picture which we saw running with lights/lasers from the taxi from the airport last night, but there is also a tiny fountain in the middle which runs during the day, and it is supposed to be lucky to walk round it 3 times and put your left hand into the water, so we did that.
Then walked over to theatre by the bay new complex, which is two huge spikey domes, containing concert halls, a library and a superb roof terrace with a great view across the harbour.
The harbour is guarded by a big Merlion (Mermaid-Lion), then took a boat tour of the harbour and river areas, which dropped us off on the river front of the chinatown area, and grabbed a sandwich for lunch in an irish sandwich shop, as we had to get back to the hotel for our coach tour.
Got back to the hotel just in time for our coach tour of city including chinatown and little india, the botanical gardens and a 40 minute ransom stop at a jewellry shop. Tour was great apart from the crap shop bit, and the tour guide was very proud to be Singaporean, and told us how the goverment subsidises housing, and heavily taxes cars, which all made good sense ! Coach dropped us back to the hotel, where our taxi was waiting to take us to the airport, just in time to checkin for our flight to Auckland, and we had a few minutes free so I fulfilled a personal ambition by having conveyer belt sushi, before our flight to Auckland.
[intro][Singapore][NZ-North][NZ-South][USA]
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