Enough of wine tasting, cycle tours and climbing volcanoes – five days in Singapore presented a perfect opportunity to earn our Tourism Cliche badge. The plan was simple: hit as many of the city state’s vast array of tourist attractions as we could in the five days we’d have before moving on to KL. The zoo, the river cruise, Universal Studios, Madame Tussauds…
TripAdvisor helpfully brought to our attention an all-inclusive tourist pass called iVenture which offers unlimited access to 50 different attractions over 1, 3 or 5 days. Perfect: we pay once for the five day pass and then get stuck in. Out with the calculator, and we figured on saving about 30% on the standard ticket prices, provided that we could keep up an average of four venues a day.
Challenge accepted!
Singapore Flyer
Where better to start things off than with a bird’s eye view of the city, so we headed off to the Flyer, Singapore’s answer to the London Eye. At 165 metres tall (30 metres taller than the Eye), and with its very central location, the view from the top is worth the 15 minute wait as the wheel makes its very slow (< 1km/hr) rotation. We had an inkling of just what an amazing place Singapore is from our airport transfer the previous day, but it’s not ‘til you see it from above that you realise just how many iconic landmarks it has. But as we’ll be visiting most of them, more on these later…
As we would learn more about later in our visit, Singapore is a hub for key shipping channels between Europe, the US, the Middle East, Australia and Asia. This makes it one of, if not the world centre for shipping, with logistics being one of the country’s biggest exports. Looking out across the Singapore Strait (with the South China Sea further beyond that), we saw ample evidence of this in the form of a few hundred anchored commercial shopping vessels, presumably waiting their turn for loading or unloading at the harbour.
The Flyer has 28 capsules, each with a capacity of 28 passengers, although on the day of our visit, the queue was short and so they were only half filling each capsules. The number 28 is significant because in Cantonese it represents “double prosperity” (with eight being a lucky number in China).
Unlike the Eye, the Singapore Flyer was built on a dedicated brownfield site rather than being squeezed into an existing tourist hotspot. Although it does require a bit of a walk (or HoHo bus ride) to reach it, it has the advantage of considerably more space. The facilities provided for purchasing tickets, queueing and boarding are more comfortable than they can be in London, and after your flight, you return to ground level by descending on escalators through an impressive indoor rainforest. Pretty neat.
Singapore River Cruise
In London (and surely just about every major city that’s been built on a river), there are several different operators offering river cruises. For whatever reason, Singapore is different: there is just one Singapore River Cruise, and if you’re in the centre of town, you can’t help but notice it, because the operator has dozens of identical boats, setting off just a few minutes apart and doing the same 40-minute loop.
The boats are a recreation of the original diesel-powered “bum boats” that have been working the river here for more than a century. They have an electronic motor now, and an English language audio commentary, but do still look the part.
From the central Clarke Quay jetty you sail east towards the ocean, passing beneath Cavenagh Bridge and the famous Five Boys By The River statue before entering Boat Quay. Shaped like the belly of a carp, this stretch of the Singapore River was once home to three quarters of all shipping activity in the city due to the association made between fish and prosperity in Chinese culture. On the south bank of Boat Quay is a row of original shophouses from the late 19th century. Today they have been converted into bars and cafes, but the facades have been preserved. The buildings vary in height for no other reason than because a taller building cost more to build!
Beyond Boat Quay is Marina Bay, home to several well-preserved historical buildings, now dwarfed by dozens of giant glass sky scrapers that tower above them. The Fullerton is perhaps the most notable. Now a hotel, the Fullerton was built at the end of the first world war to celebrate Singapore’s Centenary. The building once hosted not only the General Post Office, but also the Exchange, and numerous government offices.
On the other side of Marina bay, perhaps now equally as iconic as the Fullerton (despite having been open for just a few years), is the Marina Bay Sands resort, a giant three-towered hotel with an integrated conference centre, shopping mall, theatres, a museum and casino. There’s a viewing platform at the top of the hotel which we’ll be visiting, so more on this later…
The Singapore River Cruise boats make a loop around Marina Bay, passing Helix Bridge (built in the shape of a strand of DNA), The Float (a giant floating platform that is often used for concerts, but was decked out with a football pitch during our visit) and the Esplanade, two spiky, dome-shaped buildings used for performing arts events and known locally as the “two Durians” due to their resemblance to the fruit.
On the way back to Clarke Quay we passed Raffles (perhaps the world’s most famous hotel, named after British statesman Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore), Empress Place Building, formally used by a number of governmental offices but now home to the Asian Civilizations Museum, and the Victoria Theatre and Concert Halls which were built in the 1900s in memory of the late Queen Victoria.
Hooters
Okay, so Hooters is not a tourist attraction, it’s a chain of restaurants specialising in scantily clad table service. But lunch at Hooters was included with our iVenture pass, and it was a new experience for us both, so we dropped by for some lunch!
National Gallery Singapore
Next we visited Singapore’s National Gallery, housed in the very grand surroundings of the city’s former City Hall and Supreme Court buildings. With seven or eight floors and a few dozen permanent exhibitions to explore, we didn’t really know where to start, so decided to concentrate on a temporary exhibition: Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacies. The exhibition explores how the British Empire was viewed by the countries which she invaded, and the different perspectives presented in the media back home, and abroad. We only had time for a cursory look around, but it was (to me, at least) really interesting, especially in light of it being presented by and for the consumption of people from one of the former colonies, rather than back in London.
Alive
Though they describe themselves as a museum, Alive is really a gallery of two- and three-dimensional artworks which have been created solely for the purpose of providing crazy photo opportunities for visitors. The photos say it all really…
Moonlight Adventure
Not an attraction in itself, Moonlight Adventure is a tour operated by the people who run Singapore’s Hop On Hop Off bus fleet. Though we would certainly not have considered joining this particular tour had we been paying full price for the tickets, it was included with our iVenture pass and seemed like a good way to visit a couple of districts of Singapore that we might not otherwise have made it to.
The tour starts off with a visit to China Town, and included in the price of the ticket is a small contribution towards dinner. We had just a few minutes to grab some food at the street market, before jumping back on the bus and heading to Gardens By The Bay (more on this later, as we visited it again under our own steam), and then on to Bugis Street, which is a pleasingly chaotic shopping destination crammed full of tiny stalls and stands selling everything from street food to knock-off designer wear to cheap household goods. With rows of stalls spread over three floor, and almost no space between them, it would be very easy to get lost!
Universal Studios
Just like it’s very much older (and bigger) cousin in Florida, Universal Studios is a theme park with various rides and attractions ‘celebrating’ several of Universal Studios most popular film franchises.
The park is arranged into seven zones:
New York, with film sets from gangster movies such as The Godfather;
Hollywood, with big cars, diners, gaudy film sets and (presumably through want of anywhere more appropriate) home to the Minions and Seasame Street!;
Sci-Fi City, home to Transformers and Battlestar Galactica;
Ancient Egypt, for The Mummy;
Lost World, for Jurassic Park and Waterworld;
Far Far Away, for Shrek; and Madagascar for, well, Madagascar!
Each zone has just a couple of big rides. Our favourites were Revenge Of The Mummy, an indoor rollercoaster set in almost total darkness, and TRANSFORMERS The Ride, where you sit in a “car” that – despite not physically moving very far at all (it mostly just spins around and bumps you up and down) – makes you feel like you’re right in the middle of a battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons with the help of several screens and a pair of 3D glasses.
Kit also enjoyed Humans versus Cyclons, two intertwined rollercoasters, where you choose whether to ‘fight’ for the humans (the red track, for woosies – where you’re seated) or the cyclons (the grey track, for dare-devils – where you’re suspended and spend half the ride upside down!).
It’s not a huge theme park, and there aren’t that many memorable rides. However, lucky for us, we were there on a Wednesday, off season, and so we got the best possible experience. There was no queue to get in, and most of the queues for rides were 20 minutes or less. The only long queue was for The Lost World, where we waited over an hour for our turn, and this only because there had been a mechanical fault earlier in the day.
Singapore Butterfly Park and Insect Kingdom
Also located on Sentosa Island (home to Universal Studios), the Butterfly Park has some very average reviews on TripAdvisor, and I would have to say that they were pretty fair. Most comment that you don’t actually see many butterfly – which is true, unless you count several thousand dead ones which they have in display cases!
We did meet some very talkative parrots though, a giant lizard, and the world’s largest species of Pigeon. What these things have to do with butterflies and insects I don’t know, but as we we just about the only visitors at the time, we had a very personal “meet and greet” which was a lot of fun.
Tiger Sky Tower
Sponsored by the makers of Tiger Beer, the Sky Tower claims to be “Asia’s tallest observatory tower. Offering panoramic views at 131 metres above sea level across Singapore”. Perhaps a bit of a hollow claim to fame when you consider that the Singapore Flyer is 35 metres taller and the observation deck on Marina Bay Sands is 75 metres further taller. But, I guess these aren’t technically observatory towers!
The tower has a spinning observation deck (similar to the new i360 observation tower in Brighton), so you just sit down and watch as the 360 degree views come to you. Nothing special, and all a bit 1990s perhaps, but it’s in a different part of town to the other two birds eye views which we got during our stay in Singapore, so we thought it was worth the trip up to see the view over Sentosa Island and especially to get an aerial view of Universal Studios which we could better appreciate now we knew what we were looking at.
Singapore Cable Car
Just next to the Sky Tower are stations on each of Singapore’s two cable car lines: the Sentosa Line, which runs east-to-west along almost the full length of Sentosa Island; and the Mount Faber Line, which crosses over to Sentosa Island from the mainland.
Included with our iVenture passes was a round-trip journey on both lines, so we first hopped onto the Sentosa Line before beginning the journey back to our bnb by taking the Mount Faber Line over to the MRT station at Harbourfront. The highlight of the Mount Faber Line is a journey through an office building a few dozen floors up!
Singapore Botanic Gardens and National Orchid Garden
Though entry to the National Orchid Gardens is just $5 – so we were hardly saving anything by using our iVenture passes – I am glad this attraction is covered by the pass because we might otherwise have never thought to pay it a visit.
After a 20 minute ride on the MRT (Singapore’s underground network), followed by a 30 minute walk through the Botanic Gardens (which are completely free to visit), we arrived at the National Orchid Gallery with just an hour to explore.
I had expected something much smaller than what we actually found. The orchid is clearly a very beloved species in this part of the world, as there are literally 100s of them on display, and the gardens are immaculately presented.
Particularly noteworthy is the VIP garden, where prestigious visitors to the gardens have had a species of orchids named after them. Along with orchids dedicated to Barrack Obama, Lady Diana and Nelson Mandella, there were several slightly less glamorous dedications, including one to Bertie Ahern!
As well as a lot of flowers, the gardens were also impressive for the effort which has been put in to the overall look and feel of the place. There are waterfalls, sculptures, pagodas and arches galore.
Jurong Bird Park
This was the first attraction where we really had to use the Hop On Hop Off bus service that is included with the iVenture card, because it’s miles away from anything! In fact, its location is so inconvenient that they are busy making plans for the park to be relocated next to the zoo.
Though the 40-minute drive out to the bird park is fairly uninspriring, we were glad that we made the effort, because it’s a really decent attraction, all the better for being half empty at the time we visited!
Luckily for us, we arrived just a few minutes before one of the daily live shows, where various birds are brought out on stage or fly around above the heads of the audience. The stars of the show were undoubtedly the parrots – one who made the sound of a telephone, a snoring human, and spoke several words for us, and one who showed remarkable agility after flying through some hula hoops that were held up by volunteers, one of which was less than a foot in diameter.
After the show we dashed around the rest of the park, with the highlight being a very inquisitive emu, some very colourful lorikeets and a cage full of the ugliest birds you have ever seen!
Night Safari
Right next to Singapore Zoo (which we would be visiting tomorrow) is the Singapore Night Safari – really an extension of the zoo which opens after dark to provide opportunities to see noctural and diurnal animals when they’re at their most active.
Having come almost directly from the bird park – which was half empty – we had a real shock upon our arrival at the Night Safari, where the queues had queues! It’s not entirely surprising I suppose: by opening for just a few hours each evening, everyone had turned up at pretty much the same time as we had…
Once inside, you’re presented with two choices: there is a tram, and there are walking trails. From the tram you see all of the big species divided into seven regional zones: the Himalayan Foothills, home to tahrs (mountain goats); the Indian Subcontinent home to hyenas and asian lions; Equatorial Africa, home to zebras, giraffes and hippos; Asian Riverine Forest, home to elephants and bearded pigs; the Nepalese River Valley, home to Indian wolves and Asian rhinos; and the Burmese Hillside, home to Malayan tigers and black bears.
As there was a second queue to get onto the tram, we decided to do the four walking trails first. Though there is some cross-over with the tram route, from the walking trails you see many of the smaller species including otters, civets (which we’d last seen in Bali), flying foxes, possums and wallabies.
We don’t have any pictures from inside the Night Safari because it was dark (duh!), but it’s a decent-enough attraction that’s well-deserving of its 4* review on TripAdvisor. The only thing I would say is that visiting this place eight hours before coming back to visit the zoo is probably not the best plan – even though there is a focus on nocturnal species at the Night Safari, there is still quite a lot of cross-over with the zoo, so these two attractions would definitely be better visited a few months apart.
River Safari
As well as the Night Safari, Singapore Zoo has a second neighbour: the River Safari. Most visitors to the zoo will visit the River Safari on the same day, as it’s really just another extension of the zoo with a focus on the plants and animals that are found in and around the world’s big rivers: the Nile, the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Congo, the Ganges, the Mekong and the Yangtze.
Unlike a traditional zoo, where you are free to roam, visitors to the River Safari follow a fixed route which explores each rivers’ micro-climate in turn, and ends with a boat ride (which I guess is where the “Safari” in “River Safari” comes from). There’s a lot of fish to see, but it’s not all fish. We saw crocs, tons of snakes, turtles, and a few big mammals too, including a family of panthers.
On the day of our visit, there had been a fun run around the grounds of the zoo earlier that morning, and all participants had a ticket for entry into the River Safari. So there were a lot of people, many more of them locals than would probably be the case on any other day of the year. The runners were easy to spot from the blue t-shirts they were all wearing, and it can’t have been a very long run because they looked far too energetic to have just finished a marathon or half-marathon!
Singapore Zoo
So finally after visiting the next-door Night and River Safaris, we paid a quick visit to the zoo. With the last Hop On Hop Off Bus leaving at 5pm, we had just a couple of hours to explore, but as we’d been looking at wildlife for most of the past 24 hours, we weren’t especially concerned at the prospect of missing out on a few animals.
As zoos go, it’s one of the better ones that we have visited, although it’s no competition to our favourite, Chester Zoo. The highlight of our visit was an elderly but still very active polar bear, a walkthru enclosure that’s home to ring-tailed lemurs and fruitbats (amongst many other species), and a pair of very boisterous young chimpanzees whose mother had a very resigned look on her face as she watched them starting yet another fight!
Gardens By The Bay and the OCBC Skyway
Gardens By The Bay is the #1 rated attraction in Singapore on TripAdvisor, so the brief visit we made during the Moonlight Adventure on our first day in Singapore was never going to be sufficient. Located just a few hundred yards south-east of Marina Bay, which we had sailed around during our trip on the Singapore River Cruise three days earlier, Gardens By The Bay is described as “a national garden and premier horticultural attraction for local and international visitors… a showpiece of horticulture and garden artistry that presents the plant kingdom in a whole new way, entertaining while educating visitors with plants seldom seen in this part of the world, ranging from species in cool, temperate climates to tropical forests and habitats.”.
Trying to describe it is actually quite difficult. In essence, it’s a big park, most of which is completely free of charge. The highlights are two large conservatories – which charge for entry, Supertree Grove – a collection of giant tree-shaped towers which are illuminated at night – and the OCBC Skyway, an aerial walkway linking several of the supertrees.
At 19:45 and 20:45 each evening, Supertree Grove becomes the focal point for Garden Rhapsody, a 20-minute light and laser show. The trees are lit up in an array of colours which flash and glow in time to a musical accompanient. Again, quite difficult to describe, but very spectacular… and amazingly, completely free of charge.
We were lucky enough to time our visit to the OCBC Skyway so we observed part of the Garden Rhapsody show from above – surely the best seat in the house.
Back on terraferma, we paid a visit to both of the conservatories, and it was here where we truly appreciated why Gardens By The Bay is so highly rated.
First we visited Cloud Forest. This giant greenhouse contains a 35-metre tall artificial mountain that is covered in every imaginable species of water-loving plant. A walkway snakes its way around the mountain, at one point passing behind a waterfall. As well as plant life, Cloud Forest is decorated with all sorts of nature-themed wooden and stone sculptures. This place really is incredible, and given the chance, I would visit again tomorrow.
The second conservatory is called Flower Dome. Whilst Cloud Forest is jam-packed with plants that thrive in a humid climate, Flower Dome is dry. Here we encountered a huge collection of cacti (including the agave plant, responsible for tequila), as well as a floral celebration of the recent Chinese New Year. Though not quite as spectacular as Cloud Forest, a plant / flower enthusiast could walk around the Flower Dome all day.
Marina Bay Sands Viewing Platform
Marina Bay Sands is a giant hotel and conference centre complex that stands between Marina Bay to the west and Gardens By The Bay to the East. It’s one of the largest hotels in the world, with over 2,500 rooms spread over three towers. Connecting these towers is a giant platform, home to a 150-metre long infinity pool (photograph below – but not taken by us, sadly!), several bars and restaurants and an observation deck that’s open to the public.
We visited the observation deck at the end of a long day, and though we were tired, it was well worth it. The views across Marina Bay are stunning, especially when they begin “Wonder Full”, a nightly laser and light show played out across the water. It was also neat to see several tiny (when views from 57 storeys up!) Singapore River Cruise boats snaking their way around Marina Bay even that late at night.
Madame Tussauds
For our final day in Singapore, we returned to Sentosa Island (where we had visited Universal Studios three days earlier) for more tourist delights, starting with a visit to Madame Tussauds.
Needing no introduction, there’s really not much to say about this place except for the fact that it was considerably less packed than Madame Tussauds in London, which meant we could take some very predictable photos without feeling too embarrassed!
4D AdventureLand
Included with our iVenture card was entry to the “Journey-2” show at the 4D AdventureLand on Sentosa Island.
Journey-2 is a 20-minute edit of the feature length Hollywood film “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island”. Whilst the full-length movie was widely screened in 3D, “Journey-2” is presented in 4D which means you’re sitting in a chair which bumps you around during action scenes, sprays water at you when the characters are being tossed around on a pirate ship on screen, and occasionally ‘tickles’ you with a blast of air to make you think there’s a spider or giant millipede walking up your leg!
All good fun. Although the film is completely ridiculous, as least we only had to see the “best” 20 minutes of it rather than a full 90 minutes of the Rock and Michael Caine hamming it up!
4D AdventureLand is actually is actually a miniature theme park featuring several other ‘multi-sensory’ attractions, but iVenture only got us into the Journey-2 screening, so that’s all we stuck around to see.
Adventure Cove
Having not fully satisfied our daily adventure quota at AdventureLand, we headed next to the Adventure Cove Water Park. I’m not sure I’ve been to a water park before, and maybe we wouldn’t have gone at all had it not been included on the iVenture card scheme, but I am certainly glad that we did go as we had a blast.
For obvious reasons, we don’t have any pictures to prove it, but we hung out at Adventure Cove for a good three hours. As well as a very relaxing “river” that flows right around the park and takes a good 30 minutes to circumnavigate floating on one of the giant rubber rings provided, there’s a few big water slides (ranging from a little scary to really quite scary, but nothing in comparison to the pitch black roller coaster ride at Universal Studios three days earlier!), an over-water assault course that includes a 3m cliff jump, and a giant wave pool.
There’s also a aerial ropes course – though I never quite understood why, since it had nothing to do with water. It’s the first time I’ve been on one of these thing and yes it was quite daunting crossing a narrow balance beam with nothing to hold onto except the rope that attaches you to the overhead wire. I don’t think I was so much scared of falling off – I did trust that the harness would do its job – but more the fact that no-one else had fallen off while we were queuing up (including several small children!), so it would have made it a little embarrassing to have done so myself!
S.E.A. Aquarium
And so, after five days of wall-to-wall attractions, we came our our final stop: the S.E.A. Aquarium right next door to Adventure Cove on Sentosa Island. As with our visit to the zoo 24 hours earlier, we’d not left ourselves much time to explore the aquarium, but we have visited a lot of aquariums in a lot of places around the world, so we were too concerned about needing to keep moving.
It’s a pretty substantial place, and of course, there’s a lot of fish to see. But the owners obviously know what people (and especially kids) most want to see, and hit all of the right buttons with sharks, rays, spider crabs, jellies, electric eels, piranhas, and of course the inevitable clown fish.
Most bizarre – and definitely the highlight for me – were the Leafy Sea Dragons, also known as Australian Sea Dragons as they are only found in temperate waters around Southern and Western Australia.
Though we spent almost all of our time in Singapore with our tourist hats on, we did get a bit of a feel for Singapore as a city / country to live in as we travelled between its various attractions. The transport network is fantastic: the MRT is everything that the London Underground would be if it had been built in the 21st century, with very spacious trains, escalators, lifts and moving walkways at every platform, wide ticket barriers and loads of space in the tunnels that run from ground level to the platforms, and between lines. They do have a strange idea of how to encourage people to play nicely though: #StandUpStacey, #BagDownBenny etc.
Above ground, the city is very clean and very green. In fact, it is a stated objective of its leadership to make it not just a “garden city” but a “city in a garden”. Whenever trees are cut down to make room for a new building, that building must incorporate trees and gardens into its design. This means you quite often see sky scrapers with dedicated garden balconies or terraces. Almost every traffic barrier we saw has a hedge growing around it, many road bridges have climbing plants growing on them, and verges are covered in mature trees, even in the city centre.
Singapore is also a very diverse city / country. As well as a huge ethnic Indian population (many of whom are men who work in the construction industry, sending money back to their families in India), there is a big Chinese community, as well as a diverse and very significant number of ex-pats from Europe and elsewhere. We didn’t see any signs of ethnic tension, and indeed, the country seems to thrive on having a number of different religions (though Islam is the “national” religion), and languages. Conveniently for us, you can definitely get by in Singapore speaking only English, although not everyone we ran into was a fluent English speaker by any stretch of the imagination.
In terms of cost… well it’s certainly not a cheap city to live in. Food, and most consumer goods, seemed to be pretty much on par with London prices. Property is very expensive too, although perhaps the high speed rail link to Kuala Lumpur that is currently being planning will help ease that, as it will enable commuters from Malaysia to reach Singapore in 90 minutes. One thing which is cheaper is transport: we made several long(ish) journeys on the MRT, the cheapest of which cost 77c and the most expensive was – I think – $1.47. That’s about 80p – if only you could make a journey on the London Underground for that price!
