Singapore

So, ideally we would have had a little more time to explore this city. (We really could’ve used a little more time to explore this city, as it took us almost an entire afternoon to just figure out the regular mass-transit system). Had we caught the 12:30pm bus the day before, we would’ve been able to have at least another night in the town, but that just didn’t work out. Oh well. We worked with what we were able to work with.

We got in, and first things’ first, we found a hotel in the heart of the city. We found a room at the SE Asia Hotel right sort of in the Chinatown area. Had we done more research – we would’ve booked something earlier as Singapore was hosting the “F1 Formula Night Series” a HUGE car racing event (which turns out it was a pretty big deal, I guess even Biance (current famous singer popular with many youngsters today for the grandparents reading this post) was going to be there. (Who knew!!??....HA I guess not Peace Corps volunteers’ living in Cambodia, whose only connection to the world is ‘Radio Australia’). Anyway – we were lucky to find a room; and lucky for us we only were going to be there one night.

We got showered up and got in contact with a friend I wanted to meet. Five years back, my father was diagnosed with CML (Chronic Myelogeneos Leukemia)… and anyway – there was an online support group, and the person who started it is a very kind person named Anjana, who happens to live in Singapore. Her husband has had CML for 8 years now and the post is still going and still supports people with CML all over the world. She was very much a wealth of support and promising information in regards to this type of cancer, and helped me and my family (and many, many other people) at very scary times in their lives. So I felt it would be nice, that since we were in the area, I could at least pay a visit. (Which we did. Eventually.)

So, Singapore is a very, very large (and expensive) city. It also is a meticulously clean city. (I believe chewing gum is outlawed there, and it’s a $1000 fine if one gets caught littering. ($1USD = $0.75 SD). I guess if you want a place to be clean, slap a really expensive fine to keep it that way and then enforce it. (Enforce being key word here.) With those rules in place, it made it quite a pleasant city to visit. (We’re used to much dirtier places where we currently come from [the wild, wild west]). Anyway…..We walked around, and found a spot in China town to grab some lunch. We were thinking that for that afternoon before we met Anjana and her husband Roy for dinner, we would go and visit the famous Singapore Zoo. But before that, we thought that we had better go and try to find bus tickets back to Kuala Lumpur as our flight was an early one the day after the next. We wanted to be back at least one night before; and we didn’t want to have the issue that we had (having the 12:30pm train to Singapore be sold out and having to take the 2am train instead) …. when trying to get back to KL. So, we thought that was a good idea.

Well. Let me repeat ‘so, Singapore is a very, very large (and expensive) city’. There aren’t any cheap tuk tuk rides to get you around this place. It has a very huge functioning mass transit system. They’ve got a very efficient MRT (subway/monorail system)…as well as a city bus system. Which is great – and in all honesty experiencing all of it for the few hours we were in that town, they truly do have a very efficient system and it does transport people (hundreds of thousands of people) every day, every few minutes or so getting everyone where they want to be. With that said, learning the names of stops, routes, parts of towns and how to get to who, what, where was a bit of an undertaking in itself. It took us 2 hours to find the place where we could get tickets back to KL (which apparently wasn’t as big of a deal as they’ve got buses departing every half hour). And well, I could tell Will’s frustrations were at the boiling point when we got turned around on a map and were walking in the complete opposite direction for a ways on the way to the station. (Keep in mind we didn’t have that great of sleep on the night train, and now we were dealing with a huge hustling and bustling city, very unfamiliar to us and our current lifestyle…which pretty much made you feel…. well…. very small…on all levels and in all respect.)

Once we found out that bus tickets weren’t going to be an issue – we definitely didn’t have time to put what would have been our money’s worth into the zoo (before we were to meet our friends for dinner). So instead we tried our luck again with the city’s transport system and tried to check out a few of the hot spots in the city. After some navigating… and I use the term ‘navigating’ lightly… (I mentioned before they were setting up for the F1 series, in which the racetracks were along city streets so some of the transportation options were blocked or detoured).,…we eventually made our way to the Esplande center, and walked around there. Unfortunately no shows were happening and even the art gallery of the center was in transition between exhibitions. By that time, with our current luck taken into consideration, we decided we’d better get a move onto getting to the spot where Roy said he’d pick us up at 6pm.

The lesson we learned that afternoon was that it takes a LONG time to get from place to place in Singapore (especially if you’re new to the system) and secondly that it would be ideal to have more than 24 hours in such a place. One of Will’s favorite quotes is ‘all’s 20/20 in hindsight’. Sigh. Oh well. We originally were going to have more time, but that’s not how the cookie crumbled this trip so we did the best with what we had and tried to soak up as much as we could.

We were able to meet Roy at the entrance of the Singapore zoo about a half hour later than we had planned, but it worked out just fine. He drove us to their flat and Anjana had a pizza waiting for us and we actually had a very nice evening just relaxing and visiting with them. They were very nice company and they were adamant about having us come to visit and stay with them for at least a week so we could truly get the full taste of Singapore. We’ll have to see what the timing and wallet says to us at the end of our service and see if we can accept that offer or not. There were many more things we would have loved to have seen there, so I guess we shall see. ;-).

But yes, after that we caught the bus back to the MRT station, and took the MRT (subway) back to our part of the city and headed back to the SE Asia hotel for the night. We were wiped. Nothing like getting off a 2am night train; heading into Singapore; trying to navigate and figure out the transit system and then have to get back to bed in time to leave the town the next day at a decent hour.

Well… actually the next morning we were able to have a complimentary breakfast at our hotel and looked at the city map and saw we were within walking distance to the Singapore Art Museum, so decided to go and do that before we headed back to KL. I’m glad we did, they had a wide range of interesting exhibits and it made our trip to town seem that much more worthwhile. Not to mention, Will bought a small Indian Food cookbook at the gift shop in which we’ve been experimenting making all sorts of different Indian dishes from. So yes, the morning was a success. We hopped on the bus to Johor and from there we were able to catch a bus back to KL.

We didn’t arrive back to KL until about 9 that evening. We remembered seeing a hotel that was really close to the airport when we first flew in and thought it’d be great to just stay there as the airport is an hour and a half outside the main part of the city. So banking on that, once we got to town, we grabbed one last dinner at the Subway (yes, fast-food-subway-sandwich-subway. it had been over a year) then took a bus to the airport. We arrived around 11:30pm, walked over to the hotel only to find a long line to the counter. We waited in line and sure enough, got to the front to learn that they were fully booked for the night.

My heart sank. (I was looking forward to one last night in an air-conditioned room and more so, a good night’s rest before we flew back to Cambodia.) We grabbed our bags, and begrudgingly walked back to the main airport, claimed some chairs in the waiting area and then took turns watching luggage, and walking around. After my shift of trying to sleep for an hour or so, I decided maybe it was better just to stay up. So I did. Will grabbed one of those big carts to haul luggage around, we put all of our bags on it and we went to the various fast food places that were open 24-7 in the airport to grab snacks. Then, Will pushed me in the luggage cart over to the 7-11 shop (as it was the only place you could buy a beer)…(yes mom and dad, I was a little concerned that we might get in trouble about the whole 28yr-old-riding-in-the-luggage-cart-thing; but it turns out that pretty much everyone on the graveyard shift at 3 o’clock in the morning just chuckled at us and couldn’t have cared a bit that we were doing what we could do to pass the time)–and we sat down and had a few beers while we waited. Then we went back to the hotel’s lobby and used their internet (for free) – no one seemed to care there either, and then soon enough it was two hours before we needed to check-in for our flight, so we grabbed a sausage and egg biscuit at McDonalds and then went on our way to check in.

Quite the night it was, but we made it. Will quacked for the window seat in the plane, but the man couldn’t even stay awake through take off. I’m not joking, he was snoring before they took the seatbelt sign off.

Two hours later we landed back in Siem Reap, Cambodia. It was about 8am and I was ecstatic to find that the Dairy Queen was open at the airport. We were the only customers in at that hour – but we both ordered blizzards, and enjoyed and appreciated the ice-cream while we waited for our tuk tuk to pick us up.

Quite the unforgettable vacation it was. But as always, it’s nice to sleep in your own bed. We got back, said hello to the family, crawled into bed and slept until about 4pm that afternoon.