10.07.2007

Today we went out to Santosa Island for most of the day. We didn’t really know what to expect, and unfortunately it wasn’t that great. It is basically an island theme park. We took the monorail to get to it. We spent time at the beach, underwater world, the army fortress (which was the one thing that was actually real, it gave us an insight into Singapore’s world war 2 history) and we saw a dolphin show. We took the cable car back to mainland. That was a bit scary for me and very amusing for Philip as he got to take photos of me looking very tense. It was a long and very hot day. We didn’t get to do a few things, like visit Raffles, because of lack of time but I’m sure there will be more opportunities in the future. We are now at Singapore airport waiting for our flight to London then Dublin.

9.07.2007

Today we had a healthy start- we used the hotel gym and did a workout which felt good. The swim from the night before was great too. Exercise helps you justify eating tonnes of food on holiday. We spent most of the day in the city, mainly Orchard Road, which is basically one giant shopping mall. Singapore very much looked like a big glossy magazine until we went to Bugis Street markets, which definitely had more character but were quite dodgy. Again, one thing we like is how you can have these giant shopping malls with super expensive brand name adds on them and then across the road a square which might as well be thick impenetrable rainforest. That is quite stunning. The city is so clean, Philip was extremely paranoid about not littering, to the point that he wouldn’t let me eat pistachio nuts while walking around for fear of dropping the shells on the floor. He’s scared we’ll get caned for littering (which happens here). After the day in the city we went to the Night Safari at Singapore Zoo. Now this is well worth seeing. Firstly we had dinner there, they have an outdoors food court and then we saw an animal show which was ok. We then got onto a tram ride through the safari and got off the tram in the middle to do one of the free walks around the animals. It was beautiful to be in the middle of a forest in the middle of the night with only small lights around us checking out all the animals. Unfortunately the photos are not very good as we weren’t allowed flash photography. After the safari, around 10pm, we were extremely tired but wanted to check out this huge shopping centre in Little India called Mustafas which is open 24 hours a day. When we got there we were happy to see that Little India was a busy energetic place and it was not a pretty clean “poster” city like the centre of Singapore, it had lots of character. Unfortunately the department store, Mustafa’s, was absolutely horrible…. The whole store had shelves from floor to ceiling and only room for one person between them. It was impossible to move in there and the prices weren’t as good as we were told so we pretty much walked in and out, we were too tired to fight with the crowds. We were told it is packed all the time. Tomorrow we will visit Santosa island. We’ll write more then.