Rather than flying from India straight back to Australia, we instead planned to spend 3 nights in Singapore as a way of chilling out before Rob had hip surgery a few days after returning home.
Well another ‘visitor’ to Singapore was just making its presence felt and starting its spread across the world whilst we were enjoying both Bhutan and India… COVID-19 or Coronavirus.
We were very aware it had reached Singapore, even more obvious on arrival into Changi Airport with mass temperature checks happening and many people wearing face masks.
We had taken face masks with us for the pollution in India, so they became very useful, especially in any crowded places like trains or whilst in shopping centres. Everything was still open as usual but there was certainly some social distancing going on at this stage.
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| Yes... we know... not a good look! |
So we were careful and cautiously concerned.
Singapore was such a stark contrast after weeks in India, because everything was orderly, there were significantly less people to interact with and everything was clean. There were many choices of food, especially street or market food which we knew wouldn’t make us sick.
Using Singapore’s wonderful metro system and doing stacks of walking, we managed to visit many things we hadn’t seen during previous, albeit short visits, and as seen in our route map below.
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| Our route throughout Singapore |
Sentosa Island is an island resort accessible by road, foot, cable car and monorail the latter being how we reached it. The entire island is obviously designed for people to have fun on, but it was eerily quiet whilst we visited just a few areas before returning to downtown Singapore.
For us, apart from potentially enjoying a great variety of food choices, there were a few iconic locations in Singapore on our must see list. We started by enjoying the city by walking the pathways on both sides of the Singapore River, visiting Gardens by the Bay, a nature park spanning 101 hectares and the Raffles Hotel.
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| Key areas & locations we visited in Singapore city |
The city of Singapore and what surrounds the river is architecturally very interesting and is especially people friendly with historically interesting locations, parks and benches to enjoy and rest on, LOTS of restaurants and bars to choose from, tour boats to take people on the river itself and eye catching city vistas to marvel at.
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| Some of the architecture in the city |
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| Singapore skyline and parks along the Singapore River |
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| Art Science Museum with Marina Bay Sands Hotel in background |
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| Bumboats cruising along the Singapore River |
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| Very refreshing |
It is a city which is able to express a sense of intimacy and calm despite being home to ~5.6M people.
We actually visited Gardens by the Bay twice, first time during daylight hours on a scouting mission investigating where to take nighttime photographs from. Most people who visit Singapore come here, almost 50 million visitors in total so far.
Some people call the 18 individual impressive structures called Supertree Groves within it, the Avatar Gardens because of their design and prominence, not dissimilar to scenes out of the movie of the same name.
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| Section of Supertree Grove inside Gardens by the Bay |
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| These structures are awesome |
There are many other attractions in Gardens by the Bay like art sculptures, Dragonfly and Kingfisher Lakes, the Cloud Forest, various gardens and over 1,500,000 plants. It was very relaxing to spend time walking through most of the garden areas.
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| Dragonfly Lake |
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| Sculpture in Garden by the Bay |
Most visitors actually come to see the nightly Garden Rhapsody Show, which is when the Supertree structures are lit up with constantly changing lights synchronised with beautiful music loudly spreading out from many discrete speakers.
COVID-19 seemed to have been forgotten as many thousands of visitors grabbed vantage points throughout the gardens and stared up towards the sky but focussed on the Supertrees varying in height up to 16 storeys.
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| The sun starts setting and the lights come on |
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| The crowds gather for the light & sound show to come |
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| Then the show starts... wow! |
It was just spectacular!!
My first personal visit to Singapore was around 1983 for a sales conference and during this, many of us visited Raffles Hotel, a colonial style hotel built in 1887. In 1942 the Japanese occupied it, stories of this recounted to us by an elderly concierge who worked there during this period.
The hotel was also famous for its Long Bar frequented often by Somerset Maughan and other occasional visitors to some of the hotels’ courtyards were Malayan tigers.
Raffles Hotel is synonymous with a cocktail famous in Singapore called the Singapore Sling, so one of our last enjoyable experiences in this lovely city was to again revisit Raffles, sit in the courtyard outside the Long Bar and enjoy a Singapore Sling… a very nice way to end our entire trip away.
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| Very nice indeed |
Well Coronavirus has certainly impacted on our travel plans for 2020 so will just need to see what happens and when, so until next time sometime in the future… , stay isolated, stay safe and go well!
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