As much as I’m loving life in Australia, this video is making me a teeeensy bit homesick for the bay. I’ve been lucky enough to live in some pretty cool places.
As much as I’m loving life in Australia, this video is making me a teeeensy bit homesick for the bay. I’ve been lucky enough to live in some pretty cool places.
As I mentioned in this post, we were trying to save money in Singapore, so we turned to Groupon, where we got a great deal on tickets to the conservatories at the Gardens by the Bay, and also free tickets to the aquarium at Sentosa Island.
I didn’t really know what Sentosa Island was, everyone just called is Sentosa, and said that we absolutely had to go (and by everyone, I mean everyone in the tourism industry, people that live in Singapore stay far away, but we hadn’t discovered that yet) so we did.
Sentosa Island is basically a huge tourist trap/resort with just about everything you could ever want to do all in one place. There’s a Universal Studios, a beach, an aquarium, and tons of resorts and hotels as well. Also there is a giant lion statue. for some reason.
We were there on a beautiful day, it was actually scorching hot out. It was so bad that I took to hiding out in the corner of a Billabong store just for the air conditioning. The other thing about Sentosa is that it is RIDICULOUSly expensive. A lot of the beach bars have signs out advertising $16 beer at happy hour, as though it’s a bargain.
Even though it was 4000 degrees, I wasn’t spending $16 on a beer, or $22 on a margarita, so we didn’t stay as long as we could’ve.
The aquarium was kind of cool, we got to play with sting rays, you can pet them and feed them. I felt a bit awkward about that later, when we met up with an old classmate of mine for supper in Chinatown and we ended up eating stingray for supper.
I normally don’t really eat anything that swims (fish are friends, not food) but I blame the massive Tiger beers that the waitresses, dressed up like Oktoberfest hostesses, were bringing to our table in buckets.
After the aquarium we went to the dolphin show, which was about 25 minutes of some sea lions playing ring ross and balancing balls on their noses, and then 3 minutes of dolphin jumping.
But the dolphins were pink at least. So that’s not nothing.
A few lovely things for today, because I’m procrastinating and because job hunting is the absolute worst.
A few snaps from the top of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore. We wanted to go up and check out the infinity pool up there, but it was $25 each to go to the top, and you can’t go to the pool anyway, just the observation deck.
After supper in Chinatown one night we decided to go over there and see if we could sneak in. We got dropped off at the entrance to the third tower, and crept inside. It’s really gorgeous inside the hotel, as you would imagine.
We got in the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor, but we needed a key to get up. Just as we were about to get off the elevator, a group of hotel guests got on, and pushed the button, so we were able to go up and check it out.
At the top there is the pool, a couple of bars and restaurants, and several observation decks, and you can see almost a full 360 degree view of Singapore and the Gardens by the Bay at night.
It’s truly stunning, and I’m very grateful to that group of people for helping us sneak up to see it.
The Gardens by the Bay has two conservatories, the Cloud Forest, and the Flower Dome. The Cloud Forest is the big, splashy main event, but the Flower Dome was pretty cool too.
It’s divided up into sections, to showcase the flowers and plants that grow in different regions of the world, so you walk around into each section, and find yourself in Australia, or South America, or California, surrounded by those native plants.
My favourite part was the flower field in the center of the dome, it’s a themed flower display that they switch up every few months.
When we were there, it was made into a Persian garden, with lots of bright colours, and table displays.
There is a succulent garden, a large collection of cool, gnarled trees called Boababs, and an olive grove with a 1,000 year old olive tree.
I was eventually unceremoniously dragged out, apparently watching someone take 600 pictures of roses gets boring after awhile, who knew?
If you’ve ever seen The Jetsons: The Movie, and you remember the scene where Judy goes on a date with Sky Rocker at this amazing futuristic mall, then you’ve basically already been to the Cloud Forest, so no need to spend the money.
And if you haven’t seen it, go watch it immediately. I’ll wait.
OK, so you should probablyyyy still go see the Cloud Forest, all I’m saying is, whoever designed the place has definitely seen that movie.
As soon as you walk in, you are hit by a wall of mist from the water cascading over off the waterfall, which is the tallest indoor waterfall in the world.
It falls from the top of a big, beautiful mountain that’s completely covered in flowers and plants, and as you walk around it, you climb a spiral ramp to the top of the glass dome, where there is a stunning view of the Gardens, and the rest of Singapore.
There are about a million different kinds of orchid, and it’s nice and cool and misty in there which is worth the cost of admission just to get out of the Singapore heat for awhile.
As you walk through there is lots of information about natural cloud forests, and the different plant and animal populations they support in nature.
It’s really an amazing place, even if you don’t know anything about architecture and design, which I really don’t, you can tell that it’s very unique.
Seeing the Cloud Forest is one of the big reasons I wanted to visit Singapore, and I was not disappointed.
We only had about five days in Singapore, but since I’d been told over and over again that we would pretty much need to sell our kidneys to afford to eat there because it was so expensive, that seemed like the right amount of time.
It was expensive comparatively, we had just come from Thailand and Cambodia, where we were spending about $15/night for a nice room, and in Singapore we were paying $60/night for basically a shoe box, but it had air conditioning so that was really all we needed.
We were looking for ways to see as much as we could in Singapore without having to sell any organs, and we found tickets on Groupon to the Gardens by the Bay (to go to the gardens themselves is free, but there is an admission fee to get into the Cloud Forest and the Flower Dome) that also included day passes to the aquarium at Sentosa, so we went for it.
However, we didn’t look at the fine print (reading is hard), so after navigating our way on MRT (the public transit system, which is pretty easy to get around on) we realized that we had to go all the way back up town to a tourism agency to pick up our tickets.
It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it hadn’t been so bloody hot out. I felt like we’d climbed all the way to the top of Mount Everest only to realize we’d forgotten the flag we were going to plant and we’d have to climb all the way back down to get it.
Going all the way back uptown seemed like an impossible feat. I threw myself down on a bench and pouted for awhile. But I pulled it together eventually because I am a grown up (allegedly) and we went got our tickets, after a quick stop for ice cream, and found our way back.
The gardens themselves are really beautiful, there is lots to see outside of the domes, and it’s free admission so it’s definitely a great way to spend a morning if you are on a budget.
I was really excited to see the Supertrees. They are about 16 storeys tall, and they are covered in lots of different plants from bottom to top. You can pay $5 to climb up the walkway to the top of one for a great view of Singapore. There is also a restaurant inside one of them.
The real show starts at night though, twice per night there is a light and sound show in the Supertree Grove. The Supertrees are gorgeous all lit up, and there are lots of people just laying on the benches and walk ways underneath watching.
Luckily the streets in Singapore are pretty clean, because it’s illegal to chew gum there. Or so I’ve been told, 4000 times.