Singapore

Hello and welcome to... the next blog. As I've probably rambled about earlier, I had to get back to Bangkok after Indonesia in order to get my flight to New Zealand, so I decided to breakt the journey up with a few days in Singapore. My preconceptions of the place were: It is an ultra-controlled totalitarian police state, where you can get flogged for chewing gum and shot for jaywalking (by a Judge Dredd-lookalike), and it is a concrete block floating off the bottom of Malaysia. Which intrigued me. Plus a friend had told me that the food was good, so hey hey.

There is a bit of history to the place - the British were defeated at Singapore by the Japanese in WWII, and a lot of allies got rounded up and killed rather than taken prisoner (the Japanese saw surrender as a cowardly act). The Chinese seem to have got it worse, many were beheaded. My maternal grandfather was one of the "lucky" ones who didn't get killed, and instead got to work in a copper mine on Formosa (now Taiwan) for his troubles. He did survive that though. There is not a great deal of history apparent in the city now - it is all wide roads, cars (though the traffic is not very heavy at all), shiny public transport (and cheap), and absolutely hundreds of expensive malls selling designer goods. As far as it being a police state, the most obvious restriction was on smoking, with smoking outside seemingly restricted to certain areas with ashtrays available. Also there is no eating or drinking on public transport. I didn't actually see any police, maybe they were undercover, but I also did not see hardly any CCTV cameras, certainly not as many as in the UK. People do seem very well behaved there, they all wait patiently for the pedestrian crossings to change to green.

I stayed in the Mitraa hostel (very nice, great staff) which is on the edge of the little India district. On seeing the rest of the city I reckon this was the best place to stay, as it was very lively, lots of cerremonies going on (both Hindu and Chinese/Buddhist) and there were tonnes of cheap food places, with loads of vege options. Food is cheap, but drink is expensive - I had my first pint for 3 months in the Prince of Wales pub, cost me $12, or 6 of yer British pounds. So nearly as expensive as Paris. I had three days there, one to wander around the city, one to visit the zoo, and one to go to the MacKenzie reservoir, which runs into the Bukit Timah nature reserve, this is a patch of native rainforest in the centre of the island.

The zoo was great, many of the animals were almost free ranging, including some of the monkeys. My favourites were the probiscus monkeys, marmosettes, otters, cheetahs, giant tortoises and the absolutely huge python. But the best was the baby komodo dragon, I don't think there are any more of these in the world in captivity! He was very active (makes a change to the usual reptile house were they just lie there) but he stayed still long enough for me to get a couple of shots:
I also saw the big daddy komodo:

The reservoir/nature reserve walk was also good, and was a great cheap day out. I didn't even pay for lunch as I'd taken some extra boiled eggs and fruit from the hostel breakfast. There were lots of wild macaques out, and I saw a really thin snake. There are apparently Pangolins living there (anteaters) but as they're nocturnal its no surprise I didn't see them. I walked part of teh way with some locals which was interesting, they asked a lot about business and football! By teh way, everyone speaks English in Singapore. My favourite part of the walk was the tree-top bridges on the MacKenzie nature trail:

Next time: NZ!