Singapore (2)

The second day we took it reasonably easy. We slept in late and when we eventually emerged we took the MRT to Orchard Road and wandered slowly West, occasionally going into a mall if we saw something interesting, or if it looked nice. I found a store that sold bits of camera, and nearly bought a lens and adapter for my camera until the bloke started getting rude. Anyway. It's a nice area, wide and bright and western, loads and loads of people, and quite a lot of construction (of malls, of course).
On that note...I don't see how they can all be making money; surely McDonald's, say, has to have an outlet in each mall, or they'll lose that share of business, right? And the same follows for all stores. So if you walk into a store in Orchard Road, you'll probably find the same stores as there were in the last mall. Every new mall competes with all the others, yeah? And every new mall means that all the big shops have to outfit and staff another shop, which is competing with the previous mall, where they also have a store. It doesn't seem to make good business sense, but what do I know, eh?
We reached the end of Orchard Road and found ourselves in a Hard Rock Cafe. Mostly, it was good just to sit down in an air-conditioned space (notice a pattern?) and we just had coffees before heading back. A lazy day.
On the 20th (I think, it's hard to keep track of the days - is it Saturday today?) we decided to go to Sentosa, an island on the South coast that's best described as a well-developed tourist attraction. We got there by cable car, which was very exciting, or at least felt exciting after being stuck in a queue for ages for a ticket. Incidentally, how do you get to the cable car station? Through a mall, of course! Dangling over the island we could see the beaches, the diggers and cranes that were presumably creating another beach, or hotel, or something, and the dense jungle in the centre of the island, as well as a huge grey statue in the centre, which I'll get onto in a minute. Emerging through the gift shop onto the island it was obvious that it was geared for tourists - big open paved areas with cafes and Ben and Jerry's and things. We took the escalator (they love their escalators) down and gradually, this huge statue came into view...at first, it looks like the head of a lion, but as you get nearer you see - wait, is that...scales...a fish tail?

Looming over you is this giant (you can go up to it's head and stand in it's mouth for a fee) fish-lion thing. They call it a mer-lion. Everywhere you go on this island you see little statues and trinkets of this ungodly piscene/feline frankenstein, dreamed up by a tourist council that's short of ideas (I paraphrase the Lonely Planet). Maybe I'm being a little harsh. It's not ugly, as such, and it would be majestic if it wasn't so bizarre.

we headed off round the island. It's quite nice, really; there's little pedestrian train things, and lots of beaches (full of people) with convenient islands a little way out to hide the scores of ships in the bay (Singapore is allegedly the world's largest port, or has the largest turnover, something like that). So we wandered around, stopping to buy tickets for the show in the evening, and in some gift shops, etc, and eventually ended up in Underwater World, an aquarium. It was pretty good, again full of people, but there were some good exhibits, especially a display of shark eggs at various stages of development (you could see the shark wriggling inside) and, like the one in KL, an underwater tunnel. I think we would have been more impressed if we hadn't been to the one in KL, and this one was less imaginative and more crowded and expensive, and the exit was through a gift shop, but we still enjoyed it.
With our aquarium tickets were tickets to see a dolphin show. The pink dolphins were very good, balancing balls and jumping through hoops and the like - if you've seen a dolphin show you'll know what it was like, but it was still impressive. At the end, we decided to pay to have our photo taken with a dolphin! We lined up and then when it was our turn slowly waded towards it and stroked it's back, while we had a photo taken of us. The skin is rubbery and surprisingly lumpy and rough, actually! So now, we are members of the elusive band of people who have touched dolphins.

We grabbed some food from a 7-eleven (cheaper than fast food) and sat on a bench in the shelter to eat it, because it was raining.

Eventually it was time for the show. It was a bit weird, to be honest. The "actors" were mouthing along to dubbed voices and jumping up and down a lot, but there wasn't really a plot to speak of. The effects were amazing, though - they had multicoloured lasers projected onto walls of water, as well as video and animation, and loads of lights and fountains and fireballs and fireworks. The story was terrible, and I can't help feeling that, given the same number of fireball machines and fountains and lasers, something you'd see at Alton Towers would have better acting, story and choreography, but to be honest, that made it even more enjoyable.

We power-walked back over the island to beat the queue and took the cable-car back in the dark, seeing Singapore lit up around us.

The next day, the 21st (maybe) we went to Singapore Zoo and night safari. (Argh, I'm running out of time again). They say the Zoo is amazing, and it really is - the exhibits are buried in the jungle and you wander around through a rainforest to get to them. There's a canopy walk where the monkeys roam free above you (although we didn't see many) and orang-utans are free to go where they like. There was lots to see, and although we left it a bit late, we saw most of it. In the evening, we went to Singapore Night Safari (next door). After the entrance fee it turned out that you had to pay again to go on the tram tour thing (which they didn't tell you beforehand - Singapore's a pretty expensive place, to be honest), so we walked around instead, which I think we enjoyed more. The animals were dimly lit (photography was impossible) and there were bat caves to walk through (fruit bats are really big!) and things. We ended by going to a nocturnal animal show, that was amazing - the animals were really, really well trained, and I had no idea that otters could be trained like that (it was sorting plastic bottles, cans and paper)! By the time we headed back it was pretty late, but the MRTs hadn't closed yet.

And the next day, Penang!