Singapore

John: We had only one day in Singapore, not nearly enough to do more than scratch the surface. Which is sort of liberating in a way; when you know in advance that you can't get all that far, you might as well pick something that looks like fun and just enjoy. So we decided to go to the zoo, which is widely billed as the finest in Asia, and one of the best in the world. After some frustration trying to figure out the mass-transit system (the system itself is very efficient; the ticket offices much less so), we finally made it out there via a combination of metro and bus, helped enormously by a local gentleman who showed us how to get from one to the other--we'd still be looking for the bus stop if were left on our own. 

The Singapore Zoo lives up to its billing--it's great! The animals are close, and in large habitats stocked with natural flora. Highlights included lemurs, gibbons, orangutans, white rhinos, and pygmy hippos. For my money, the real standout was a trio of white tigers:

Aidan and a white tiger over his shoulder, as if it happens every day.

The white tigers are not a separate species; they're a sport of nature, all descended from a unique white tiger born in 1951. They're beautiful, and they roam very close to the spectators. Usually when I've seen tigers in zoos, they're resting or just sleeping, but two of the three tigers in this group were exploring their lair energetically, and you could really get a sense of their size, beauty, and strength

It's too bad we can't be here at night; the Zoo has a night safari, where you travel through the Zoo in the dark on trams; since you can't see the low walls and moats that separate you from the animals, it's apparently a little scary to be that close, and many of the animals are more active at night as well. From the point of view of parents, perhaps the Singapore Zoo's signal innovation is that it rents Flexible Flyer wagons out so that you can wheel kids from place to place. This was a big hit, and spared lots of the kinds of cranky walking that ultimately leads to carrying, something that was particularly likely to happen in the hot and humid temperatures here. We'll have to put this idea in the suggestion box at other zoos.

We went next to Chinatown. (Warning: brief history lesson to follow.) Singapore was sort of invented by a guy named Stamford Raffles, who was an employee of the British East India Company, charged to find a place that could serve as a trading spot for the British in this region (in particular, a place strategically located to counter the Dutch, who had a lot of influence in nearby Indonesia.) This island, off the southern tip of what is now Malaysia, was perfectly positioned, with a big harbor and a wide river, and not much developed or populated (there were, though, apparently a lot of tigers; the three in the zoo are the only tigers on the island now). So (making a long story short) Raffles made a deal with the local sultan and the Company took over the place, and then started moving in a labor force of Chinese, Malays, Indians, and British administrators. Raffles sat down with a map and laid out the city's neighborhoods by function and ethnicity: warehouses and export businesses in this place, Chinese over here, Indians over there, colonials housed down here. And while Raffles wouldn't recognize a lot of modern Singapore, the plan he drew up is still more or less how Singapore is laid out; there's Chinatown, Little India, an area of older colonial buildings, and the big business district, now dominated by one skyscraper after another. We picked Chinatown not quite at random; there were some temples that we wanted to see there, and we figured that the food would be good, too, but we could just as easily have spent time in other parts of the city and gotten a very different kind of experience.

The first temple we saw in Chinatown was actually a Hindu temple, built originally in 1827. It's very ornately decorated:

Interestingly, there's a modern building nearby that seems to be emulating the shape of the temple's facade:

While we were there, a thunderstorm struck, so we took cover in the nearby Maxwell Food Market. It's a covered area filled with what are known here as hawker stalls--small shops selling Singaporean fast food. We had mango and kiwi smoothies:

And then the local specialty, chicken with rice, which really depends on the variety of the hot sauces that you have with it.  Delicious--and cheap, about the equivalent of $3.50US.

The final sight was the Buddha's Tooth temple, which is amazing. I don't think that there's an actual Buddha's Tooth there, though.

Finally, some wandering around the streets of Chinatown. This is one of the few places left in Singapore with old buildings; the government has torn down many blocks of older buildings to make way for modern construction. These shophouses, with shops on the ground floor and housing above, date from the early colonial period, and are still in use as shops for clothes, toys, electronics; not sure if anyone still lives upstairs, though. Then back to the cruise center to dispense our remaining Singapore dollars (they've thoughtfully provided shops designed for that very purpose), then back on the ship, trying to beat the on-ship time of 8:30; there's always a frenzy of people getting through immigration and security at the last moment, since the penalties for being on the ship late are pretty $evere. We pulled out around 11:00 pm, on our way to Ho Chi Minh City, a/k/a Saigon, where we arrive on Sunday.

It would have been great to spend more time in Singapore. Unlike many places we've been, though, a lot of Singapore is very familiar--many modern buildings, with ethnic enclaves with older structures, freeways, tourists. It's a very cosmopolitan place, with people from all over the world working or visiting here. The international brands are also ubiquitous; within ten minutes of getting off the ship this morning, a fair number of students had outfitted themselves with Starbucks frappaccinos (thereby ending a long drought), and the Zoo has not one, but two Ben and Jerry's shops (we checked one of them out). The place feels sort of like a cleaner, more humid Los Angeles.