Megamoon

We had one more stop off before heading to Australia – a short flight (which took twice as long as scheduled as we had to land in a heavy rain storm!) from Kuching to Singapore. We had 4 days to explore Singapore.

On landing we found a nice French bakery in the airport and thoroughly enjoyed some crusty baguettes and patisserie cakes. It tasted amazing-oh how we’d missed western food!

Singapore airport is worth a mention-its a really swish airport. It has the nicest toilets I’ve seen for a long time (so clean and ultra modern) and has some impressive art installations, a cactus garden, butterfly garden, orchid garden, sunflower garden, water Lilly garden and a roof top swimming pool!! We didn’t see many of these-as usual we left minimal time before we flew!

Singapore is a modern country with a western feel. It’s very clean and safe and also very expensive-it’s officially the worlds most expensive city.

The country has expanded by 22% since 1965 through reclaimed land. The Raffles hotel used to be by the sea (and isn’t now)

It was British owned until 1965 and still has a colonial feel in parts of the country. It fell under Japanese occupation for 2 years during WW2. The Population is mostly Chinese and Malay, with lots of expats. We even bumped into one – Kathy, one of my room mates from when I was in America!

Despite being told that everyone gets taxis in Singapore, we walked. Our legs had finally recovered from the mountain climb. We covered China town where we visited 2 pretty temples, the most impressive was named the tooth relic temple (as it claims to hold a tooth relic of Buddha). I’m not entirely convinced this is infact Buddhas tooth-there are many tooth relic temples staking their claims to have the notorious tooth around the world. It’s a lovely temple though with thousands of shiny mini Buddhas in. We found the Buddhas that aligned to both of our birth years (Chris’ looks a little scary to me!)

We also found some great hipster coffee spots in the CBD and Duxton Hill. Chris was happy to drink some proper coffee and I even had a few myself!

We visited a few museums, both of them were very impressive. We spent all day in the national museum learning about Singapore’s short but interesting history. We also went to the Artscience museum where there were exhibitions on Escher (mathematic art) and one called ‘future world’ where we embraced our inner child with interactive digital art. Jess would have loved it!

We did the obligatory trip to the famous Raffles hotel for their Singapore sling. It was the priciest cocktail we’ve ever ordered, but a great experience. It came with a sack of peanuts which you’re encouraged to de-shell and throw the remnants on the floor creating a big mess.

We initially stayed in a hotel in one of the parks. There Liz’s legs got throughly eaten by mosquitos and at night the frogs would come out and hide in the drains causing their ‘ribbits’ to amplify into a surround sound frog experience!

Our last day we spent in the Marina bay sands hotel, we we got a spectacular upgrade from the cheapest room to the top floor suite-the views were amazing, across the gardens and out to sea and part of the Grand Prix course, topped off with a plate of home made chocs delivered to the room. We were so lucky!

The hotel came with the world’s longest rooftop infinity pool. It was quite amusing watching everyone with their selfie sticks posing for photos at the edge of the pool-of course we joined in!

Chris ordered a pina colada which came in a coconut and decorated with flowers.

We sat and watched a thunder storm pass around us, before getting a taxi to the airport for our overnight flight to the next continent on our list: Australia-Brisbane.