Gardens by the Bay

It almost the middle of Day 2 (or the third day of travel – at least when I’m starting this post. Edit: It’s now Friday, so I’m way behind but not giving up yet!) The flight was uneventful, I dozed a bit, food was fine. I was pretty tired so I didn’t make any really progress in getting things done or watching TV. I read a little bit of my book and listened to some music. We landed on schedule and it took a little while to get through immigration, but nothing too bad and our luggage was already on the carousel by the time we got out. We had organised a transfer to the hotel, but unfortunately they never showed up. We spend a fair but of time waiting but in the end we got frustrated and decided to just take a taxi. We then had the issue that there was 5 of us and Maxi’s can take a while to arrive. In the end we split into two taxis. They took two different routes to the hotel, but they arrived pretty close together and the fare was less than a dollar in difference.

The hotel is nice, without being amazing. It’s almost $250/night so it’s not cheap, but then again no accomodation in Singapore is. My experience so far is that Singapore is fairly expensive, probably more so than the US. Although, this trip is slightly different – travelling with friends I’m probably less likely to cut corners on cost. Anyway checked in with no issue. We were all pretty tired and had agreed on room service for dinner. I’m on level 9 and my friends are on level 25. My card won’t let me up to their floor so we met in the lobby and then headed up to their room for dinner. Then it was time for a bath & bed!

We agreed on a relaxed start for Sunday and met on floor 4 for breakfast. The hotel that we’re staying at includes a (buffet) breakfast which is pretty good. We then headed off to do the Flower Domes and Cloud Forest at Gardens by the Bay. They were great – it was cool to see indoor flowers. The biggest thing I noticed when we walked in was the lovely fragrant scent of them all. They were beautiful to look it, but I can’t write a lot about it – they were flowers! We had lunch athwart is probably a typical (Singaporean) fast foot joint. Then we saw the cloud forest, it was avatar themed which was a bit of fun and there was an amazing indoor waterfall.

After that it was on the MRT (Singapore public transport) back to the hotel. I must say Singapore public transport is great. You can scan on & off with your credit card, so no extra card needed. It also covers the whole city really well. (Though that’s probably easier when you consider Singapore is the size of Bunbury and there’s not a lot of urban sprawl).

Edit: Oops – I forgot the other thing we did until I started adding photos to this post. After the cloud forest it was actually the MRT down to the water where we had a bum boat tour booked. We organised that then ducked into a nearby bar cafe to have a cold drink and some cooler air and a break from the humidity. The boat tour was good, we got to go up and down the river and hear some history about the areas we were passing by. We also got to see the Merlion (which was good – more on that later) with some decent photos. After the boat tour we headed back to the hotel!

We decided to have the buffet dinner at the hotel. The food was good, but it wasn’t cheap. We also realised it was a halal hotel which meant no port at all and also no alcohol with dinner. 14,694 steps later and 10.33 km it was time for bed.

Here are some pictures from Day 1 – you can expand them to see the full photo by clicking on the image!