Slingless

(Because we were in Singapore but Clare was off alcohol, such as Singapore Slings)

Let me re-tell Clare's story from the last couple of posts from my PoV.

Having omitted to research it earlier, we sat using mobile data on our iPhones in the baggage hall of Changi airport (pronounced with a soft g - like Chang-ee). I found the address of the Grand Pacific hotel, then looked it up on a map to find the nearest subway station, then downloaded a subway map.

We decided to save a line-change and go to a slightly further-away stop, then got misled by a local-area map in that station. Hence we ended up dragging our cases along from the third-closest station in the sweltering morning heat after our long overnight flight. Fortunately, things improved from this point.

After feeling well enough for us to book leg 3 a couple of days before, Clare felt queasy throughout the long flight and too poorly to leave the hotel room once we'd got in and freshened up. She said that if she'd felt that way before, we wouldn't have booked to travel!

With Clare as comfortable as possible, she urged me to go out and see something of Singapore to make the best of our short time there.

I strolled out, past the closest and second-closest subway stops, then across a large sports field where I watched teams playing cricket against the soaring backdrop of the central business district (CBD).

Then I caught my first sight of the Marina Bay Sands hotel. This is an amazing sight, even though I'd seen it on F1 race coverage on TV. There's a 340m-long curved, vaguely boat-shaped top, complete with infinity swimming pool, perched 200m or 57 storeys up on top of three tower blocks. Amazing.

I strolled down to the Esplanade area, a promenade with shops behind by the side of Marina Bay, enjoying fabulous views of the Sands and the CBD across the water. I took a photo or two (hundred).

There was a bandstand on the promenade under a high-tech curved-steel-tube ...um... structure with taught sheeting ...um... roof. A pretty good band were sound-checking there, so I got an ice-cream wafer (the flavour of durian fruit, similar to guava) and sat on a big arc of steps running down to the water, enjoying the music and soaking in the view. Wow!

I walked back to our hotel past the Raffles Hotel, thinking about how to share this experience with Clare. I decided not to show her my photos, and even to hide my camera so she wouldn't think to ask, so that she could discover it fresh for herself the next day, when hopefully she'd be well.

She was, and we did. On the second day (our only whole day here) we saw everything I'd seen the first afternoon; still as stunning.

We sat chilling with drinks for an hour enjoying the view from the Esplanade, then crossed the bridge to look at the Merlion statue. This is an 8m-high white stone mer-lion (c/f mermaid) with a fountain spouting forward from its mouth.

Singapore means "lion city", since an early coloniser thought he'd seen a lion there, completely erroneously.

We then took a leisurely lunch. After that, we started trying to walk along the side of the Singapore river, long the heart of the city before continual land reclamation created the bay, the area where the Sands sits, and all the dock areas behind.

Unfortunately, the sun was just too fierce - probably the harshest we've encountered it anywhere (just 85 miles north of the equator). We had to retire to our hotel for a siesta.

That evening, with the sun gone but the heat of the air only slightly reduced, we returned (via Raffles, as Clare described) to the Esplanade for a lovely meal with fabulous night views of the CBD across the bay.

On our last morning we caught the subway to the middle of the CBD. On the train I read Wikitravel on my iPhone and learned an amazing fact:

"Granted self-rule in 1955, Singapore briefly joined Malaysia in 1963 when the British left, but was expelled because the Chinese-majority city was seen as a threat to Malay dominance, and the island became independent on 9 August 1965, thus becoming the only country to gain independence against its own will in the history of the modern world."

We went up the tallest building in Singapore, 1 Raffles Place. This has a triangular observation deck on its roof, just surrounded by chest-high glass sides. We relished the great views over the whole country, but only for ten or so minutes, because a siren sounded and we had to go down due to a risk of lightning from growing storm clouds. We escaped without lightning or even rain - never mind.

We returned to the airport via the subway. We used the nearest subway station to the hotel, but the doorman pointed toward the station we'd used when arriving. Turned out there is a cumbersome interchange half-way along between lines built at different times, so we probably weren't as far wrong as I thought on our arrival.

We arrived at the airport, checked in (getting away with 1.5 kilos overweight) and duly dumped our drinks before going airside. There was no security, which quite surprised us, so we went and bought new water supplies for the flight.

When we got to the gate, we discovered that the security was there - another of the irritating airports (like Shanghai) where they confiscate your water immediately before boarding the plane - leaving your hydration to the mercy of the airline. Grrrr!