Day 264: Skygarden (and Rain)

More rain! Luckily this time it started earlier in the day so I didn't get caught in the middle of some outdoor activity. Since it was going to be another wet day I decided to visit "Gardens by the Bay", an impressive group of structures that combines nature and some pretty wild engineering and architecture. Normally visiting gardens on a rainy day isn't the brightest idea, and it's true that I did miss out on a bit of the area due to the weather, but the parts I really wanted to see were mostly indoors.

The grove of strange tree looking buildings is called the Supertree Grove. In addition to being pretty decorations and housing vertical gardens up the sides, the Grove is something of a power station for the larger garden, helping generate electricity and aiding the heating/cooling systems.

The main section of the garden is located in the two glass domes. The taller one is the Cloud Forest, and as one would expect it's cool and humid. I really enjoyed Cloud Forest. It has an artificial hollow mountain in the middle, with a waterfall pouring down over the side. Different paths and walkways let you climb through and up the mountain, seeing the change in vegetation as you ascend. The variety of interesting plants also allows me to have a post with what I can only assume is the nightmare of all blog-readers: poorly shot amateur flower photography!

The other structure has the confusing name of Flower Dome. It is very dry and mostly contains cacti, succulents and dry climate trees like baobabs. It also was decorated for Christmas, and having Santa and reindeer flying through a patch of cacti was a bit strange.

I thought about sticking around for the lightshow over the bay, but it was still raining and I didn't really have anything to do in the meantime. Plus, light shows aren't really a huge draw for me. Instead I took the metro to a shopping mall and got some dinner and looked around a little, since it kept me indoors.