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.

Day 263: Skybridge (and Rain)

Notice the theme with titles? I guess when you go to a city that's almost exactly on the equator, in a tropical climate, during their rainy season, you have to expect getting a little wet.

My plan for today was to go up to the MacRitchie Reservoir for a little exercise. There are a lot of reservoirs around Singapore to gather and store water, and the area around MacRitchie Reservoir is a big tropical park that includes the zoo, the night safari, and something called the TreeTop Walk, which is what I was mainly going for. The bus I took to get there dropped me off at the wrong place despite me telling the driver exactly where I wanted to go, and then questioning him doubtfully when he told me we were at the stop I wanted and it didn't match the description I'd given him at all. It was still near the MacRitchie Reservoir trails, but not the trail I wanted, so I had to walk 5km extra to get where I wanted to be. The day started off lightly overcast, and the weather was nice for the first couple hours. When I got deep into the woods the rain started to come. At first I tried to duck under trees or into shelters when the rain got really hard, but soon I was so wet that it didn't really matter anymore. By the time I got to the TreeTop Walk I was soaked through, and then learned from the attendant there that the path on the other side was closed due to the number of fallen trees the previous day that were blocking it. He still let me do the walk, which is a 250m long suspension bridge over the jungle canopy, and then turn around and walk it again to retrace my steps back. I took a different route back (going to where I had wanted to get off the bus the first time). Once the rain came I didn't see many animals, but before it started I saw quite a few lizards and small furry things running around, as well as a lot of monkeys.

It feels strange that a few short months ago I thought seeing free-roaming monkeys was exotic! The jungle itself was nice too. Lots of exotic flora (for me, at least) and very humid (both before and during the rain).

Not sure what tomorrow will bring, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess my post title will involve (and Rain).

Day 262: Skyship (and Rain)

Without anything terribly pressing to hunt down in Singapore, my first day was a meandering exploration with another guest at the hostel. The exact route we took doesn't much matter, but we covered the majority of the city center, including the bay, the business district, the Muslim, Indian and Chinese districts, and a variety of other places, mostly while lost and not really knowing where we were going.

As I mentioned before, architecture is pretty impressive in Singapore. They have a lot of money, a lot of people, and not all that much space, so the inclination is to build up, and to build fancy. Things in Singapore don't get much more fancy then the Marina Bay Sands. Marina Bay Sands is a hotel/casino/shopping mall resort complex standing over the bay. It cost $8 billion (yes, billion) to build, and the hotel consists of 3 towers that support a giant ship/park. I know that sentences is confusing.

Three towers, giant ship, see? The bay has a lot to see around it, including a double-helix shaped bridge and a skyline of a bunch more tall hotels and office towers. We walked around the bay once earlier in the day, then again at night to see all the lights. Here are a few random mix of pictures from the area.

At one point late in the afternoon we were walking through a park when we saw dramatic black clouds coming towards us as if the armies of Mordor were afoot. Just as the rain started to turn from drizzle to downpour we jumped into a random shopping mall (Singapore is one of the few places I've been where seven floor shopping malls are truly random buildings strewn about). The ground floor was littered with cafes and restaurants, but a few odd things caught my attention and led me to investigate the mall more thoroughly. My suspicious about the mall proved correct when I checked out the 5th floor and found 6 video game stores, 2 video gaming accessory stores, 4 stores relating to other forms of games, and 5 stores selling figurines and models. It was a nerd mall. It was actually more of an electronics mall, and the 5th floor was where the nerdier elements of it gathered, but still, a fortunate refuge from the storm.

Day 261: Flying on South

For once I had a flight at a comfortable time and didn't need to get up in the middle of the night to catch it. The flight was on one of the bare bones budget airlines, but it was only for a couple hours, so it didn't really matter.

After getting through customs and getting my bags I took Singapore's thorough metro system across the city (/country) to near my hostel. Since it was already dark out by this point I got a taxi for the last 500m since I didn't feel like struggling around trying to find the place in the dark. There was nobody at the hostel to check me in, but they'd left things set up for me and after calling the manager I got everything worked out. I spent the evening deep in discussion with a couple of the other hostel guests and did a little research on what to do in the city.

Singapore is a really fascinating place. It's one of the few true city-states left in the world, and for such a tiny place generates a lot of wealth. Their aggressive immigration policies make it incredibly diverse, with 4 official languages and a real mix of culture and religion. The combination of growing population, limited space and lots of money also lead to some pretty awesome public works projects. The architecture is wild, and the the geography is.. flexible. Need more land? Build some new islands! Need more fresh water? Build a new lake! Need a mountain for a high elevation garden? Build something crazy! Since I haven't actually been to these places yet I'll stay away from too much detail at this point, but all shall be answered as I explore the city over the next week.