June 30th, 2019
Today we started off finding a bus ticket for tomorrow morning to take us into Malaysia as we want to head to Tioman Island. After we bought our tickets, Brendan had a really terrible lunch from a market. I guess you win some and you lose some when you buy a plate of food for a couple dollars. Nothing looked appealing to me, so I had a coke and a Luna bar from the dwindling stash in our backpack. We then took a subway to MacRitchie Reservoir which is also a huge park in a protected rainforest. There is a ‘Tree Top Walk’ that looked kind of cool, but it ended up being an 11-kilometer hike roundtrip. I was nervous to start the walk as the last two days have been brutal for us with the heat and humidity. However, speaking just for myself I feel like today I’m starting to adjust to the climate. It wasn’t as bad as I thought although the temperature was just as hot as the previous 2 days. I was encouraged and thought I may actually adjust to this climate. I have always liked the sun and warm weather. Even in Central America when Brendan and Taylor were very hot, I was okay. This is a different type of heat though and very sticky. Even though it was hot, I’m really glad we did the hike because we got to see lots of monkeys! This was the closest I have ever been to a wild monkey and they were super cute. They are macaque monkeys and they were everywhere.
Someone also wrote on a piece of paper and put it on the ground pointing to where a venomous viper snake was. I guess it was resting as it was still there on the return. When we got to the top there was a cool 250-meter suspension bridge up in the trees. It felt like a long way back and our feet were pretty tired by the end. This 11k was on top of all the city walking we did on this day. I wanted to go to Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay for their night light show, and we didn’t have enough time to rest at the hostel before, so we got on the subway and headed back to downtown. We went to a new part of town which was the big shopping district. We walked from there to the Gardens by the Bay and it was really pretty as the sun was setting in the city.
We got to the Garden of Lights and it was really cool. We found a spot to sit down and waited for the light show. It was beautiful.
Aside from the crowds of people, it was a pretty magical place. After what felt like an incredibly long day of walking, we made it back to the hostel and got ready for our 6am bus ride the following morning.
The thing I liked least about Singapore was that the sidewalks had many metal grates. They were literally every 10 feet all throughout the city.
In the less desirable areas, the sidewalks were narrow with no way of avoiding stepping on the grates which would always make a terrible metal on metal sound. Some of the sidewalks in Little India were just all grates entirely. I kept thinking that surely once we got to the ‘nice’ area they won’t have them. They still had them every 10 feet. In the nicer parts they were more camouflaged, and the sidewalks were wider, and they were much easier to avoid. Also, most of the sidewalks throughout the city were made of tile. When wet, the tiles were super slippery. It sprinkled a couple of times for a few minutes, just enough to get the streets wet and the tile sidewalks became treacherous. I was so afraid of slipping. I was also surprised that for being known as an eco-friendly city, they used a lot of little plastic bags. If you ordered a drink to-go, they would put the cup in a little plastic bag with a straw. Imagine your to-go coffee cup in a little plastic bag. I guess they think if you carry a drink in your hand, you may be tempted to take a drink out of it while on public transportation which is not allowed. I noticed everyone in the subway had their drink in a little plastic bag. If you were dining-in, you would be served everything on reusable plates. It was usually an extra charge to get things ‘to-go’ and have it in disposable containers. I guess that was a good thing. I don’t understand why they need so many grates in the sidewalks, but otherwise, Singapore was a very nice city. I appreciated how every menu had pictures of all the dishes, so you had some idea of what you were ordering. Not that it made that much difference. Regardless of what kind of dish you ordered, even if it was completely void of seafood, it still had a somewhat fishy taste to me. Definitely a great place to have a layover or to use as a launching point for another Southeast Asia or Australia destination.