I Love Singapore

Changi Airport, Singapore

Someone hands us a necklace of orchid and jasmine flowers. Another person offers us a sample of Bailey's Cream liqueur. We walk across spotlessly clean carpets down a corridor lined with tropical plants stretching upwards to wide skylights. Signs at a desk read "Please Q here". A map on the wall tells you where you are in relation to the gymnasium, the pool-side bar, the spa, and the fern and orchid garden. We pass an internet station with six terminals, all free of charge. Soft music floats on perfumed air. All this beauty and comfort and we haven't even left the arrivals hall of Singapore's Changi Airport.


After a hard three months of travelling in densely populated countries, dragging our bags off buses and on dirt roads, chewing on the air of many a polluted city, practicing sign-language more or less successfully, Singapore is a balm for tired English-speaking travelers. Note that I didn’t say that Singapore is a culturally rich adventure travel destination. I appreciate Singapore as a place to recover.

In travelling through Southeast Asia over months at a stretch, I think I understand how the wife of a colonial administrator felt a hundred years ago. Back then, colonists took to Hill Stations in Malaysia, India or Burma, for temporary relief from heat, pestilence, and tropical maladies. These stations grew up in mountain areas and homes there were constructed in the familiar style of English country estates. Food was imported from home. It looked like home and felt like home, even though home remained thousands of miles away.

In my contemporary reality, I’m not seeking respite from climate; rather, after several months on the road, I want to go home… but at the same time I don’t want to go home. For just a little bit of time, I need to set aside my Lonely Planet. I need to relax in a city that’s as easy to navigate as Toronto. It’s clean, I can read the English signs. People keep their physical distance to the extent I’m used to. It’s not work.

And what’s not to love about its palm-lined streets, or its eccentric, pastel-coloured colonial buildings, open-air restaurants, and multi-storied English language bookstores? The thick humidity softens my skin and restores my dry nasal passages. Thousands of trees and flowering shrubs have been planted along its expressway, each one bar-coded for efficiency of maintenance, so the story goes. I feel like I've just taken the dose of salmon oil and liquid glucosamine that my cat had been prescribed for a stress ailment around the time of our departure from Canada. It had the pleasant effect of delivering happiness and a confident swagger.

This is the fifth time we've parked ourselves in this tiny island city-state. Over a three-year period, Singapore has been our hub from which we bounced back and forth from Indonesia, Borneo, Thailand, and Cambodia on different trips. We've now experienced the city and its changing blooms in the months of December, January, February, March and April. We've sweated through its rainy season, sweated through its dry season, and one time, waded through its submerged intersections during a monsoon that made headlines coming on the heels of the aftershocks of an earthquake in Sumatra. A good chunk of the city's malls, street names, and its gleaming subway system are familiar now, and I want to spend even more time here.

But understandably, not everyone feels the same way about Singapore. There are criticisms about draconian laws like a fine for spitting on the street, although that example is so time-worn. In fact, in a world that has known SARS, that particular bylaw is arguably an enlightened one. Better examples of minor offenses that incur harsher penalties than in many western countries are smoking and littering in public places, or eating food on the subway.

Singapore also pushes the envelope in suppressing alternate lifestyles, undeniably challenging personal freedom. On the other hand, this is a place that might be seen as ahead of its time in our global society, in view of its harsh penalties for acts of racism. And when you consider that Singapore continues to have the busiest container ship port on earth, one can understand why it would treat drug trafficking more severely than other countries.

Raffles Hotel, home of the Singapore Sling

Still, the priggishness of local mores is an oddity. I remember seeing the Hollywood movie “Something’s Gotta Give” at a theatre off Orchard Street and Diane Keaton’s famous bedroom scene had been edited out. Hardly smut! Then there was a debate in the local paper about how the city should deal with people who put their feet up on furniture at the public library.

Between ourselves, Dan and I argue about the ethos of Singapore every time we touch down here. He’s unforgiving in matters of suppression; I’m more inclined to rationalize (admittedly when it’s not me who is being suppressed). So I never win the debates, but I don't care.

Still, on this warm, quiet evening walking to the night market for chili crab, I put Singapore in perspective. Dan and I have travelled many places where urban chaos is the rule so I’m bound to feel good in a place that gives me respite from the struggles of travel. At a stoplight I reflect on our experience in other countries dodging motorcycles on the sidewalk. The light turns green and we step into the intersection. A car indicates its intention to turn; it stops and waits for us to cross. Sigh. All's right with the world. (by C. Moisse at www.maturetraveler.blogspot.com)

My Recommendations:

The first time we visited Singapore, we thought it to be quite expensive both for accommodation and to eat. But in time, we discovered how to eat well on a budget by heading to the Night Market. A flight attendant from Air Australia gave us the scoop. Go to the Lao Pa Sat Old Night Market and order chilli crab and it's cheap and so delicious. It's also really messy, so bring wet towels.

One of our favourite areas to eat also was Clarke Quay. There's dozens of outdoor restaurants lining the river and our experience has been acceptable to exceptional. It's the ambiance however that makes us return to the area, in spite of the touts working the tourists.

Although Dan and I can afford mid-range hotels now, we've booked in at the New Seventh Storey Hotel once or twice just for old times sake. This hotel, which had been around for half a century serving the backpacking client, offered worn but spacious rooms for around $50 - $60 Cdn. (Sadly, it was torn down in 2009). After one night to relive the memory, we would check out and head off to the hotels around Orchard Street where we have paid about $100 a night (after negotiating) but, by comparison, we'll have amenities like a regular tub and shower.