Day 14: Last day in Singapore

This is the Raffles Hotel, named for Sir Stamford Raffles of Britain who founded Singapore in 1819.


Raffles' Long Bar is where the Singapore Sling cocktail was invented. Tempted to try one, but we had a full day of walking ahead of us.


We grabbed a few pots of tea and some scones instead.


Entrance to museums was free today because it was National Day, so we visited the National Museum of Singapore. Sometimes I like looking at the people who go to museums more than the exhibits themselves.




Kampong Glam was up next, an ethnically Malay and Muslim neighbourhood. Lots of restaurants, street vendors, delicious aromas and thick crowds.






Taxi-ing back at night, our last look at downtown Singapore.

Day 13: Chinatown and Sentosa

The day started in Chinatown. So many cute colourful houses here, like many other Singaporean neighbourhoods.


Strings of red paper lanterns floated over the vendors on the streets.


For lunch we went to Maxwell House, which had a similar indoor-market format to Lau Pa Sat. The vendor food in Singapore is seriously delicious, and extremely affordable.


A Singaporean specialty is Hainanese chicken rice.


And another is ice kachang, which is shaved ice over red bean, corn, and jelly, topped with syrups and coconut milk.


We took a monorail to Sentosa, an island resort. There are hotels, golf courses, a beach, and even a Universal Studios.


Palawan Beach, where you can access the southernmost point of continental Asia.


There were peacocks wandering around all over the island.


I really love aquariums, so we stopped by the Underwater World in Sentosa while we were there. Can't resist jellyfish.


Their shark tunnel had a travelator!

Day 12: Gardens at the Bay

After a little walking around in the morning, we stopped at Iggy's Pte Ltd. for lunch. It was a little fusion restaurant tucked away in the Hilton Hotel that served a pricey 4-course set menu. I love fusion and trying eclectic foods, so this was right up my alley. This was the delicious dessert, the 'Kaya and Teh Tarik.' To be quite honest, I'm still not entirely sure what I ate, but the cube on the left was French toast with burnt sugar on top, and on the right was a dollop of some kind of ice cream, covered in I-don't-even-know-how-this-is-food foam.


We walked over to the newly opened Gardens by the Bay, a huge, futuristic botanical garden in Marina Bay where we spent most of the rest of the day. These structures are the Supertrees, massive vertical gardens fitted with technologies that are supposed to get them to act like real trees. Two of the taller Supertrees have a Skyway linking them- the orange bridge you can see toward the bottom of the photo.


The view from the Skyway. The glass dome is the Flower Dome, one of two conservatories in the gardens.


Not pictured two photos above was the Cloud Forest dome, which we visited first. the environment inside mimics that of tropical mountainous regions from 1000-2000m above sea level. We were greeted by the cool spray from these waterfalls.



The Flower Dome was next, though not as impressive as the Cloud Forest.




Supertrees at sunset.

Day 11: Arrival, Take 3

After recovering from our midnight flight to Singapore with a nice long sleep, we headed out late morning to Marina Bay. This was my first time in Singapore, and needless to say, I was extremely impressed. I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie or in a piece of concept art for a futuristic city half the time. It's still hard to grasp that a place like this is real. In downtown Singapore, the buildings shine, the streets are clean, the hedges are manicured, the people are well put together, and everything is very efficient. Such a contrast from Bali, where the buildings are short and rustic, things are a little disorganized and chaotic, and everyone is relaxed. Pictured here in the foreground is the Marina Bay Sands resort complex. On the left are the three hotel towers, topped with the SkyPark that has its famous infinity pool. Next to it in the shorter buildings is the shopping mall, casino and theatre, and next to THAT is the lotus-shaped ArtScience Museum.


Singapore is truly an international city, and diverse like I've never experienced. There are four official national languages: English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. It seems that everyone is multilingual, and people seem to be able to handle any language you throw at them. We've used both English and Cantonese with success, sometimes holding conversations using both at the same time.


This is the Helix Bridge over the Singapore River, with a design based on the structure of DNA (you can see part of it on the left in the top photo). At night, lights in the floor shine the letters G, T, A, and C representing the 4 DNA bases (definitely appealed to the biology nerd in me). My dad was much more impressed with the architecture, and wouldn't stop talking about the stainless steel and curved glass for the entire duration of our walk across the bridge.


We took a taxi to Little India at sunset. Quite different from the stark modernism of downtown.





For dinner we went to Lau Pa Sat, an indoor market that is famous for its huge variety of food stalls. The selection ranged from local Singaporean, to Indian, Malaysian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and everything in between.


At night, we went up to the SkyPark at the Marina Bay Sands to look around at the Singaporean skyline. The National Day of Singapore is coming up on August 9 to celebrate Singapore's independence from Malaysia 47 years ago, so they were rehearsing the light and water show.


Such a beautiful city.

Day 10: Last day in Bali

For our last day in Bali, we took a leisurely hike through some of the rice terraces in Ubud. Definitely not as dramatic as the ones we saw a few days ago on mountainsides, but still pretty nonetheless.






Back in town, we saw women weaving the baskets used to make canang sari.


All of the Indonesian kids we met in Bali have been absolutely adorable and so friendly.


One of our last glimpses of Bali. To Singapore next!

Day 9: In Ubud

We began our first day in Ubud with a walk through the sacred Monkey Forest. The forest and the temple inside of it house a few hundred macaques. Unlike the monkeys at the Uluwatu Temple, these ones are more well-behaved and only want your food, not any of your other belongings. For a few dollars you can buy a bunch of bananas, and the monkeys will scamper all the way up your body to your arm to grab the snack. Here, one of the men who work there feed the macaques corn on the cob.


Me and some monkeys.






We visited the Lotus Temple in central Ubud after playing with the monkeys. Lovely water gardens to each side of the pathway.


Ubud Palace was next, and we saw these girls practicing a traditional Balinese dance, called Legong.


Group of Chinese tourists- most tourists I saw/heard in Bali were Chinese, Australian, French or German.


Another Balinese specialty: pork ribs.