Orcs, Orchids and Oriental Octagenrians

Day One - Singapore

In the morning we took a taxi to Orchard Road, the main shopping drag. Jenni can't believe I hadn't even made it to London before I found a cabbie to talk football with. He wasn't a bad bloke for a Scum fan. His daughter supports the Reds (good lass!) and his son is a Chel$cum fan. His wife, when bothered, is a Toffee (a fact ge himself admitted makes no sense at all). Thank goodness Torres banged one in against WBA to get us three points otherwise I'd have had a rougher ride I think ;-)

Tolkien wrote that orcs were made corrupting the elves. Subway (at least the Singapore one) says different. Monday's special was "orc". Given that it was a food court I was tempted to believe it might be tough, green and unpleasant. It turns out they just meant "oven roasted chicken". Yeah, right...

Since we only had a half(ish) day in Singapore and arrived very late we decided on the easy option and did a city bus tour. As it turned out it was great fun and very interesting. Singapore is a really odd mix of new, expensive, flashy glass buildings and old, ramshackle, character packed terraces. On top of that there is plenty of Victorian colonial architecture. We got to see a bit of all of that on the tour.

First stop was "Little India", quite possibly the best smelling place on the entire planet. Jammed into narrow streets are every imaginable sort of vendor of Indian wares. Jewellery, food, knick-knacks, you name it, all being touted by the inevitable hard seller.

Next up was Fullerton Road and the waterfront where we got our first look at the Merlion, symbol of Singapore. The Merlion (or Lesser Malaysian Barfing Catfish to us) is a mythicalesque lion-headed, fish-bodied creature dreamed up in 1972 when they added a fish body to the traditional lion of Singapore - "singa" being lion in sanskrit I think. The Merlion fountain statue on the waterfront is 8 metres plus tall and chucks out quite a bit of water. The view was very cool too with the triple towers of the "surfboard hotel" dominating the skyline across the bay.

From there we went to a jewellery factory where you can see goldsmiths working. James and I stayed on the bus as the travel started to catch him, plus neither of us being that interested. The girls went in and were very interested to see them at work.

Second last stop was Chinatown where we saw various temples, including the bhuddist temple which was one the best buildings we saw all day. Walking back to the bus I stepped out into the street after checking to see there was no traffic. How I missed four and a half foot of determined ancient Chinese dude towing a massive box of polystyrene I'll never know. His left arm shot out like a bullet from a gun, ready to shirtfront the disrespectful foriegn devil. I managed to dodge back onto the pavement and narrowly avoided getting my ass kicked for not following the "road rules according to miniature angry local street vendors".

Last up was by far the best - the orchid garden at the National Botanic Gardens. I'm no gardener, preferring to blow things up or chop them down (aka landscaping) but this blew me away. We only had 30 minutes but all four of us could have spent 30 days in there. There are something like 2,000 species of orchids and everywhere you look the colour is quite simply mind-blowing. I took more photos in that 30 minutes than I've taken in months. Jenni had a narrow miss, almost having a squirrel jump on her head. I think he could smell nuts <whistles...>

From there it was back to the hotel to collect bags and straight onto the airport. All very smooth and organised although the cabbie was a bit on the vague side about lanes and how they work. We waited a couple of hours and then got onto the A380. More on that next time...

Cheers,
Millsy.