Upon our return from Perth, Australia to Vancouver, we had booked a couple of days in Singapore to break up what would otherwise be a 35-hour, 3-flight ordeal. We had planned to revisit a few Singapore favourites, including the viewing deck at the Marina Bay Sands and Gardens by the Bay. However, the weather forecast was for nothing but rain for the entire two days of our visit, so we changed things up and visited some indoor sites that we’d never seen before. Fortunately, we’d booked a hotel near Chinatown, directly across the street from an MRT (subway) station, so getting around was a breeze!
We arrived late in the evening and thanks to another hassle with the Singapore immigration software we didn’t get to bed until nearly 2:00 am. The next morning was slightly drizzly, so we hit the Singapore History Gallery at the National Museum of Singapore. A very interesting exhibit with lots of audio-visual components along with the usual museum artifacts. The next stop was the MINT Museum of Toys that could be charitably described as “quirky”. We sure didn’t think that it deserved the 4 stars that it gets on Tripadvisor!
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the Toy Museum is that it’s right across the street from a Singapore institution, Raffles Hotel. We had passed by Raffles on our last stopover when in Singapore, but it was closed for years for a multimillion-dollar facelift. So our return visit came after an interlude of 41 years! In the interim, the Long Bar was relocated and the tiger skin rug was removed from the floor (a nod to political correctness one assumes), but the famous Singapore slings, first mixed at Raffles in 1915, were as tasty as ever!
Thanks to a late start and lingering in the Long Bar for quite some time, we simply headed back to the hotel for a short rest before dinner. The walk through the Chinatown markets, past the Hindu temple (on Temple Street naturally), was rewarded by a very tasty Chinese meal washed down with Tiger beer of course.
Our second day dawned cloudy but rain free, so we started off with a walk up Canning Hill to the site of the former Fort Canning to continue our history lesson. We made a completely unscheduled stop at the Fort Canning Heritage Gallery, just opened by the National Parks Board in 2022. A definite highlight there was the Singapore Bicentennial centrepiece event (from 2019) that has been repurposed into a cinematic experience in the gallery. We felt that the Heritage Gallery was so good that we cancelled our planned tour of the Battlebox (a WW II bunker), instead checking out the Keramat Iskandar Shah shrine.
With rain forecast for the afternoon, we decided to visit a new Singapore institution, Jewel Changi Airport. Imagine nearly one and a half million square feet of retail space, amusement parks, restaurants surrounding the world’s tallest indoor waterfall. Our visit to Jewel is (or at least will be soon!) the subject of another post!
After an afternoon at Jewel, we returned to the hotel then headed out to the hawker courts of Singapore for some street food. We were so late that the largest hawker market was closed, but we found another one close by (there are over 100 in Singapore) and enjoyed some delicious Chinese favourites, and some more Tiger beer.
We departed Singapore the following morning in bright sunshine. Ironically, despite adjusting our plans to focus on indoor activities due to forecast rains, we hardly saw a drop and never opened our umbrellas. Upon our return to Vancouver in November, of course we weren’t so lucky! Can you say “atmospheric river”?
A photo album from our Singapore stopover: www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720322269287
