We are up early next morning and enjoy the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Nice variety in their selection of breads, fruits, salads and pastries.

I was planning to go out and buy a camera, but it was still too early. So we decided to hit the iconic tourist spot of Singapore – The MERLION (Half Mermaid, Half Lion). For some reason they call Singapore the land of lions. But I think it should be renamed as the land of Malls. There are no Lions to be found in Singapore (except perhaps the zoo). But the entire city/country has 100’s of shopping malls. I think half the population of Singapore works at a mall.

We use a great mobile site (gothere.sg) which gives you all the directions you need by bus or train from anywhere to anywhere. It even tells the estimated fare and time to wait for the next bus. The Merlion is barely 15 minutes away from us.

Waiting at the Bus Stand

Bus services are excellent. We never had to wait for more than 5 minutes for a bus. Just scan the EzLink card at entry and exit. Fare is deducted and remaining balance displayed instantly. That easy. Pic here shows the card scanner installed on every bus. Wish we had something like this here in Bangalore.

The bus drops us off near the Supreme Court. Typical British Colonial era building. Merlion’s about a km walk from here.

Near the Victoria Memorial Theater

We reach the Merlion and the view of the down town is excellent. It’s only 7 am and there are already crowds of Chinese tourists here. We are the only non-chinese nationality at this place.

The Esplanade theater for performing arts — also known as the “Durian Building”.

For some reason, they modeled this building in the shape of their national fruit – The Durian. A pungent smelling yet apparently very tasty fruit. Everywhere you go, you will see warning signs of how this fruit is banned in all public places (transport, hotels, restaurants etc.). Singaporeans have a love-hate relationship with this fruit. In this entire vacation, I saw shops selling Durian lollipops, Durian chocolates, Durian gum, Durian this and Durian that. But I never could find the RAW Durian fruit. Strange!

Image result for durian

The Marina Sands hotel across the bay. We would go there later.

It’s around 9am and we head back to the hotel. Unfortunately, despite our gothere app, we somehow manage to get on the wrong bus, get down somewhere and change over again. About an hour or more wasted. I’m puzzled about how I screwed up. Look closely at the phone again and I slap my forehead … the phone was not tuned to the GPS and it assumed we are getting on from another bus stand and showed us wrong bus numbers. Lesson learned. 😦

We make our way to Cathay Camera shop in Peninsula Plaza mall where I had already negotiated a deal for a camera even before coming to Singapore. This camera (Canon G7X Mark II) costs twice as much in India and very difficult to find at this time. Got it for around $650 here. Nice ! Also, they made sure to give us proper GST refund receipts (that’s 7% tax saved) which we would later refund at Singapore airport during departure.

Cathay Camera – Nice friendly service and great prices.

Canon G7X Mark II – Top of the line stuff among point and shoot style cameras.

Of course, I can’t use my new toy today. Have to charge its battery for the next several hours. It’s nearing lunch time and we want to see Sentosa island that we heard so much about. It’s an island of Singapore which itself is an island. Some blogs dismiss it as a complete waste of time tourist trap, but others say its worth it. We decide to go for it and in the end, we were glad we did.

We make our way to the ChinaTown station through the mall in front of our hotel. From ChinaTown, we take the metro just 2 stations away to Vivo-City mall. The moment you get our of the train, you are inside the mall (love the location of our hotel .. everything seems to be within 10-15 minutes from there). Again, the elusive Durian fruit processed products advertised everywhere; but never the original fruit (seems we missed the season for it).

We reach the Vivo City Mall that acts as the entrance to the bridge connecting Sentosa island. Vivo city is one of the largest malls in Singapore. Before proceeding towards Sentosa, we have lunch at the food court. We desperately try to find local cuisine that we could eat, but being vegetarians, there was NOTHING substantial that we could consider lunch. Pretty much everything was noodles with seafood or meat burgers. So in the end, we had to settle for Indian food again – something that we were trying to avoid. There were 2 Indian joints in the food court; both of them serving almost the same items. Both of us shared a single thali that was sufficient. Pretty reasonable for just around 8 SGD.

There were 3 ways to get to Sentosa island.

Walk 1 km on the boardwalk bridge to the island. (We chose this).
Use a monorail to get there in 30 seconds.
Use a cable-car to get there.

As the sign says … it really is more fun to just use the boardwalk.

The entire boardwalk is just a series of travelators. So you could just stand there and let them slowly take you all the way to the island while enjoying the varying greenery around you.

The monorail above us as we enter Sentosa island.

So this island is indeed built as a tourist trap with all the usual trappings … wax museums, trick-eye museums, magic shows, candy shops, souvenirs, theme park rides, water-world, cable car rides, petting-zoo, water sports, para-sailing and zip-lining, beach chairs to just sip your martini with the little umbrellas, bike trails etc. But you can enjoy it just the same even if you do not partake in any of these activities. We were there to see Singapore and not all these tourist traps. We took only the cable-car ride on this island to get a bird’s eye view of this place.

Kids cool off in the summer heat.

This copycat Merlion is much larger than the original Merlion.

Singapore’s Shipping port is seen in the distance with all the loading cranes. 1000’s of ships clog the entire sea port.

Some see these buildings as ‘art’. I see them as steel monstrosities.

The typical Segway groups you see in all tourist places these days. Convenient, but more expensive than renting a car.

A free shuttle runs along the entire length of Sentosa island beaches. We wait for one of these shuttles to get to another beach area. Each beach area has its own characteristics .. some quiet, some family oriented, some for water sports etc.

We take another bridge to a small island called as “Southernmost Point of Asia” which is an island off an island (Sentosa) off an island (Singapore). But it certainly isn’t the southernmost island IMO, as there’s Indonesia just south of it. And if that’s not part of “continental” asia, then neither is Singapore.

We climb the watch towers and get a good view of the beaches.

After spending time soaking our aching feet in the temperate waters, it gets dark and we head back home. Sentosa starts to take on a different look at night with all the lighting.

We are finally back on the boardwalk and its good to just relax our feet for a while. We must have walked 8-9 kms today. Not much for some people, but we’re not used to this.

Back at the hotel, we rush to the showers and get a much needed bath. We had been sweating the whole day in the sun and we needed to cool down. Shweta makes some in-room coffee (good thing we had purchased some full cream milk from a nearby convenience store) and then we head out to the hotel’s roof-top swimming pool. Neither of us know swimming. We are the only one’s at the swimming pool and we just hang on to the edge at the shallow end of the pool while enjoying the city skyline.

Source: TripAdvisor

Once we are done with the pool, we head out again around 10pm to Clark Quay area (walking distance from our hotel). On the way, we grab some subway sandwiches. Clark Quay is a nice little river-walk that reminds me of similar scenes in San Antonio. Lots of pubs offering live music and beer for those who want a night life. We hear both Chinese rock and English rock as you walk past the pubs. Take a further walk and its quite and serene with young couples slowly strolling down the river side or just standing there smooching away under the faint neon glows. Wonderful romantic environment.

On our return back to the hotel (almost midnight), we see a 24 hours open restaurant almost in front of our hotel. We had been really itching for a decent chai ever since we left Bangalore. Tea-bag tea just doesn’t cut it. We felt like drug addicts suffering withdrawal symptoms. But here we found the closest thing to chai called “Teh Taarik”. It’s more sweet than our typical indian chai and there’s no ginger or masala in it; but close enough. Aahhhhh… gooooood. Sluurrrp.