Singapore and beyond.

Well, I’m back in Adelaide.

Koh Tao to Singapore: 3pm ferry to Koh Samui. Cheap room at a relatively deserted Best Western hotel. Hot shower, shave, sleep. Awake at 4am, hotel shuttle bus to airport. Check in, wait, fly. Several hours transit in Bangkok. Delayed flight. Arrive at my hostel in Singapore late Wednesday afternoon.

Ah, Singapore. Strangely familiar yet so completely foreign. I ate a cheap vegetarian curry from some place nearby and it’s surprisingly good for something devoid of animal flesh. After dinner I wandered around Serangoon Road and side streets between Little India and Farrer park MRT stations. It was a seething sea of humanity – throngs of people wandering, shopping, eating, selling, buying. It’s fascinating, pungent, and delicious.

Later, I relaxed at the garden bar near the hostel with a book and a few cheeky beers and read a book for a while… a good end to a busy day.

Thursday morning is golf time – the first round of the 2008 Singapore Open. The weather didn’t look very nice. I made my way to the tournament on Sentosa Island and arrive just in time to be in a position to follow Adam Scott around. There was a 3 hour rain delay after six holes. Scott wasn’t playing well, and thinking that I was jinxing him I checked out some other groups. Phil Mickelson was busily signing autographs, and I commented on his recent appearance on Entourage. He grinned, shook my hand, and said thanks. I wish him well. He finishes 9th. Adam Scott doesn’t make the cut.

On Thursday night I met up with Matt and Marissa, whom I had met at Akinabalu Hostel in Kota Kinabalu. We met on Clarke Quay at Brewerkz, and discovered that as well as lots of delicious beer they also did some pretty good food. Their stories are pretty entertaining and they’re living the dream – lots more travel is planned. It was good to see them again. Following a beer rendezvous, they headed to some night club, and I went to back to the hotel, to bed.

The weather on Friday was no good at all so rather than see the golf (which was mostly rained out anyway) I spent the morning around the hostel, where I met three English girls. We talked for a while and they went out, but I had planned to do boring stuff – like all the laundry I had left over from Koh Tao. Laundry took a while, and when it was done I wandered to Orchard Road and had a brief investigation of a few enormous shopping malls. Eventually, I made my way to Chinatown to start another walking tour through Chinatown and the seedy underbelly of Singapore’s past. Emma, one of the English girls to whom I had mentioned the walk, was there too.

After a very interesting tour we headed back to the hostel to find the other two girls, but they weren’t about so we went to the Price of Wales for a few beers and some curry and some live music. It turns out that this girl was house sitting in Singapore, got bored, and checked in to a hostel to meet people. What a life! We made plans to recruit a group of people to visit the Night Safari the following night.

The recruitment didn’t go all that well and the four of us made our way to the Night Safari on Saturday night, learning along the way that public transport in Singapore is really very easy and more versatile than I knew from my experience with only the MRT. The proximity card ticket thing for the MRT works on busses, and there’s a bus from one MRT station right to the Night Safari. We found our way there easily enough.

To be honest, the Night Safari was a little lame. It’s clearly designed for kids, but we had a good time anyway. The setting was great and gives a real sense of being in the jungle… despite the scripted, practised, repeated hundreds of times each night speech from the person who tells us what we should be seeing. The little tram things are quite cool, though… and the banana split from the ice cream shop is enormous. All in all, a good night.

Sunday brought a big decision. I hadn’t intended to head home so early, but I was still suffering from the cold and feeling quite average. The political situation in Thailand was becoming more and more unstable and there were signs of more nastiness to come. Additionally, Tropical Storm Maysak had ruined parts of Vietnam and had made life unpleasant with lots of rain and misery to be found. I wanted to go to Laos, but to get there meant transiting through Thailand (risky) or Vietnam (flooded). Frustrated with paying money to be sick away from home, I went to the Singapore Airlines office to change my ticket and return to Australia earlier.

I locked in a return to Adelaide on Wednesday, November 19 – coincidentally my sister’s birthday. She was due to arrive in Adelaide only a few hours after me. The flight was overnight, so I was scheduled to depart Singapore on Tuesday night.

Sunday night brought another meeting with my mate Tim. We went to Maxwell Food Centre, home to the famed Tian Tian chicken rice. Tian Tian was closed, but Tim prefers another chicken rice stall and it was open. We feasted on chicken rice  and other assorted delicacies, and washed it all down with a couple of long necks of Tiger. Total cost was $cheap. The food is something I could definitely get used to in Singapore… I love it, especially the hawker/food centres.

Monday was spent wandering around again and finding a gift for my sister’s birthday. Antiques are expensive! I eventually settled for a still stupidly expensive Buddha head – four faces showing different expressions. I was probably ripped off. On Tuesday I had to leave the hostel early so I left my bag there and tried to keep inside air conditioning – so I saw the new Bond film at a nearby cinema, looked around some shopping malls and bought some new ear buds, and eventually made my way to the airport.

Changi airport is pretty sweet, especially the Terminal 3 departures area. There’s a brewery… in the airport! I had a pint of airport brewed beer (OK, it probably wasn’t actually brewed there) and a burger, and took advantage of the free wifi and a place to plug my laptop in to charge.

Leaving Singapore wasn’t as easy as entering: the plane I was due to leave on was broken. Flights were departing to all over the world, but we were stuck in Singapore for two hours until a replacement plane arrived.

After a long and uncomfortable overnight flight, I arrived home… and promptly managed to somehow delete most of the photographs I took during my second visit to Singapore!