LUCY TAYLORsays that Singapore is an easy, fun destination with a fairy-tale charm all of its own
SINGAPORE: stopovers, skyscrapers, super-organised, chewing-gum free and light years ahead of the rest of us for technology and all things modern. That’s what I thought. I never expected to fall in love with the city, and I haven’t, but I was quietly intrigued to see it with my own eyes, and I have.
When my Singaporean cousins came to visit Dublin one winter, they first asked “Daddy, why are all the trees dead?” and then, “Daddy! All the houses are on fire”. I remember them discreetly glancing into street corners and trying to be tactful as they mentioned the lack of litter in their island state, where the trees are always lush and green and there is never a need for fires or warm clothes.
I arrived in Singapore, dazed and dozy-eyed, into a tropical evening and a spacious, well-serviced and efficient but dated airport. Having been told that the city resembled Dundrum Town Centre on steroids and was nothing if not entirely boring, I was almost delighted that the taxi driver wasn’t adverse to a little bit of speeding and dodgy overtaking; the lack of a sense of personal safety that I associate with other Asian cities was welcome.
We ate the first of many delicious meals and headed straight out to Clarke Quay (which sounds far more exotic in my cousins Singaporean accents) for a few drinks and a stroll around. This was my introduction to the bubblegum-coloured, playground side of the city.
Clarke Quay is an old, river-side trading centre done up in candy colours and full of theme bars and beautiful people. I didn’t sample what was flowing in the drips and syringes of one hospital-themed bar, but I did try the home brew in one, which also offered surprisingly high-quality music in the form of a Malaysian cover band complete with a large-sized cross dresser. A trip in the cable car across to the beaches and attractions of Sentosa Island made for a fun day in a city that is a “built by humans, for humans” experiment that made me feel like I might never need to grow up.
A tour around the night safari next to the zoo is well worth it. The animals are real and the habitats are believable. Any inclination one might have to hunt some big game was totally off-set by the desire to shoot the irritatingly shrill guide, but nothing can detract from the roar of a lion a few metres away when you’re standing in a dark jungle. I’ve done the real thing in Africa and it still captivated me.
A walk around the MacRitchie Nature Reserve and a tasty meal in China town were also well worth it, especially with my cousins as expert guides, who have the enviable advantage of being able to pose as tourists then surprise would-be rip-off merchants with their Chinese.
Singapore’s colonial past is evident in the place names and buildings that echo with that stately era. The history is there, but it is given no place of glory. The Long Bar in Raffles hotel, home of the Singapore sling, is memorable both for its architecture and the fact that customers are free to throw peanut shells on the floor until the entire bar crackles and crunches underfoot.
One ex-convent is now an upmarket bar and restaurant courtyard, and makes a good destination for watching soccer on the pull-down screens, and for more fun cover bands.
The famous Orchard Road is tree-lined and much more impressive than many shopping thoroughfares, but not being one for designer labels or state-of-the-art gadgets, I avoided most of the department stores and high-tech centres.
They are what most people think of as synonymous with Singapore, but I don’t feel as if I missed out.
As for my images of Singapore as a machine-like city, it is well organised and smooth in every aspect, and certainly beats Dublin’s public transport and planning, but it wasn’t as extreme as I expected.
It is certainly not as compact as many cities and this means that it doesn’t get full points for efficiency. People still rely on cars and taxis and the planning is not quite as evident as in somewhere such as Barcelona’s Eixample.
Singapore is a clean, virtually crime-free bubble where everybody is free to drop litter because a Filipino maid or a Bangladeshi street cleaner will always be at hand to keep everything tip-top.
I have to disagree with my friend telling me that Singapore is like an over-sized Dundrum. It has far more character and fun than the bland pseudo-town centre, but pseudo is a prefix that could be used for many of the attractions of Singapore.
It does not have art; its history goes back only to colonial times and its natural beauty has been mostly “enhanced”, but it is unavoidably cosmopolitan and it has an optimistic, almost naive and often superficial personality all of its own that makes it an easy, fun destination with its own tropical fairy-tale qualities.