Night train

Thursday, 27/09/2012 – 105 A.D.

Asia? It's a piece of cake, a walk in the park, child's play.

By our second full day we reckoned that we'd been here long enough not to need a visitors' centre, but we did still require a cash machine. Therefore, armed with a decent if oversized map, we headed across the city to where we were absolutely certain that Barclays Bank must be - South Tower, Raffles Quay. It was indeed on Raffles Quay, but just as Tim feared it wasn't a bank as we knew it, rather an office complex. And so we just bit the bullet and used the nearby ATM for the Australia & New Zealand bank - what's an extra 2% when you're having so much fun?

[Merrill Lynch's imitation of the Wall Street Bull - touching its bits is optional and won't bring good luck.]

[The out-of-this-world Marina Bay Sands resort. Yes, that really is a cruise ship on top of those towers. Although this casino complex was developed by a Las Vegas firm, it's very much a symbol of Singaporean wealth.]

[The merlion is a national mascot of Singapore. The fish body represents its origins as a fishing village and the lion represents Singapore's original name of "Singupura", meaning Lion City. Pay attention, there'll be questions at the end of this...]

It hadn't rained so far and felt hotter than yesterday. On our way back from the CBD we stopped in Esplanade Park for our lunch. Here I was dismayed to discover that I had left my pre-made sandwiches back in the fridge and brought what remained of the loaf. Desperate for food, I enjoyed a couple of slices of dry bread - enriched dry bread, I might add, which would give Warburtons a run for its money. And as I munched away and watched Tim obscenely chucking some of his lunch to the birds, I wondered if throwing bread to them is technically littering if they don't eat it. Also present in the park was this contemplative chap, no doubt meditating on why two westerners were sitting in his park and eating dry bread and dropping litter.

With my belly semi-full, we walked north through the city and entered Fort Canning Park. This is an elevated park that is rich in Singaporean history; primitive stone tools have been found on the site; it was where the chief of the land had his stronghold during Singapore's golden age in the 1300s; and it features various impressive buildings representing the latter influence of British colonialism. 

  

By now the humidity was really sapping us (and the red V shape across my chest had returned) so we headed back to the hotel to prepare for the evening session - Night Safari at Singapore Zoo. This is based in the north of the island and we'd booked our tickets online earlier in the day. The plan was this:

Get the train to Woodlands Station, which is the main terminal for trains out of the country.

Alight and go to the ticket office and book tickets to Kuala Lumpur, hopefully in a sleeper cabin for two, otherwise in regular daytime seats.

Find somewhere to eat.

Get back on the train and go a few more stops down the line to Choa Chu Kang, which is the nearest stop to the zoo.

Board a connecting bus (number 927) to take us directly to the zoo and go safari crazy!

      However, it didn’t quite go according to plan. We got onto the train with no problems, despite it being the middle of rush hour and more packed than The Tube. Tim and I felt unnecessarily close, even after all of this travelling! It took about 45 minutes to get to Woodlands and I noticed it seemed quite a bit smaller than a major transit terminus should be. This was soon explained to us briefly by a guy behind glass at the ticket office area. When asked if we could buy tickets for Kuala Lumpar, he simply said, “No.” We quickly worked out that this was not where we wanted to be. As we stood around trying to work out what to do next, a rather irate transit worker asked us if we wanted any help, and when we said we weren’t sure, he snorted that we were blocking his gate, i.e. getting in the way of the rush hour punters trying to leave the station. We explained our dilemma and he told us that we’d have to head up to some kind of checkpoint and get tickets there, which totally ruined our best laid plans. 

[Tim displaying the look known as 'Confused Foreigner'.]

The best decisions are always made on full stomachs, so we looked around for somewhere to eat...there were only about a million places to choose from. We settled on Long John Silver's, a sort-of fast food restaurant for fish and chips. I had trouble working out what the guy behind the counter was telling me (he could have been speaking in pirate), but I managed to order special meal #3 - chips, three battered shrimps and two pieces of battered chicken. For £3.50 it wasn't bad at all. And we decided that we should forget trying to book our Kuala Lumpur tickets for now and just get to the zoo.

Rather than deal with the hassle of a bus, we headed for the taxi rank. Irate Guy At The Gate had told us that the fare should be no more than ten dollars, so Tim tried to establish if this was the case, although the driver didn't give much away. As the journey went on I noticed us pass a sign for the Night Safari on the right, but we kept going further down the highway for a few more minutes. 'Here we go' I thought, 'Taxi man trying to screw us!' Suddenly the driver did a Dukes Of Hazard-style U-turn and headed back the way we'd come, jokingly explaining to Tim that he'd got a bit confused. All this time I sat there silently, playing the part of the unknown quantity who could turn angry at any moment while Tim acted as the friendly negotiator. In fact, this good-passenger-bad-passenger is an approach we might adopt in future because when we arrived at the zoo and the meter was over ten dollars the driver apologised for getting lost and said to just give him ten. Result!

Upon arriving we saw that the Night Safari was incredibly popular, arguably the second most well-known attraction after Raffles' Singapore Slings - the place to come and see animals doing their nocturnal thing. Quite what the animals make of a load of homo-sapien-sapiens gawping at them from a short distance is unclear, especially when they are riding in trams like these:

We boarded the next available tram and set off on our trip around the park, which passed through various zones, such as the Himalayas and Africa, featuring animals relative to the respective areas. There was a zoo employee on the front carriage with a microphone, keeping us informed of all the facts about the animals. The MC told us that taking photographs was okay, but flash should not be used. Even so, look at the quality of shot I was able to get...

...not really. Unfortunately the above shot is from one of the back-lit panels that provide extra information about the animals. In reality I was barely able to get a single decent shot during the whole trip, which was a real bummer because there could have been some real classics. Here's a couple of samples of the actual results...

[Errr..could it be a wildebeest? Or a hippo? Nah, it's a duck-billed platypus.] 

[This really isn't due to my shaky hands, its just poor lighting.]

Halfway along the tram ride we had the option to alight and walk along the Leopard Trail, which means you get to see more animals, this time from behind glass. However, the highlight was walking through the fruit bat enclosure and getting to see the blighters up close, rather than as dark blobs up in the trees like they were in Cairns. And some of them were pretty big, particularly one that hung from a branch and chewed on a conveniently-placed banana, all the time watching us from a few feet away with its big, beady eyes. 

It was just as we were leaving the fruit bats' enclosure that the skies opened and it "hoyed it down", as my brother would say. Fortunately we'd both packed our waterproofs and we scrambled to get them on. But we were the only ones who had packed them...why was this? This is Singapore, right on the equator, where it rains bloody hard and pretty much every day! The extra issue caused by all this water was that everyone who'd alighted the trams to do the Leopard Trail now flocked back to the station to get on again, which meant a massive queue. And as each tram came along no one wanted to get off and get soaked, which meant we were all left there waiting like lemons until the zoo staff realised the rain wasn't stopping soon and  sent an empty tram to scoop us all up. 

The tour continued and we got to see all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures, which I won't list in full, a. because I can't remember them all and, b. because it's getting late as I write this. Suffice to say we had a great deal of fun at Singapore's Night Safari and by the time we got the boneshaker bus all the way back to Little India it was almost too late to drink beer, but we managed it anyway.