Singapore, Singapore; half sanitized, half raw for sure.
Singapore is a nanny-state plugged onto the bottom of one limb of Malaysia. The bits they want you to see are spectacular and quite artificial. The ethnic group regions of the city/island are not quite as clean, twice as busy, half as predictable, a half as well served by the public transport and two thirds of the price of the upmarket areas. That’s a summary, and here’s how today went.
We did a lot of walking, but first we left the hotel to have an argument at the bus stop on the main road. I’m very much a “let’s get on a bus going the right way and then we’ll sort it out later” kind of person. Mum is more inclined to plan before leaving the hotel. No, the process of selecting and catching the bus you think you need isn’t easy, especially without a route map (does such a thing exist here?), but the trick very broadly is to find a road you want to visit on your map, find it on the right-hand column of the bus list to see which numbers will take you along that road (but which end of the road? which direction?), get on the bus when it arrives, ask the driver for the price to your desired stop and have him pluck a figure out the air, normally about S$1.20 or more, then use your map to keep track of the route so that you know when you’ve arrived in the approximate area, then ring the bell and get off.
Mum wanted to go to the Bay Gardens, a beautiful, ultramodern eco park on reclaimed land by the Marina Bay area and the bus dropped us off between two impossibly huge buildings (a 5* hotel, the Marina Bay Sands and the “Shoppes”, or mall) and a very busy main road. We finally made it up a lift to a walkway over this road, which allowed us to walk through the upper reaches of the hotel and out the other side, putting us in view of the most remarkable “Supertrees”. These, we discovered, were all part of a water, air and biomass recycling effort which uses prunings from a number of municipal sites to run a biomass boiler which in turn powers the dehumidifiers in the two huge greenhouses you can see in the distance in some of these shorts.
Poor Mum was truly exhausted with achy feet. I started a beer and some work, but soon handed the laptop over, with the words “I’m too tired to do this”, and fell asleep before the can was finished!