Animal Adventure

As nothing in Singapore really opens before 10am, we had another breakfast at McDonalds this morning. I had an iced Jasmine Green Tea (sounded pretty healthy for McDonalds!) and a hash brown (not so healthy). After the nutritious breakfast we began our most ambitious journey on Singapore public transport to date. We started at Chinatown MRT station and had to change lines at the Dooby Ghaut (still having issues with the pronunciation of that one!) station. After travelling out into the ‘burbs we left the MRT and had to catch a bus to Singapore zoo.

The Singapore suburbs are quite strange. I guess because Singapore has such limited space, they build up not out and so the suburbs are full of 10+ storey apartment buildings. We passed a few houses, but even these were all town houses – and attached at some part to other dwellings.

We arrived at the zoo at about 9am, which was really good as there didn’t seem to be anyone else there. It was a drizzly morning – which normally would spell disaster – but we have come to appreciate as it takes an edge off the heat.

The zoo was very interesting. The exhibits are much like those at Auckland zoo – trying to mimic natural habitats as much as possible, however I would say that Singapore zoo is probably three or four times as big and has that many more species within its walls too. At about 2.30 we had made our way around the zoo, and too be honest, we were animal-ed out. We decided to give the Night Safari a miss – perhaps something I can talk Barry into doing with me on the way home.

After returning back to Singapore central we took a well-earned rest from all the walking and spent a couple of hours by the pool.

In the evening we headed down to the Clarke Quay area for dinner. We found a little place by the water front called Hot Stones which sounded like a bit of a novelty. They basically present your meat order to you raw but on a sizzling hot stone for you to cook to your liking. Over dinner we also tried the famous ‘Singapore Sling’. I thought it was pretty tasty – although I tend to like these things sweeter than most, so I would imagine that it probably wouldn’t appeal to the general population (it is flavoured like those fake cherries they put on ice cream sundaes).