Singapore Sting
Trip Start
Jan 02, 2009
1
17
34
Trip End
Dec 07, 2009
Singapore,
Singapore
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Again, as accommodation in Singapore is fairly pricey, we had pre-booked a backpackers’ hostel for 3 nights. When we arrived, we discovered that the place was more like the Big Brother house than a hostel. It was very small and all the "rooms" were off one open-plan area, so that the washroom (which was just a long trough with several taps along the length of it) was in the same place as the reception area and the lounge. The toilets were off the communal kitchen and just had a curtain that you pulled across. With very little space between the loo and people eating their breakfast at the kitchen table, privacy was practically non-existent. For a hostel that catered for around 30 people, there was not nearly enough space or facilities. Our room was next to the reception desk and we were often woken up in the early hours of the morning with the doorbell ringing and doors slamming. Not only that, but the hostel seemed to be mainly full of young men in their early twenties who spent all their time watching movies involving lots of gun fire and fighting, or playing noisy computer games.
We were pleasantly surprised to discover that Singapore is not the sterile city we had envisaged it to be. It is actually an attractive mix of very modern architecture with some lovely old colonial buildings. The city looks particularly good when lit up at night. Some parts of the city, such as Clarke Quay which is where we stayed, are very artificial, but generally we quite liked the city. However, after spending the previous month in Beijing, Hong Kong and Tokyo, we were starting to feel a little fed up with big cities. We didn’t do any sightseeing or take any photographs, but spent our time here getting hair cuts, doing our laundry, going shopping, researching our next trip, changing flights and buying bus tickets. As we will be back in Singapore in September for our flight to Australia, we figured that we could do some sightseeing then.
We found Singapore an expensive place to eat out in, especially when on top of the advertised prices for food and drinks, you are also charged tax and service charge. In one restaurant, we were stung for the tiny bowl of nuts they brought us with our drinks (which we hadn’t ordered) and 50 cents each for the paper napkins! When Dean complained, the waitress gave him a dirty look and told him they charge everybody that. We had probably been spoilt by the fantastic service we received in Japan, but we were definitely not impressed with the “don’t really give a shit” attitude we encountered in a couple of the restaurants here.
We were more than ready to get back to a beach and chill out for a while and after doing some reading up, we decided that Tioman Island was the place for us. From our research, we had come to the conclusion that a lot of the other islands in Malaysia have become rather over developed and that, very annoyingly, many of the best islands and bays have been taken over by expensive resorts where non-residents are not allowed access to the beaches. We booked our bus tickets to Mersing in Malaysia, which is where the boats to Tioman depart from, and set off the following day.
