Singapore

Singapore

Photos: Port of Singapore Lucky Plaza Hindu Temple (outside and inside) Raffles Hotel Long Bar Boats on river Cable Car to Sentosa Island Merlion Cityscape Siloso Beach


After seventeen days at sea, we were pretty excited to see land - Sumatra on our starboard side and finally Singapore to port.

We were thankful to have made it through the Malacca Straits without incident. From a newspaper we picked up at the Seafarer’s Club in Singapore, we learned of some recent incidents with other vessels. A barge carrying steel from Penang to Indonesia was boarded by 10 pirates who destroyed all communication equipment onboard before taking the master (captain) and chief engineer ashore. The pirates then contacted the ship’s owners to demand a ransom and negotiated for their release. Other incidents included ships being robbed in Indonesian waters (a chemical tanker), in the Democratic Republic of Congo pirates robbed a refrigerated cargo ship, in the waters near Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam, five robbers stole ships stores from a container ship and in India robbers boarded a container ship at anchor but were scared off when an alarm was sounded. So, I guess the days of the pirates on the high seas are not in the distant past after all.

Sunday: Arriving at 7 am, we were anxious to spend our first day ashore seeing some of this beautiful city. Unfortunately, by the time the ship cleared Customs and Immigration, and our passports were returned to us, it was 11:00 and almost noon before we were able to get a taxi. So, we made the most of our time and headed for the famous shopping district of Orchard Street. Ngee Ann (pronounced “neon”) high rise shopping mall, where we were able to find all of the essentials on our shopping list. We also visited, Lucky Plaza (the old high rise mall) in hopes of finding an astrology software program to help us enjoy the night sky, but with the hundreds of shops there we had no luck, though Martha was able to find the short-wive, world-band radio she wanted in order to tune into BBC while we’re aboard. We also had fun shopping for Martha’s outfit for a wedding she’ll be attending in December in India. We then found another shopping center where I was able to get my prescription for antibiotics filled (in the unlikely event I have another bout of diverticulitus) and two new print cartridges. Finally, we had earned a lunch break and enjoyed some very interesting, and good, Korean cuisine. Next stop was an internet café which was so small and crowded it was hard to stay long enough to check our email. We enjoyed a walk along Orchard Street taking in the sights and before heading back, stopped into a British Pub (who would have thought?) for a pint and some fish and chips. Actually, people here do seem quite British, at least in one way. They queue for everything. The queue for a taxi is sometimes half a block long but there’s no choice except to just get in line and it moves surprisingly quickly. The cabs arrive one after another but we soon learned that not all cabs will take you - they first ask where you’re going and depending on your answer, they ask the next person. It seems to be a good system but took a little getting used to.

Monday morning we got an earlier start and spent a very full day in Singapore. Though it rained off and on (sometimes a real downpour) all day, we enjoyed a small art gallery, some other nice shops and then ducked into the old Raffles Hotel and had an original Singapore Sling at the famous Long Bar. Raffles is no longer just a hotel - they now have a museum tracing the history of the hotel back to the early 30s, jewelry stores, antique shops, a bakery, several restaurants and bars of course, and a huge ballroom for everything from special art exhibits to ballet and symphony orchestra concerts. We learned that a suite at Raffles is now $6,000 per night. Even in Singapore dollars ($1.50 s.d. to $1.00 USD), that’s a lot of money. The river walk was delightful, even with a slight drizzle and we loved watching the many boats, some acting as ferries and others as tour boats and ended at an outdoor café for lunch. We walked the seven blocks to China Town and entered the Mariamman Hindu Temple during some type of special service - with musicians and lots of bell ringing. The firewalker ceremony was scheduled for the following week and we were sorry to have to miss that. Walking along the little alley ways that make up the old part of China Town was fascinating and we made a few small purchases - my favorite being a stamp with my name in Chinese characters carved while I waited (on top is a small figure for the year of the goat, when I was born).



Tuesday we had one more full day for sightseeing. We took a taxi to Faber Hill and cable car to Sentano Island. There is a huge (about the size of the statue of liberty) sculpture of a Merlion (half Man and half lion) that was created to remember the folklore of one of the early discoverers of Singapore who claimed to see such a creature - hence the name Singapore (port of lions) though there are no lions here. We learned much about the history and culture from the Images of Singapore museum and particularly liked the rooms replicating the many festivals held here. We walked and stopped at several restaurants which, unfortunately, were all closed (it was mid afternoon) but finally had a nice lunch in a resort hotel overlooking Sentosa Beach, where we later had a little walk and dipped our toes in the Indian Ocean. We later took a monorail back from the island to mainland and taxi back to ship. We were back aboard for a light dinner in our own little dining room.

Wednesday: Surprisingly another day here in Singapore since the on and off-loading took longer than expected. We felt we’d seen the highlights of Singapore so enjoyed a quiet day aboard (very calm for painting while the ship is not moving) and visited the Seaferer’s club to post another blog and check email. Unfortunately the club was closed (probably because our ship was not scheduled to be in port) so Martha and I sat on the steps (wish I had a photo of that) of this very rustic warehouse, where we could access WiFi, and communicated with friends far and wide.

We were very pleased to receive a package of mail from our mail forwarding service, which contained news from family and friends: Martha’s big news was from her parents in Philadelphia who told her about the recent announcement of a Nobel Prize winner from Martha’s small community where she grew up in Pennsylvania. Mario Capecchi was born in Italy during World War II. When just four years old, his mother was taken by the Gestapo to Dachau, and before she left she put him in care of friends who lived in the country. Something happened to them and he was on his own on the streets for the next 4 or 5 years. After she was released his mother found him again when we has nine years old and they went to Pennsylvania to live with her brother and his wife who saw that he went to school and studied and later went to University. He’s now seventy years old and it was anticipated that he would eventually get recognition for the work he has done in genetically engineering mice to develop human-type diseases as part of the on-going efforts of medical scientists to find cures. Of course, in addition, we learned of the prize for peace being awarded to Al Gore and of the one shared by three other Americans.

Martha also received some Time magazines and Skagway newspapers from her friend Chuck. We all enjoyed the newspapers and laughed at the big news from Skagway: Headlines in one paper read “A Porcupine Walks Into a Bar,” which is a true story of just what happened about 2 AM and it took three customers and a police officer to get him out. One man received several quills in his leg. Another article was “A woman reported that her 86-year old husband was missing. She was shopping and he didn’t want to shop. She left him sitting on a bench on Broadway while she shopped. When she returned he was gone. He was located on the bench in front of AB Hall where he had been sitting for 2 hours or more. His wife was mistaken about the location of the bench where she had left him.” Sure glad we didn’t miss all this big news from Alaska.

We learned from our friend Richard (via email) of the passing of Doug’s former racing skipper, and good friend, Tom McCune. Doug speaks of him often and of the grand adventures they shared racing offshore out of Florida, during the years Doug lived in Florida and worked in the Honeywell Clearwater office. In fact, Doug had recently written a story about a race he and Tom did together and we sent it with a note to Tom’s widow, Teddi.

Crossing the Equator was an uneventful event aboard the ship. We didn’t observe King Neptune rising out of the sea to board our ship (but maybe that’s why we were on pirate watch alert last night) and there was no celebration marking the occasion. We did “retard our clocks” one hour but advanced an hour the next day. It’s strange to watch the clock in our room slowly advance or retard when the times change and all the clocks, starting at 10 PM slowly speed up until we’re on the new time by midnight.