We woke up and had a lazy breakfast at the hostel this morning, enjoying the cake we picked up from a bakery late last night. We got the MRT to the botanic gardens and spent an absolutely beautiful and very hot and humid morning wondering around the gardens. The gardens are huge, with so many different areas, lakes and trees, with rainforest sections, fountains of all kinds and English country garden sections to make us feel slightly at home in the sweltering heat.
The really impressive part of the garden was the orchid gardens, which cost about £3 to enter, and were absolutely huge and gorgeous; crammed full of the most beautiful hybrids of orchids in the world. There is a whole heritage and vip section of the orchid gardens, where famous or influential people who come to Singapore botanic Gardens get an orchid hybrid bred and named in their honour. A special favourite of ours was the Princess Diana orchid, which was absolutely beautiful.
The heat in Singapore is very different to the heat in Thailand. In Thailand the heat is the first thing you notice when you walk out the door, whereas in Singapore the heat kind of sneaks up on you, to the point where you don't realise how hot you are until you find it impossible to try to cool down. We walked around the orchid gardens baking in the heat, wishing desperately that there would be the slightest lick of wind to soothe us, and standing slightly too close to the fountains to try and get the cool water to possibly splash on us a tiny bit.
Once we had exhausted the gardens we headed to Chinatown where we enjoyed a huge lunch at a Chinese restaurant. The lunch consisted of egg fried rice, sweet and sour pork and kung pow chicken, and was absolutely incredible. We were very obviously the only tourists in the restaurant and the only people who had no idea how the whole premise of sharing large plates of food worked, but luckily the waitress was very friendly and explained it all as she gave us forks instead of chopsticks...
We spent a while wondering around the shops in Chinatown, marvelling at inner painted bottles. Our next stop was the Gardens by the Bay. This time we paid to go inside the Cloud Forest: a dome very like the Eden Centre, in that it's an environment inside a dome where many plants are grown. It's quite incredible, huge waterfall in the middle and clouds hovering to create environments for many different types of plant, including lots of carnivorous ones. The centre had lots to do and learn about, and at the end had a huge portion on climate change and how to do better.
The next dome we went to was the Flower Dome, which wasn't quite as impressive as it seemed to be mainly dedicated to Christmas decorations... But included a lot of roses which smelt incredible.
We walked across a very impressive bridge past part of the F1 track and wondered into a very expensive shopping centre and got an enormous chocolate brownie and dark chocolate cake from a chocolate shop called The Dark Gallery. It was incredible; the richest brownie, but still incredibly light and fluffy!
Right now I am writing this blog post while Tom gets his hair cut at a very expensive barbours, and absolutely raves about having a head massage while they are washing his hair; 'I'm never washing my own hair again!'Read more
Photo @Max Sydow