Personally I think Japan was cleaner; everyone has the same old one-liner about Singapore and it’s not particularly true. Whilst the advertisements of upset-looking youth on the metro talk about community service for dropping litter, in practice it’s something you actually have to be stupid enough to be caught doing. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, on to more interesting things.
A strict government, coupled with an excellent education system means that the mixture of faiths here causes little friction. Extremists of any cult are put off by the threat of swift and decisive police and legal response to such nonsense. This means I’m accepted and welcomed in to the mosque I chose to brave near my hostel; Muslims elsewhere take note. The Hindu temples are rather garish in design and feature numerous pigeons that litter the floor with the aftermath of free offerings from locals; so whilst it is necessary to remove footwear before entering, each time I felt a cold wet patch underfoot I became gradually more aggravated. Ornate decorations whilst colourful, depict all manner of symbolism, with my favourite being the fierce-looking individual brandishing a head on a plate complete with entrails.
Once the temples have all been ticked off your list, head to Chinatown or Little India (what’s wrong with “Indiatown”?), for food. Or visit Orchard Road to fulfil your recreational shopping desires, but nothing comes cheap. Catch metro to the bay and you can gamble awaya any spare change or head to the roof for a view; hundreds of enormous shipping liners moored waiting to despatch 25% of the world’s goods and a great deal of construction work inland.
And that really does sum up the place in a nutshell. It’s a small world in Singapore, where things to do can be counted on one hand, though thankfully it beats the nearest equivalent hands down; this is definitely Hong Kong how it should have been’ Hong Kong version 2.0 beta if you will. It’s still in beta as the construction craze is permanent and perpetual; buildings are only granted 99 year leases and are then fair game for ripping down and starting again. There’s no protection laws here to keep anything for generations to come; it’s all brand new. Back in HK and the lack of grass, trees or just about anything naturally occurring means it’s impossible to get away from it. Here is utopia in comparison, where the laws of land and buildings ensure areas of greenery coexist and complement the nearby concrete monstrosities. It makes the country a much nicer place to visit and means exercise is an option; MacRitchie reservoir offers beautiful scenery to traipse around, if a little hazardous should you become lost and end up navigating the virgin rainforest in near pitch black.
17k around MacRitchie Reservoir
I do wonder if a curfew exists; come 9pm and hoards of bodies can be seen heading to the nearest metro station for transit home. And when I say hoards, it’s a literal stampede of humans quick marching left right, left right all the way home, like a million little piggies. The police and military presence seems to increase numbers to match the new proportion, ensuring every good citizen passes through in an orderly fashin and doesn’t scream expletives at the ticket machine, waiting to retrieve one dollar deposit for return of metro ticket.
Policed and tightly controlled utopia it is then, but with Hawker Stalls offering delicacies – that whilst far more expensive than neighbouring Malaysia are arguably better – it’s somewhere to pile on yet more unneeded insulation for the coming winter that never actually arrives in Asia. The food is sublime, flavours from everywhere spiced and executed with a style all their own and even the Chinese stalls are remarkably good, considering the majority are owned by non-English speaking mainland Chinese. So visit for a break, shop till you drop jaw from the asking prices (a watch for S$534,000 for example), and stuff your face until those jeans no longer feel like a loose fit – but don’t expect this small area of independence to occupy your time for longer than a week; at most. The people are friendly and the women – well, visit on ladies night to see for yourself (it’s Wednesday) – bundled with modern conveniences and ease of transport to just about anywhere, make it attractive. For me it’s a nice place to pass through en route somewhere else, but in making Hong Kong look positively like squalor, I’m dreading a few nights in a cupboard-for-a-room, before heading to New Zealand.
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