Summer 2018 big trip - day 24.1

Monday 20th August, part 1

Singaporesingaporesingaporesingaporesingapore! Singapore. Yaaaaaaaaaaaay! Finally. Now I was very excited to be here, I had been looking forward to it for months.

Apart from the few days in Sydney, I had spent the whole trip in the Tropics – the latitudes between the two Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn – so it had been very hot and very humid in both Queensland and Bali. But this city-state is smack bang in the centre of the Tropics at just 88 miles north of the equator and my goodness do you know it when you step outside. The airport and the MRT (metro) trains and stations are air-conditioned, so when I exited the station at Chinatown, where my hostel was, I just hit a wall of heat and humidity like nothing I've experienced before. Thankfully, a lot of the pavements are covered, so you can get some respite from the sun at least, and every building is air-conditioned.

On trips, if I'm by myself, I always go on a free guided walking tour on my first or second day in a new city, and had booked onto a five-hour one (!) for the afternoon of my first day here. My flight was due to land shortly after 9am and the tour wasn’t until 1pm, but my flight was delayed and then it took longer than expected to get to my hostel in Chinatown, so I didn't arrive till about 12:30. I called the tour company and asked if there was somewhere I could meet the group as I wouldn't get to the starting point in time; thankfully they said I could meet the group at a hotel in Chinatown where they'd be taking a short break. I left my bag at the hostel as I couldn't check in yet, and found my way to the hotel. After 45 minutes of standing outside getting increasingly concerned (and hungry, as I hadn't had a chance to have lunch), I was relieved when the group turned up, led by a bright and cheerful Singaporean woman whose English name was Priscilla.

The tour was excellent, the best I've been on anywhere. It was in the downtown core area but completely off the tourist trail. There were only six of us in the group, too, which was nice. The hotel I met them in started life as a Chinese temple; there's a low little wall several inches high across the doorway which you need to raise your feet to step over, which acts as a flood barrier, a symbolic threshold from the mundane to the spiritual, and has the function of making you do a little bow as you enter (in the act of stepping over something relatively high, you naturally lean forward as you put your foot down). It then became a museum, and is now a heritage-listed building, so the hotel has to let the public in to wander round the ground floor, where it's still a small museum. After a break sitting in the air-conditioned lobby, we went back outside and Priscilla led us to a traditional Chinese bakery. It's one of those with the open store-fronts, and lots of boxes with bags of biscuits and things in. The tour included some food tastings, so here we got the first one of some tapioca wafers (large thin circles, brightly coloured) and black sesame caramel sticks.

Many of the older buildings in the city centre are the traditional dwellings called shophouses: terraced buildings two or three stories high with a shop or other business on the ground floor and living quarters above. In the city's early days, poverty was rife and these buildings were full to bursting with families, living conditions were awful. Many also have "five-foot-ways" out front, generally along the length of the street. These are five-foot-wide covered walkways, built for shelter against the frequent rain and hot sun. The buildings can be quite colourful and pretty, and some shops have little shrines outside the door on the walkway.

We visited Thian Hock Keng Temple, a beautiful Chinese Taoist-Buddhist temple on the edge of Chinatown. It started in the early 1820s as a small waterfront joss house, built by immigrants from the Hokkien region of China and dedicated to the sea goddess Ma Zu, where sailors and settlers could go to give thanks for their safe arrival. Nowadays it's a large, elaborately decorated proper temple with several buildings or pavilions centered around a courtyard. There are several large shrines, like chapels in a church – one to Ma Zu, one Buddhist, one Confucian, one for ancestral tablets, and a few others. Priscilla showed us how people pray there and explained a bit about the different shrines and the faiths. I've never been to a temple before, and this one was amazing, so beautiful and interesting, I loved it. The back wall of the temple, outside on the street, was decorated with a mural about the history of the city's Chinese population, and the designers of the modern building opposite the front of the temple included two large eye-shaped holes in the top of it to 'watch over' the temple and keep it safe.

Not a good photo, but you can see the mural and the 'eyes' at the top of the glassy building.

Due to the limited amount of land in Singapore, the vast majority of people live in high-rise subsidised public housing apartment blocks, built by the Housing and Development Board and so referred to as HDBs. Most if not all of them have a market (basic shops like grocers, hairdressers, bank, a small bakery perhaps) and food centre, or hawker centre, either as part of the building or nearby. Hawker centres are a bit like food courts with a variety of places to choose from and lots of tables, but are open-air (roof but no walls) and the stalls are run by independent hawkers (no chain places). They began to spring up in the 1950s and '60s as a more sanitary version of streetside mobile hawker stalls, where hygiene wasn't always great. The food is generally simple, very cheap (on average a couple of Singaporean dollars a meal) and can be very good. I've since found out that there are even a couple of stalls in the city that have been awarded Michelin Stars!

We stopped at Maxwell Food Centre for a proper break and Priscilla bought us a sugarcane juice drink to try. It was delicious! Lovely and sweet and ever so refreshing. For food, we got to try two typical Singaporean dishes: carrot cake, and chicken rice. Carrot cake in Singapore is not carrot cake as we know it – it’s basically an omelette filled with chopped radish. Very tasty though!

Now - chicken rice. Chiiiiickeeen riiiiice! Widely considered to be Singapore's national dish, it is now one of the dishes that I love because it is so simple and yet so delicious, if done well. Basically: poached chicken, rice cooked in the stock from the chicken, and a bowl of chicken broth. Omigod. Wow. Big smile!

After half an hour or so, Priscilla returned and we left to continue the tour, stopping next at the Singapore City Gallery, where there is a giant scale model of the island on the ground floor, which was really cool. On the same floor was an exhibition about this year's President's Design Award, which was about "Creating a better world by design"; the entries were designs for things that would provide solutions to a range of issues like homelessness and environmental damage. The first panel was about a special tent, based on those used in the military and extreme-condition explorations, which could provide privacy and security for women living in refugee camps, or decent shelter for other homeless people. Reading a small summary online, apparently the gallery is about how Singapore came to be, how the city was planned to be able to fit a large population onto a relatively small island (approx 50km/31 miles east-west, 27km/17 miles north-south), and how city planners continue to plan sustainably. I would have liked to have gone back to the gallery and had a proper look round all of it, but didn’t have time/didn't prioritise it on this visit.

I love how 'green' and environmentally-aware Singapore is. Everyone always says it's the cleanest city in the world, and it is very clean, it's probably true, it's great... but it's also a small island that has no natural resources of its own and is now completely urbanised, so it's had to develop very good waste-recycling systems, make use of renewable energy sources, and make a sustainable future an absolute priority. Apparently it's the only country to have green building regulations in its legislation. Priscilla told us that, by law, a building developer has to re-plant the same amount of land it built on, and on a horizontal plane. So if a new building takes up twenty square metres of land on the ground in the city, the developer has to fill twenty square metres of land somewhere else with plants (though that doesn't necessarily have to be in Singapore) - it cannot cover twenty square metres of the building facade with plants (as good as that is, too). I love that! Many more cities and countries need to learn from them and follow suit, ignore the selfish interests of Big Business such as fossil fuel companies, look to the long-term wellbeing of the planet and all of its inhabitants (not just humans), and stop acting as if sustainability, conservation and protecting the environment are at odds with economic development.

Our last stop was the ‘Pinnacle@Duxton’, in the Tanjong Pagar area. This is an amazing modern HDB building, consisting of seven 50-story blocks linked by two 500m-long sky gardens on the 26^th and 50^th floors. Uniquely, for this project the Housing and Development Board decided to hold a worldwide competition for its design, which attracted more than 200 entries. The sky gardens are terraces surrounding the whole structure, so you can wander round and get amazing views over the city in every direction. It's kind of like a park, on top of a building; there isn't any grass, but there are plenty of plants and trees, and a few seating areas. Looking south you can see some islands across the water, and to the north you can see some skyscrapers beyond the distant hills - Indonesia and Malaysia respectively, both so close. We had 45 minutes there, to wander at our leisure, before the tour ended and we all left.