2015 ADVENTURE – PART 7

If I were a city, I’d want to be Singapore!  We spent two full days there and it wasn’t nearly enough.  Singapore is ‘Dubai with class’.  We’ve never seen a city like it: clean, orderly and sophisticated.  True, it has little to offer in terms of history, but to anyone wanting to experience the ultra-modern city, this is the place!  It’s like a whole society dreamed of a magical place to live in, and just went ahead and built it.  And it’s not just the infrastructure that’s different, the people are too: unfailingly polite, industrious and proud.
 

The Singapore experience brought me back almost fifty years to Expo ’67 in Montréal, a naïve thirteen-year-old: first time on an airplane (Eastern Provincial Airways from Summerside!), first city bus, first subway ride.  The Expo site was otherworldly - things I’d never seen or imagined: monorails, geodesic domes, pavilions from countries I’d only seen on a map, a midway bigger than Old Home Week!  Expo was a temporary affair, meant to show what a modern city could be like.  Singapore is it - the real thing!
 

On our first day there, we’d taken the hop-on-hop-off bus to get the lay of the land and rode the Singapore Flyer, the world’s biggest Ferris wheel.  Our next time in port, we took the Metro to the Marina Bay Sands Hotel to watch the sun go down.  The hotel consists of three massive towers topped by a boat-shaped observation deck, 56 floors up, at 650 feet, and straddling the three towers.

From there, one can see the financial heart of the city, the Flyer, the Formula One Grand Prix circuit, and the Gardens by the Bay, much of it built on reclaimed land!

We watched the sound and light show over Marina Bay, took a short ride on the Metro to Suntec City to see the Fountain of Wealth, and headed back to the ship.

We spent our last day in Singapore on Sentosa Island.  From the cruise ship centre, we took the monorail, getting off first at the area called Lake of Dreams near Universal Studios.  Hardly anyone was there, but Starbucks was open!

Then we went to the beach, took a dip at Palawan, and walked over to Siloso Beach.  The beaches may be artificial but they’re beautiful and, in the morning, almost empty.  Sentosa is Singapore’s playground, definitely worth another visit when we come back to this part of the world.

We sailed overnight and arrived in Port Klang, a ninety-minute drive from Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur.  Malaysia was country number 15 on our journey through Europe and Asia and it drove home a valuable lesson: big things are happening economically in Southeast Asia.  There is nothing ‘Third World’ about Singapore, Malaysia, and even parts of Indonesia.  People are acquiring a taste for the better life and have the smarts needed to get there.  Kuala Lumpur looks like any modern city in Canada or the US, better than many, in fact.  There’s a lot of money here.
 

Once again, we’d opted for an all-day taxi, shared with the Crockers.  This time, we hit the jackpot with a driver named Edward who knew how to make the best of the limited time we had and show us the city’s must-see attractions.  We started off with a photo shoot at the base of the magnificent Petronas Towers and then rode the elevator to the observation deck atop the nearby KL Tower, 400 metres above the city.

We went from there to the War Memorial, visited Independence Square, drove past impressive municipal parks, and made our last stop at the King’s Palace.

Our second and last stop in Malaysia was Langkawi Island, located 25 kilometres from the mainland, one of 99 islands in the archipelago known as the ‘Hawaii of Malaysia’.  Our hired driver, Darus, took us first to the Kilim Geoforest Park where we boarded a boat for a guided tour of the Kilim River.

We visited a small aquaculture operation, watched eagles glide above the water in search of fish, sailed to where the river empties into the Andaman Sea, and walked through a spooky bat-filled limestone cave.

Next stop was the cable car station at the foot of 700-metre Machincang Mountain.  Had it not been for the 35-degree weather, we’d have sworn we were at a ski resort!  The ride up and the views from the top were gorgeous: lush vegetation, crystal clear turquoise water, and beautiful white sand beaches just waiting to be explored.

After lunch in Chenang, we went to the nearby beach and swam in the warmest salt water I’ve ever experienced.  The sand was almost too hot to walk on and squeaked just like it does back home at Basin Head!  Elva and were so impressed with the place that we picked up a price list from the beachfront Holiday Villa Hotel.  Langkawi ranks in our top three places visited thus far, right up there with Singapore and Bali.

When I was a kid, King Cole Tea came in foil-wrapped brick-shaped packages.  These arrived at the old Wellington Co-op packed in wooden crates that said ‘Ceylon’.  I eventually found out that Ceylon was an island country lying just south of India.  The school map showed it in pink, meaning it was part of the former British Empire, just like - it seemed to me then - half the world!
 

Independent since 1948 and known as Sri Lanka since 1972, it’s a country of 21 million people crammed into an area about the size of New Brunswick.  Wracked by a twenty-six year civil war between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils, Sri Lanka has been stable since 2009 and is now open for business.  The ship docked in the heart of the capital city, Colombo, and we were off to explore.
 

On our first day, we paired up with the Crockers and taxied to the Ingiriya tea and rubber plantation.  Elva and I had seen a coffee operation in Guatemala, but never tea.  We learned that the plant was introduced by the island’s British rulers in the nineteenth century.  Today, 700,000 Sri Lankans, mostly women, work in the tea industry.  They pick the tea leaves one by one, climbing the steep slopes with carriers slung from the shoulders, and earn about $3 per day for the back-breaking work.

On a sadder note, while traveling in Indonesia, we got some bad news.  Elva’s beloved 2012 Mazda MX-5 Miata was destroyed in a fire which totally engulfed the building where it was being stored for the winter, together with three dozen other cars and a dozen or so motorcycles.  While it’s true that “It was only a car”, a convertible is more than a car: it’s an experience!  Now comes the fight with the insurance company…