Singapore

December 20-23 – Singapore

Sunday – Dec. 20th

Entirely too early we had to get up, eat our last breakfast on board, and be off the ship by nine. We learned from our room stewardess that the ship would be over-booked for the next fourteen day voyage between Singapore and Australia. It is a Christmas voyage, and there were promises of many children boarding – much to the chagrin of all the staff who see chaos ahead.

We found our luggage in the large warehouse terminal, headed to a limo, and were whisked through impeccably clean, modern Singapore to our elegant digs – the Raffles Hotel – a remembrance of times past.

Our suite was not going to be ready until 2:00, so we had a luxurious breakfast in the Writers Grille and then sat in one of the many lovely nooks reading the Herald Tribune and planning our next days in this very high-tech city. We were just a little too ship-weary to stride out, and we felt we deserved a day of doing little but luxuriating in our hotel, so we did just that. A hotel staffer found us and introduced our Butler…one of three available twenty-four hours a day at push of a button. We were taken to our suite – the Rudyard Kipling – which is part of the East India Wing of the original hotel. The entire hotel has gone through a series of renovations from its start as a ten-room bungalow to its current state. The most recent change was completed in 1991 when they added more rooms, renovated parts that had been ignored for too long, and added powerful new air-conditioning and other modern amenities including an entire shopping court area. One walks from air-conditioned lobby through a warren of open verandahs and walk ways, each situated around a courtyard filled with tropical plants and birds. Our suite over-looked the large brass fountain brought in from Scotland in the late 1800’s. Outside our door-way was a little table and two rattan seats where we could sit and watch the world below, if we chose to be hot and sticky. Instead we stepped into our air-conditioned suite with its parlor and dining area leading into the large bedroom. The parlor was probably the size of our entire ship’s cabin, and this sudden burst of space was almost too much to deal with. The opportunity to spread out and leave things any old place made for a new experience.

We figured out that we were in an ‘old’ part of the hotel as soon as we stepped into the bathroom complex – one room for two sinks, the second room for shower, tub and toilet. As soon as you ran water you could hear it glugging down the common drain pipes in a very old-fashioned way. We learned that there was a walk-way outside the bathroom walls so that the original ‘coolie’servants could come in without inconveniencing the guests and do their cleaning (and probably emptying of chamber pots etc). And before there was air-conditioning there were no real windows, just rattan-covered openings to allow whatever faint breezes could be found to waft through the rooms. I would not have done well here in days of yore as I am not a person designed to live in the tropics.

We explored the various restaurant alternatives associated with the hotel, looked into all the very up-scale shops associated with the new shopping complex, and determined that the Raffles Souvenir shop, and the museum, would be our only stops. The hotel is a tourist stop for everyone visiting Singapore, and to avoid having the place over-run with camera-toting peepers, the hotel has a very strict policy that some areas are only open to ‘residents’ who are given the magic keys of entry. There are enough security cameras located everywhere to ensure that no riff-raff sneaks in, and every elevator has a special ‘key entry’ without which the car won’t move. But the new management understands that a tourist stop has its retail and revenue opportunities, so the recent renovations allowed for a new shopping area so that people could sit in a Raffles courtyard, have a Singapore Sling at the ‘Long Bar’(not the original), shop in the elegant stores and buy a tourist replica of a key or a tea towel so that anyone can say they visited Raffles. There is even a well done Raffles Museum where they have on display photographs of famous celebrities who stayed or visited, sample menus, pictures going back to the early 1900’s and other memorabilia of the hotel’s past.

Monday, December 21

I had only one shopping ambition – to visit Little India, where I wanted to make the acquisitions I had missed out on in Bombay when I was feeling a wee bit under the weather. So having carefully mapped out where and how to go, we stepped out into the sweltering world of Singapore and headed to the City Hall Metro Station. We bought our E-Z Pass for $15 Singapore Dollars and thereby had access to the entire city’s buses or trains. The Metro is new, sleek and amazingly clean. What subway in any other city has absolutely no trash anywhere – and no trash bins anywhere? Our train car was not only clean but had all high tech convenience including an electronic system that lit up the next stop, identified which doors would open and had a voice as clear as a bell informing riders in three languages which stop to use and to “Mind the Pedestrian Gap”. As Bob said, “Singapore is the future”.

Of course, we were entering Little India and it had to be somewhat authentic – so we did see a bit more dirt and garbage on the streets amidst the warren of small shops, but even this was cleaner than all towns we’d visited in India. We ducked under awnings to avoid sun and rain, walked through narrow passageways, past food stalls, luggage stores and trinket shops …and located a place for me to buy pashminas. At which point I was hot, sweaty and needed a beer.

Back to City Hall metro stop, through the Raffles City shopping mall and high rise complex, and out to a German restaurant for steins of Paulaner lager and Nurnberg Wurst for lunch, before heading back to the hotel for a nap and some air-conditioned splendor.

In the evening we met up with Russell and Diane at the Boat Quay. This was an old warehouse & trading area , where ships used to dock, and it had fallen to wrack and ruin. It was restored as a string of waterfront restaurants looking out on the Singapore River. We had a few beers looking out at ferry boats and looking across to the old Raffles Quay, and then moved down the row of restaurants through hawkers shoving menus in our faces and telling us that their restaurant was the best. We decided on a Thai restaurant because they seemed less pushy, the storefront looked a wee bit less tacky and it was a good as any we could chose. A feast of Thai Satay, lettuce wraps, hot & spicy seafood soup, and an array of other dishes was washed down with Tiger beer and good conversation. Fully sated we all headed back to the Metro, bidding another fond adieu to sailing friends headed home to Mallorca.



Tuesday, December 22

Last day of our trip as far as touring goes and there are suitcases to pack and last minute things to accomplish including re-confirming our airplane seats. Since the beginning of this trip I have been in the 2nd circle of hell trying to get my name to match my passport. As of this fall the government is getting very tough, and there are no ‘variations on a theme’ allowed. So while my passport quite distinctly names me as having a last name of Ring, a first name of Beatrice and a middle name of De Rocco, every damn document and flight reservation has had me under the “D’s” as having a last name of DeRoccoRing and a first name of Beatrice. It caused problems with the Israeli security, and with Indian security, and Delta almost didn’t let me on to the airplane when we left NYC. So we’ve tried numerous times to straighten things out.

We arrived at Singapore Air quite convinced that we would be screwed up and a new ticket would have to be issued, but our travel agent had put a note into our records and somehow we slipped in, though my boarding pass quite clearly stated I was DeRoccoRing, Beatrice. No matter, we went to Singapore Air, on Orchard Road, in person, and arranged that we had seats at the galley & exit door with leg room to spare, and that made up for all the inconvenience to date.

Having completed that important task, we enjoyed the crazy Christmas spirit of Orchard Road – the main shopping drag of Singapore. From one high rise mall to the next there were lights, Santa Claus statues, reindeer statues and glitter and glitz at every corner. Every mall, with its infinite array of ‘stuff’, was busily helping last minute shoppers acquire more stuff. I was on the quest for a simple kitchen timer on a string, similar to one given to me years ago by a friend who was living in Asia. I thought it would be a simple quest, but having visited Takeshimiya, Robinsons, Tang and a few other nameless department stores, I discovered nothing. What was amazing was that everyone smiled and said, “Oh of course we have that”….only to admit to me after a search that they really didn’t carry it. It seems to be the Asian desire to please, even if only in fantasy.

The malls of Singapore are famous since, like Dubai, they have every store that you could think of from any other country, be it Borders Books or Marks and Spencer. They are all spotless, all well laid out and all of them filled with people. Were I of an acquisitive nature, I could have burned a significant hole in my VISA card, but I walked out empty handed, sweaty and exhausted instead.

Back to pack and to talk with one of the historians of Raffles. His name was Leslie Danker, a local Singaporean who has worked at Raffles since 1972. He was there before the latest renovations, thru the renovations and after. He is writing a book, which will be out in early 2010, with the title Memories of a Raffles Original (i.e. himself). He proudly told us of meeting John Wayne and Gavin Young (author of ‘Slow Boats to China’, which Bob and I devoured on this trip). When asked about old registration books of the 1920’s, where we hoped to find the handwriting of Walter Maron and Herbert Meyer, he sadly reported that until recently they had been in a large room of the old hotel and when the new management was doing the renovation they threw them all away. And now with computers, we’ll never have that history again. He explained which parts of the hotel were truly old and helped us to decipher were the ‘boys’ had slept in 1928 – in the oldest section, where their door was not off a verandah, but off a main hall of the hotel itself, looking down on the lawn where concerts are still given. He explained all the renovations from 1915 on to the newest of 1991. The whole hotel, be it old or new, has been designed to look like the old colonial structure complete with verandahs, courtyards and tile work but it is now a huge complex of over 200 guest rooms. It was interesting to sit with him for about thirty minutes and he proudly gave us his business card for future times. My guess is that he started as a steward and has moved up to his lofty position of historian – time in grade does really result in good outcomes and while he isn’t THE historian who gives tours of the hotel (that man was off for the holidays), Mr. Danker made a good second.

Having packed and planned our very early morning departure, we went out for a quick bite across the way at the Raffles City complex amidst a million young workers all stopping for drinks or dinner. While Singapore has always had the image of a boring, uptight, sterile town of finance and retail, things appear to be loosening up, and while smoking is mostly not allowed and drinking of any spirits carries a very hefty ‘sin tax’, the youth of the city are breaking out. Miniskirts, high heels, blue jeans and tight t-shirts are quite de rigueur, and you truly sense that this is the city of the future.

And so this next leg of the “Journey of Discovery” has ended. We saw many of the places Daddy and Walter had visited, sailed on many bodies of water as they did, but more importantly we saw places we would otherwise never have visited, learned history we never had paid attention to in the past, and saw cultures and people so different from our own that there were no frames of reference with which to explain them.

One of the great quotes which I think captures our adventure best is by Freya Stark who wrote: “One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own, and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism”.

And now it’s time to go home.