We stayed in Singapore for three nights with our good friends Vanessa and George Spencer. They have a lovely flat across the street from the Singapore Botanical Gardens. They share their home with their dog Juno and their tortoise Houdini. I met Vanessa and her mother 34 years ago in Bali at a Sanur hotel where I was staying a few nights on my trip around the world. We’ve stayed in touch ever since and visit when we are in Singapore. Hopefully one day they’ll be able to visit us in Maui. 

Flying into Singapore this time, unlike when we landed and changed flights to Cambodia, the sky was full of haze as Neil was trying to take photos. George told us the haze is smoke from the fires in Borneo and Sumatra where they are clearcutting old-growth forest to plant palms for palm oil for cooking. He said some of the fires to clear the vegetation catch the centuries-old accumulation of peat on fire and that it smolders long and deep.

Changi Airport is huge with 4 terminals. I don’t know how many runways or taxiways but I do know we taxied for 30 minutes from our gate to the point when we took off on our way to Bali.

Singapore is a very modern and clean city/country. The country is 283.5 sq miles and growing as they reclaim land. It is all connected by a very efficient MRT and city bus system. It’s so easy to get around! We were able to take the MRT from the airport and with only 2 changes, exit out with a 3 minute walk to Vanessa and George’s home.

Every evening, we spent catching up with Vanessa and George and enjoyed a delicious meal cooked by Vanessa. George wouldn’t let us in the kitchen after to help with the cleanup. Houdini (the tortoise) does laps around the balcony and flat all evening. He is deceptively fast and quiet. I’d often feel a tortoise claw across the top of my foot as he seems to really like feet. Juno is much more reserved and every once in a while she’d allow a pet or two.

Our first day of exploration, we simply walked across the street to the Singapore Botanical Gardens which we discovered is a World Heritage Site. Vanessa walked us to the first part to show us the botanical science center. We watched through glass as scientists set up sterile bottles for orchid seeds and the next window showed mechanized rotation to stimulate the germinate process, and the last window showed the bottles still under grow lights with the orchard plants growing inside. We visited a couple of indoor museums, one which included beautiful nature photos of icebergs and penguins.  The other was the history of the gardens which started in 1819 when Raffles first came to the area to set up Singapore as a port for the East India Company. 

Our first outdoor exploration area was the rainforest garden which was ironically perfect as it started raining as we entered the garden. Thank you Vanessa for the umbrellas. We wandered past the Frangipani garden, which we know as Plumeria trees. From there we entered the Orchid Garden. Numerous paths wound through different colorful outdoor gardens and one impressive indoor structure with a chilled humid micro-climate for orchids that grow in higher-elevation cloud forests. It was beautiful and extremely colorful. My glasses fogged up as soon as we came back into the outdoor heat. Ha

After lunch in one of the park restaurants, we walked through the Ginger Garden and I learned some things! While I knew turmeric and galangal are part of the ginger family, I had no idea that heliconias are in that family. And even stranger to me is that bananas are in the same family as ginger!

By this point, I was using the umbrella as a parasol for the sun. Neil’s sharp eye noticed a forest monitor lizard foraging in the leaf litter, and nearby we saw some feral jungle fowl – the progenitor of domesticated chickens. Sadly, we completely forgot to swing by the lake to look for otters which frequent the area. Neil had been really looking forward to that. We walked back to the flat for showers and catching up on our email and then enjoyed a lovely evening with Vanessa and George.