Singapore: Beginning my travels in Asia
- Esther
- Oct 20, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 4, 2020
Despite feeling jetlagged after a thirteen hour flight from London into Changi airport, Ben and I were beyond excited to kick off our nine months of travelling the other side of the world by spending a couple of days exploring the beautiful Singapore.
Singapore by day
After lots of Googling the best things to do in Singapore, I arrived feeling like I knew everything I wanted to do and see in the couple of days we had here.
We started by taking the metro straight from our hotel to the centre of the city, which was super clean, modern and glamorous. We spent the morning wandering around the promenade, the river, the bay and the upmarket shopping centres. Interestingly, even around these ultra-classy areas, we noticed it was still cheaper to eat, drink and sightsee here than it is in most of London!
Two of my favourite must-sees in Singapore were the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest. Inside their giant domes, there are all kinds of beautiful tropical flowers, trees and manmade waterfalls, and you can see through the glass walls to the city and its skyscrapers outside.
Another highlight for me was visiting the Singapore Botanic Gardens on our last morning. They were beautiful (and free!) and the National Orchid Garden was super pretty.
Away from Singapore’s squeaky-clean tourist centre, we also had a look around Little India. This part of town was definitely a lot less pristine than the city centre but it had a bright and busy market, lots of colourful street decorations and some really good places for lunch.
We also did some shopping in Bugis at Singapore’s most famous street market, which was enormous and chaotic but sold a lot of pretty cool (and cheap!) clothes and accessories. The amount of things they'd packed in there was actually amazing – you could have got lost in the maze of stalls!
Singapore by night
While Singapore was a lot of fun to explore by day, I feel like its city centre was really built to come alive at night. After dark, when all of the hotels and landmarks by the bay started to light up with different colours, Singapore was an absolutely stunning place to be.
We ended our first day by watching the beautiful light show in the Skytree Garden by the bay, where the tree-like towers lit up, changed colours and played songs from musicals.
Right after that amazing performance, on our walk back to Raffles Place, we also stumbled across another beautiful light and water fountain show right in the centre of the bay.
I’d thought that the colourful Skytree show would be hard to top, but I think we may have managed it with our sunset visit to the Lavo rooftop bar on the top of the Marina Bay Sands hotel (the iconic building with a huge ship on top of it) the next day.
We drank our 2-for-1 cocktails (dragon fruit flavoured and really nice!) looking out over an amazing panoramic view of the city – probably one of the best city views I’ve ever seen – while the sun went down behind Singapore's amazing skyline. You could even see the water and light shows at the bay and the Skytree Garden happening down below.
The food in Singapore is also definitely worth writing about. For our first breakfast, we tried a Singaporean breakfast staple, kaya toast (which is basically like French toast with a coconut jam). It ended up being so good that we had it every morning!
I also loved the dinner we had at the city’s famous bustling food market Gluttons Bay. We tried the chicken and pork satay, the chicken murtabak and the Singapore's famous ‘carrot cake’, which isn't what it sounds like – it’s actually a fried rice and meat dish with a lot of soy sauce!
Overall, Singapore has been amazing and the perfect start to this year out for me. Even though we didn’t have that long to explore it, we definitely crammed lots into our three-day stay. From the metro to the promenade, almost everything in Singapore’s centre has felt very lavish, efficient and clean… a nice way to ease into the rest of South East Asia!
Our hotel (the Fragrance Emerald) was clean and cheap but a little further away from the metro than we'd have ideally liked. This meant that we ended up doing a lot of walking, making it a pretty tiring - but still incredible - couple of days.
I can’t believe we’re now done with our first stop in South East Asia already. It still hasn’t hit me that I’ve finally started the travelling I’ve been looking forward to for so long!
We haven’t even booked our flights for the next couple of months yet and only have a rough plan at the moment but I’m so excited for what’s ahead. For now, it's time to fly out to our next stop - Bali!
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