Sentosa – Trick Eye Museum and S.E.A. Aquarium [Singapore 2018]

Singapore, 277 square miles in area (less than a quarter the size of Rhode Island), is already a very small island. Just off its southern coast is an even smaller island, Sentosa (1.82 square miles), a resort island that is now home to attractions including beaches, an adventure park, various museums, and Universal Studios Singapore. Since 2011, you can walk to Sentosa via a ~quarter-mile boardwalk, which is what we opted to do. Out of all the potential attractions, there were a couple that we wanted to see on this trip to Sentosa – the Trick Eye Museum and the S.E.A. Aquarium.

View of Sentosa from the Southern Ridges

We first visited the Trick Eye Museum. Unlike my usual fare of taxidermy, rocks, and vehicles, the Trick Eye Museum contains scenes painted so that you look like you’re in them if you stand in the right place. Some of the scenes have things for you to sit or lie on and some of them require you to take the picture one way, then rotate it afterwards to get the full effect. For example, the photo below has you sit on the bench, then turn it upside down so it looks like you’re hanging from the rafters while being threatened by a giant snake. Other scenes include hanging off a cliff, climbing bamboo, skydiving, being a mermaid, levitating on a chair, horse racing, and being eaten by a friendly fanged fish. The Trick Eye Museum doesn’t have as much repeat visitability as a more traditional museum, but it’s fun, and worth a visit if you’ve never done anything like it before.

Giant snake attack scene

After lunch, we went to the aquarium. However, the bundled tickets we bought to save money (Sentosa FUN Pass) forced us to get to the aquarium through the Maritime Experiential Museum, because otherwise no one would choose to go to the Maritime Experiential Museum. I’m on to you, Sentosa FUN Pass. It’s not a terrible museum; they go through the history of trade between Europe and Asia, a knot-tying station, model boats, and exhibits of some of the major ports and products traded, but compared to Universal Studios and beaches, it sounds like watching grass get cut, which is only a couple steps up from watching grass grow.

The Maritime Experiential Museum connects to the aquarium at the shark tank, and we arrived in time to see the sharks being fed, which was cool. The rest of the aquarium contains the usual mélange of tropical fish, jellyfish, coral, seaweed, that tunnel tank that you can walk through and have fish swimming overhead, schooling fish, small fish, big fish, one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. They also have an absolutely giant open ocean tank that takes up an entire room and has an auditorium-sized viewing area. In general, aquariums tend to be expensive compared to other museums and zoos, but if you can find a special deal or bundle the tickets with other attractions, it’s worth it. Timing for the day: about an hour and a half for the Trick Eye Museum, forty-five minutes to an hour for the Maritime Experiential Museum, and close to two hours for the aquarium. So nothing huge like the Field Museum, but more substantial than a state park visitor’s center.

Clockwise from top left: Shark feeding, fish tank, fish tunnel, jellyfish

Open ocean tank