Hong Kong [Singapore 2018]

After the excitement and activity of the past two weeks, we had one last whirlwind day before settling in for the flight back to New England. We left Singapore after midnight, landing in Hong Kong at the bright and early time of 5 am with a thirteen-hour layover ahead of us. This long stop was intentional, because if you’re in Hong Kong for less than twenty-four hours, you don’t need a visa. Thirteen is less than twenty-four, so yes, we left the airport. We cleared customs, then had a breakfast-snack at the one restaurant that was open at 6 am before setting out on our adventure.

We took a train from the airport to Central (Hong Kong Island) and walked from there to the tram that goes up Victoria Peak. The tram is a funicular (cable railway), which the internet says has a maximum steepness of 48%. For reference, US highways can have a maximum of a 7% grade, and the maximum grade for a railway without cables or rack rail is 13.5% for the Lisbon tram in Portugal. So we took the tram up Victoria Peak. It was steep. On the way up, we got the first overhead views of Hong Kong. From the ground, you get a sense of the busyness of the city, but from above, you can see how built up it is. It’s all skyscrapers packed into a narrow strip of land between water and mountains.

Views from Victoria Peak, descent on the tram

Once we got to the top of Victoria Peak (552 m), we first had to find our way out of the tram station, then we took a walk around the peak along the Hong Kong Trail. It’s fairly flat and paved, so not difficult, but it’s nature-y, and you get views of the surrounding hills, Victoria Harbour, Central, Kowloon (across the harbor), and mist/fog/smog. It wasn’t the clearest day, but not as bad as the time we were at Acadia hiking up Cadillac Mountain, got caught in rain, and saw nothing but fog and clouds¹. We still got some nice views and pictures, complete with hair/dust/lint on my camera lens that magically disappeared later. It could have been a sleep deprivation-induced hallucination, but I can still see the hair/dust/lint on my pictures now, so it was probably a hair/dust/lint.

After completing the loop around Victoria Peak, we took the tram back down and returned to the train station to have dim sum for an early lunch. We still had six hours until our flight, so next we left the station again and took the ferry across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon. We spent some time walking around Kowloon, found a park, then took the subway back to Central, where we caught the Airport Express to the airport. There, we went through customs and security, bought some cookies, and found our gate all the way at one arm of the airport. Never travel with me if you’re in a hurry. The bus I’m trying to catch will inevitably go out of service as it passes my stop, my plane connections are at opposite ends of the airport, and if things are going smoothly, the train will pull over to restart the electrical system, but don’t worry, everything’s fine. All mostly true stories.

View of Central from Kowloon, Kowloon Park, sculpture in Kowloon Park, Somewhere over Canada

Again, the flight between Hong Kong and New England was long, but bearable. I got chicken and strawberry ice cream for dinner/breakfast [8:00 pm HKT/7:00 am EST] and yet more questionable eggs for breakfast/dinner [7:30 am HKT/6:30 pm EST]. I rewatched Frozen for Sven and the trolls, and saw both Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, so yes, I had ABBA stuck in my head for the next two weeks. No regrets. And then, fifteen and a half hours after leaving Hong Kong, after crossing half the globe, we returned to the cold caresses of New England. We were back.

¹For the record, I was the only one with a rain jacket, because be prepared. You never know when it might start raining, or the temperature could drop twenty degrees suddenly, or you might have to catch and subdue a bird.

Bukit Timah Hill [Singapore 2018]

In this expedition report, we ascend to Singapore’s highest point, no support team, intermediate camps, or supplemental oxygen required. That’s because Singapore’s highest point, Bukit Timah Hill, is 163.63 meters above ground level. That’s one hundred and sixty; not one thousand, six hundred; or sixteen thousand. So it’s about one and a half soccer fields high. The world record for sprinting 200 meters is 19.19 seconds. At least its steepness spares it from being climbed in less time than it takes to air a Super Bowl ad.

We trekked walked to base camp the visitor’s center from Beauty World to begin our journey. The path is paved, but the initial rise is steep enough that I wouldn’t recommend strollers, wheelchairs, or roller skates. There are some unpaved, less straightforward trails around the nature reserve, but we didn’t take any of them this time. After the main trail levels out, it’s a quick and easy walk to the summit flag summit rock at the top of Bukit Timah Hill. Following the mandatory pictures commemorating our conquest, we clipped back into the fixed ropes walked back down the hill.

Summit rock

Taking our time and with a slight detour, it took us an hour to get up and down Bukit Timah Hill. It wasn’t crowded, but there were a decent number of people also walking around; we probably saw two or three dozen people in total. (You haven’t seen crowded if you haven’t hiked something like the gorge trails at Taughannock or Watkin’s Glen on a weekend in summer. Bumper to bumper traffic the whole way through, and you’d better hope you don’t get stuck behind the extended family with a double stroller who walks at their three-year-old’s pace straight down the middle of the trail or the guy who’s taking advantage of the sights, smells, and sounds of nature by smoking while on a phone call.)

Back at ground level, we next walked to a nearby quarry where we saw the quarry, plus a small horde of monkeys. We still had some time before our dinner engagement, so we walked another couple miles down an old railway turned walking path. It was fabulously wet and muddy. It was sufficiently nature-y, though it paralleled the road so we never got away from the traffic sounds, which is my number one complaint/gripe/disappointment about Ann Arbor. In Ann Arbor, it’s really hard to get somewhere where you can’t hear/see traffic, train horns, the helicopter taking off from the hospital, or buildings if you don’t have a car. I’m pretty sure the four-lane road between North and Central Campus has more traffic than the two-lane highway leading out of Ithaca. The highways encircling the city also make it difficult to access certain portions of Ann Arbor as a pedestrian/biker. I have a whole Ann Arbor rant, but for now, I was halfway around the world surrounded by 5.6 million of my closest friends.

The quarry

Zoo and River Safari [Singapore 2018]

The reason we went to both the Jurong Bird Park and Night Safari was because they had a deal where you could go to those two parks, plus the zoo and River Safari, for a total of $86. At just over $20 per park, it was a deal we couldn’t pass up. I think we had a week to go to the remaining parks after the bird park and Night Safari, so we picked a day to visit the zoo and River Safari and use up our tickets.

Clockwise from top left: penguins, tiger, zebras, rhino, reptiles

The zoo is a pretty standard zoo. They have a variety of animals including elephants, monkeys, penguins, sea lions, otters, zebras, giraffes, and lions, and tigers, and bats. It’s a decent sized zoo, with enough to see to keep you busy for a least half a day, not so small that you wonder why you paid money to see it, but not so huge that there’s no way you can see everything. Throughout the day, there are also a few shows and animal feedings that you can attend. We saw the sea lion show and the elephant show. The sea lion show was better in terms of what the animal can be trained to do. Sea lions can dive and jump, and walk on their flippers; elephants can . . . open their mouths really wide? Useful in certain circumstances, perhaps, but not as exciting to watch.

Sea lion and elephant shows

After the zoo, we went to the River Safari, which is right next to the zoo. [The zoo, River Safari, and Night Safari are all at the same place, and the bird park will soon be moved to the same location as well.] The River Safari suffers a bit from not quite having its own niche. It’s generally themed around animals that can be found near water, but its main draw is . . . pandas. What I learned from Zoo Tycoon was that besides being very hard to keep happy and reproducing, pandas are highland/mountain animals. So . . . not river creatures. The problem is that any fish at the River Safari can be found at the aquarium, any birds at the bird park, and any other animal at the zoo, leaving the River Safari without a signature animal. Hence the pandas.

Anyway, we saw a variety of fish, birds, monkeys (also not river animals?), manatees, an alligator, and the pandas. The pandas are in their own special exhibit and were being fed when we were there, so we got to see them go through the process of stripping and eating bamboo. And I don’t think I’d gotten to see live pandas before, so that part was worth it. The manatees were also interesting to see. They were in a large tank where they all just kind of slowly float around.

A panda

Overall, the River Safari is the least entertaining/developed of the four animal parks, but if you want to a) see the pandas or b) take advantage of the deal to see all four parks, it’s worth a couple hours to walk through. It’s not a bad park; it’s just not as good as the other three more established parks.

Sentosa – Fort Siloso [Singapore 2018]

This was the day my breakfast included cheesecake. Nothing like quality nutrition to begin the day. It contained lemon and raspberry, so it covered more than half of the food groups, including fruits, so that makes it healthy. We spent most of the morning at my aunt’s house before going to meet another aunt for lunch and an afternoon back on Sentosa. Once again, we walked to Sentosa, but this time we were there to do some free things. First, after lunch we walked to Fort Siloso, a gun battery that formed part of Singapore’s defenses during WWII.

View from the Skywalk overlooking beaches and ships

In December 1941, as the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor, they also began attacking US- and British-held territories in Asia. Allied forces in Malaya and Thailand were disorganized and didn’t expect the Japanese to be able to navigate the jungle, resulting in Allied withdrawal from the region by the end of January 1942. Using bicycles and light tanks, the Japanese then made their way south through Malaya towards Singapore. The causeway connecting Malaya and Singapore had been blown up, but in the second week of February the Japanese began using boats to land on Singapore. A week later, the British commander in charge surrendered. In total, 130,000 people in Malaya and Singapore were captured and Singapore was occupied by Japan until the end of the war, three and a half years later.

Exhibit (in the store) + cannon at Fort Siloso

Today, Fort Siloso can be reached by a Skywalk that affords views of the mainland, Sentosa’s beaches, and the many ships anchored off the island. Assorted artillery is located around the fort, presumably in some approximation of their original configuration. Some of the restored buildings include the fort’s general store, command post, casemates (fortified gun emplacement), and barracks. Some buildings have information about the background of Singapore’s defenses and life after Japanese occupation while others are recreations of what they might have been like during the war. The surrender chamber has a wax reenactment of the Battle of Singapore. It’s all still a bit of a work in progress, but an interesting look at a part of Singapore’s history that people might not think about in the midst of high rises and shopping malls.

From there, we paid a visit to the southernmost point of continental Asia and had the world’s fastest swim at the beach (80-degree water temperatures – never before seen in New England, where the air temperature in summer sometimes doesn’t reach 80). The swim had to be that fast because we were meeting an aunt for dinner on the other side of the island. It was a fancy hotel buffet, where my goal as usual was to see how many different desserts I could try. Four, for the record.

View of Sentosa from the southernmost point of continental Asia

Asian Civilisations Museum/National Museum [Singapore 2018]

It wouldn’t be a vacation with me without at least one museum. As it turns out, we visited two, on separate days. The first was the Asian Civilisations Museum, featuring art and items from Asian civilizations. Probably the most unique exhibit/collection in this museum is the hundreds of bowls from the Tang Shipwreck. The ship was an Arabian dhow sailing from China on its way back to Iraq/Iran around 830 A.D., but was found in 1998 off the shore of Indonesia. Both the ship and the cargo were well-preserved, protected by sediment. The ship is unusual not only for surviving over a millennium underwater, but also because it was sewn together. The cargo, which included 70,000 Tang dynasty ceramic pieces, survived because many of the bowls were nestled in tight spirals inside larger storage jars, then further cushioned with straw.

Bowls from the Tang Shipwreck

The rest of the museum contains other ceramics from various time periods, some paintings, furniture, musical instruments, and Buddhistic and Taoist statuary. It’s not a huge museum, and not my favorite, but it was a good change from some of our other activities, and there’s a decent variety of items in their exhibits. Worth going if you want something quieter/less touristy than the zoo or Sentosa, or if you’re a pottery aficionado.

Asian Civilisations Museum

Near the end of our trip, we met up with one of my aunts/uncle and a cousin and his family. We had lunch together, then went to the National Museum of Singapore. The main part of the museum on the first floor covers Singapore’s history, from its existence as a trading port, to British colonization, its role in WWII1, the merger with Malaysia, and its subsequent independence. They had various artifacts throughout the exhibit, ranging from a bell cast in Paul Revere’s foundry and war documents to an opium bed and a mid-century kitchen. Even though I was dragged through a decent portion of this exhibit by my niece, I thought it was interesting and educational, especially since I didn’t grow up in Singapore, and the last time I was in the country I was still learning arithmetic and the parts of speech.

On the second floor, other exhibits include the Story of the Forest, Surviving Syonan, and Voices of Singapore. Story of the Forest is kind of cool – you start at the top of the exhibit, then walk down a spiral ramp. As you walk downward, the walls are video screens with moving forest scenes on them that are inspired by/digitized versions of drawings from a museum collection. Surviving Syonan covers Singapore during Japanese occupation in WWII¹, and Voices of Singapore is about fine and performing arts in Singapore. They have posters for orchestra concerts and TV shows from the 70s, and a theater where the seats are cars. We saw one other exhibit about fashion, then we ran out of time. Overall, I think I liked the National Museum a little better than the Asian Civilisations Museum. I’m not a huge art person, and the National Museum was generally more informative. Again, though, this museum was much quieter than, say, Universal Studios.

Clockwise from top left: fashion, Story of the Forest, National Museum mini-façade, 70s concert posters

¹More on this in a later post.