Today was the day where Sarma left us to go back to KL for work the next day.
We got up to have breakfast together and walked him down to the bus stop. While we bought flights from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Sarma was taking the bus for significantly less cost. The bus takes about 6 hours not including a stop at the border for customs.
Today was also a day where we didn’t plan anything so we could have a little bit of relaxation too. The two things I wanted to do on our relaxing day off was go for a swim and write some blogs. Anthony wasn’t too keen on going to the pool, so he stayed at in the room and Amy and I went for a swim.
The pool is not heated, but with the daytime heat the water doesn’t take too long to get used to (at least during the day it doesn’t, night is a bit colder). Anthony and Amy both didn’t want to spend a whole day doing nothing, so after about 45 minutes or so we headed back up to shower and get changed.
Anthony was keen to go into town so we ended up booking a duck tour over the phone for later that afternoon. We had seen the ducks drive around town a few times but never bothered to actually get any information on them until now.
Our booking was for 5:30 and the tour departed from the Singapore Flyer. We slowly made our way to the bay area with the intention of minimizing walking, but unfortunately once your at the bay there is not a lot of transport to get around it… and its fairly big.
We went over to see the Merlion up close and take photos of the city by daylight and then went in search of lunch. We started at the station, but then followed the signs to the mall. These signs went on forever! We did quite a lot of walking and it was all underground so we had no bearing of how far we were from the Flyer. By this stage my feet were throbbing with pain. Eventually we found a nice looking Chinese restaurant and ordered some very nice dumplings and soup and then headed out to ground level.
Once we got out we realized that we had walked basically from one side of the bay to the other - no wonder my feet were so sore. I decided that if I walked that far again I would probably do more damage to my feet, so I told Anthony and Amy that I would meet them there and took a taxi while they walked over via Marina Bay Sands for some Cold Rock ice cream.
About 45 minutes later we met up and got our boarding passes for the duck tour. We watched a short safety video and hoped on board. For those that don’t know, a duck is basically a boat with wheels.
I like the idea of duck tours, and in Boston it was fantastic, but the engine on this one was so loud that none of us could make out what the tour guide was saying, even though she had a loudspeaker.
What’s funny about the whole thing was that we were able to make out the unimportant stuff, like the lead up to the actual facts, but the majority of it was a mumble:
(”… and on the right we have <mumble>…“)
The duck took us through the city and pointed out all the historic building and tourist attractions, then went into the water and took us through the bay past Marina Bay Sands and up to the Merlion and back again. Even though we all missed most of the facts, it was still a nice cruise around.
From here Anthony and Amy wanted to check out Little India, but my feet were so sore, I decided to go home. From what I hear, Little India was nice and they had a good meal on a banana leaf!
When I got back to the hotel, I relaxed for a little while then went down stairs to the hotel’s massage place to get my feet worked on. The massage person didn’t speak much English, so my explanation of where the pain was coming from was fairly useless. The massage was still ok, but not as good as the one in Chinatown. I headed back up to the room and just wrote some blogs.