Of course, more pictures are on Flickr. After that we needed some feeding, and wandered back down into the Orchard Road area looking at restaurants. We eventually settled on a branch of California Pizza Kitchen, which I feel is kind of funny because I'm pretty sure I've never eaten at one in the US. Pizza in Japan is outrageously expensive (think $30 for a medium pizza) so we welcomed the more conventional toppings and better price of pizza in Singapore. I had a Mediterranean pizza crammed with toppings that cannot be had in Japan like feta and olives and it provided substantial satisfaction. Ana had pepperoni and appeared to enjoy it.
After that it was late enough that it wasn't worth making the trip out to the zoo as we'd been considering because it closes early, so we penciled that into an empty spot in our schedule for the next day and moved up something else we'd been planning on doing, which was testing out one of the many custom tailors advertised in all over the city and exhaustively in the tourist maps. Ana had a greater need for properly fitted shirts since I do pretty well off the rack so she was the test subject. It turned out that probably most of the tailors in the city all set up shop in the exact same mall, which has three floors that each have about as many tailors as they have all other stores combined. We walked around a couple of times checking out different stores, but mostly they looked pretty similar and tended to have really aggressive hawkers outside the door which was a little off-putting. We eventually opted for the shop with the most polite hawker and had a discussion with the proprietor about fabrics and styles and the fact that no, we do not need six of this particular shirt, thank you very much. Ana got a good collared button-down work shirt made up for her in a sort of plum purple light cotton fabric. We paid a little more than we'd been hoping to spend but half of the point was the experience and that we got. I'm sure it cost less than the same service would at home. They delivered it to the hotel less than 24 hours after we placed our order.
Now that we'd killed another hour or so and it was evening, the zoo was closed but their Night Safari, which is effectively a different zoo right next to the zoo, was opening. We deciphered the Singaporean bus system and took the bus out into the countryside to visit the Night Zoo. For those of you keeping track at home, this is at least the fifth zoo we've been to in the last two years. I'm happy to report that despite my being a little jaded as far as zoos go at this point, the Night Safari at the Singapore Zoo is pretty neat.
Animals in the Night Zoo, right before it got too dark to take (good) pictures
The main idea of the Night Safari is that a lot of animals that one might ordinarily see in the zoo pretty much sleep all day and then become active at night. Thus, the best time to view these animals would be at night, if one wanted to see something besides them snoring the day away. The whole zoo is only used at night, and features both walking trails between enclosures and a tram that goes along some routes not accessible on foot. We figured the tram for the coolest part and jumped on right after arriving for their first tram ride of the evening. The Night Safari is quite dimly lit over most of it, with just enough light to see the animals by provided in most areas. The tram operator did a pretty good job of telling the audience where to look to see the animals and giving out more details about them, but was somewhat afflicted with the surplus drama that most tram-voice-over providers have. Several people on the tram either disregarded the warnings against flash photography or failed to disable their camera flashes to the extent that they actually stopped the tram and came down the rows giving people a hard time about it as well they should. I don't like camera flashes and my eyes are presumably much less sensitive than those of nocturnal animals. Seriously, people, how many warnings can you legitimately not see and hear?
All that aside, the Night Zoo (and the Singapore Zoo, which we visit the day after this) had really well designed enclosures such that in many cases it looks like there is no boundary or barrier between you and the animals. In some cases, there truly isn't because they just train the animals not to leave a specified area and then trust the training to keep them in. The lions and tigers and whatnot have a moat and so forth, of course, but the zoo planners did a really good job; the whole place felt more natural, open, and flowing than any zoo I've ever been in. In addition to that, their selection of animals featured a lot of creatures that we've previously not seen in other zoos, creating a sense of newness that was somewhat lacking in the last two or three zoos we've visited.
The walking trails turned out to be even better than the tram. They were narrow, dimly lit, and twisted through the jungle between enclosures, with thick trees and bushes on both sides and overhead. It really added to the atmosphere to walk amidst greenery instead of along wide open concrete or brick, and there were enough twists and turns circling around that it felt more like exploring than going in the circular promenade that it actually was. We'd be walking through actual jungle (behind the zoo is protected rainforest) and then all of a sudden there would be some kind of crazy-looking wild pigs almost close enough to touch, or a giraffe all of fifteen feet away. Sometimes the walking trails actually went through the enclosures, such as the one with the flying squirrels (they dive-bombed the crowd in front of us before vanishing into the bushes) or the fruit bats. The fruit bats were enormous and would whoosh by, nearly invisible in the dark, and then we turned to look where they went they were literally within arm's length chowing down on a papaya or something. That's not something you see every day.
In time we'd peered at all the animals to our satisfaction and caught the bus back to the city to find some food. Reasoning that the riverside district would probably be a bit more active now than in the afternoon when we'd wandered by the first time, and that it was close to the hotel, we decided to go find a restaurant in there. Diving into the middle of it, we were confronted by so many choices that we had a lot of trouble picking one place out of the crowd*. Many of the venues were actually more like nightclubs and we didn't want that, and some places were too fancy for how we were dressed and feeling. We ended up hitting a Scottish pub basically out of not making a decision earlier and me being interested in taking a look at their whiskey list, which proved to be the second best I've yet seen. Ana had something called a Bloody Eyeball, which had a convincing simulacrum of same in the drink, and we had fried chicken in lieu of organ meats. I think that, as long as I live, it is not terribly likely that I will visit another Scottish pub with the walls all painted magenta. That's probably unique.
And that about wraps up this fine day in Singapore. The next blog post will cover eating at one world-class restaurant and one entirely pedestrian tourist trap, along with a visit to Singapore's other zoo.
*The place with the hospital theme, where all the chairs were exam chairs, the tables looked like surgical tables, the lights looked like surgical lights, the drinks came in test tubes or syringes (shots, hah!), etc, did not tempt us.
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