Tioman Island To Singapore
I hopped on the first ferry at 730 am from Tioman Island but the schedule changes with the tide. The tide isn’t the issue round Tioman, it’s getting back up the river to the ferry dock in Mersing. If the tide is out the big boats can’t get up river so always check with your bungalow owner or find a reliable source or schedule that follows the tide. It was a Saturday morning and the weekend was underway with the Malays and folks from Singapore coming in droves. They would all be leaving tomorrow but this morning the ferry was almost empty on the way back to Mersing. I was on my way to Singapore and a bus was the easiest way to get there. I was told Transnational bus line is the simplest way to go but I didn’t see their bus so I just hopped on one heading for Johor Baru, JB. In JB you run through Malaysian Immigration and catch a second bus for 3.30 Malaysian Ringgit to take you through Singapore Immigration and on to your final destination bus stop at Queens Market basically between Little India and old Chinatown. There are a few guesthouses about but nothing real cheap. I paid 40 Singapore dollars/night for a light blue cell with no windows and air-con. The Hawaiian Hostel boasts the cheapest prices in town but that is not particularly true. http://www.hawaiihostel.com.sg. The one great thing about the HH was its location at 171-B Bencoolen St. between Bugis and Rochor subway stops on the inner city line that connects to all the other lines. There is a free breakfast of toast and tea/coffee but I just had tea and went out into the heat. There hasn’t been much rain in the last two months so things are a little tense. Many of the freshwater fish farmers throughout Malaysia and Singapore have basically run out of water or been advised to move their fish cages into deeper water if they have that option.
The bus ride down was basically void of jungle and animal habitat and replaced with Palm Oil plantations. Including the ferryboat, bus transfers, immigration and I arrived in about 8 hours from Tioman Island to Singapore and cost a total of 75 MR/$25 USD.
Lucky for me I have a few friends living in Singapore, an Indonesian woman I met in Thailand, a Scotsman I met in Kuala Lumpur, and a woman I grew up with and her husband. On the corner of Bencoolen St. and Rochor Canal St. there is a massive electronics and photography building advertising Nikon, Cannon, and so forth but the prices were higher than KL, even though it’s a ‘duty-free’ island, so I didn’t buy anything but another memory card. I was in the market for a new underwater camera.
I walked into a gourmet shop below the Hawaiian Hostel looking for tea, brown sugar and milk for tea when I noticed rounds of Brie and Camembert cheese for cheap and couldn’t get passed the refrigerator door without opening it. Cheese is by far my biggest weakness and when all you’ve had is some local form of Velveeta for the past few years it’s even more difficult to get passed the door. Once I broke I looked for crackers, grapes, apples and a bottle of wine. At the counter the woman pointed up the road to the next block and told me there was a bakery there so off I went for bread. The evening was shaping up into a light dinner and a movie and that suited me just fine.
I only planned to see friends and spend 3 nights in Singapore and there were only a few things I wanted to do; 1) Go to the world renown zoo, 2) visit the Botanical Gardens, and 3) possibly get to the Art & Science Museum down near the main harbor area.
I went to the zoo the next day via the Singapore Rapid Transit, the initials are MRT and I don’t remember why. The zoo is a little ways out of town and can take an hour to get to from downtown. The MRT gets you to a bus terminal where you look for the 138 and hop on that and go for another 45 minutes, depending on traffic, and it takes you to the zoo entrance.
The Singapore zoo is vast and the engineers and designers did a great job replicating some of the animal areas. Some of the animals seem to be roaming basically free in the treetops with rope walkways, sleeping nets, and towers for the Orangutans. Lots of large birds seem to be nesting and flying freely overhead and that still puzzles me.
I’m not a big zoo person for the very reason that animals are taken from their natural habitat and put in a zoo for our entertainment and curiosity, but still, they are captives and don’t interact as they would in the wilds. I took the walk around the circuit and that took about three hours not including a break for a smoothie and a lite lunch. I did see some beautiful animals and the zoo is massive. I could have spent a lot more time there with some of the other zoo options available but I just paid the basic ticket price of 35 MR. There are actually other attractions and ways to get around the zoo besides walking; they offer guided tours, shuttles for those who don’t want to walk and connections to other areas of the zoo such as a river safari, a lake tour, etc.
The Australian section was closed for renovation.
I returned for a shower and caught up with my friend Anna whose boss gave her two vouchers for the movies. We went out for a beer and I signed my latest book for her. We watched ‘Eye In The Sky’. I hadn’t been to a movie theatre in a long time and the air-con was turned way down so we all froze. Anna curled up in a ball in her seat and the cold kept me awake. The movie was okay and the company outstanding. We made plans to meet up the next day and go for a wander through the Botanical Gardens and Anna made a picnic lunch that was over and above the call.
The botanical gardens are huge and you certainly don’t feel like you’re in a booming metropolis. Lots of birds calling in the trees, turtles watching you warily from the middle of the several ponds and lily exhibits, butterflies flitter in every direction, and everything is peaceful. There are many tour groups heading in and out of the popular orchid garden. Many local people use the gardens for exercise or find a nice quiet bougainvillea covered gazebo to read a book out of the sun.
The Botanical Gardens are pretty old and the trees are mature. I wandered through the gardens back in 1989 on my way through Singapore. Much has changed in Singapore but not so much in the gardens, the trees are just bigger and more variety. I’m curious how many gardeners it takes to keep the gardens maintained.
I met up with a friend I grew up with and her husband. They had lived in South Korea for some time in the past and that was the last place I had seen her. It had been at least two years and here we both were in Singapore. They made a reservation at the American Club and had dinner and discussed the up coming election in the U.S. We also touched on Singapore and how it, as a country, has run out of room for growth. The only way they can grow now is demolish buildings and move businesses around for a more compact arrangement, it’s a lot of money but investors seem to find value in the practice.
We all said our good-byes and off we went back to our paths. It was great to see everyone. The Scot and I didn’t get a chance to meet up and we should have. I take the blame because I don’t have a smart phone to make contact when I go out. I could have easily sent him a message to meet me at the Drunken Poet, a British style sports bar with Guinness down the street from the Orchid MRT stop and below the movie theatre I had gone to the night before. Next time.
I was actually looking forward to getting back to KL to buy a new camera and to get sorted for my adventure. I didn’t need much and I knew I’d be spending some time doing a little triage with my belongings, throwing out more clothes to make room for the camera and keeping the weight of my bag down below 15 kilos.
I took the bus back across the Malay border in reverse and headed for KL. The bus terminal is out of town but connects to the KL rail system so it was easy to get into town and back to the Travel Hub. I had two nights before I was scheduled to fly to Sorong, Papua New Guinea via, Jakarta and Makassar, catch a ferry to Raja Ampat and a ride out of Saiway to the Wicked Diving Resort for five days of diving before hopping on a boat and sailing and diving for 19 days back south to Komodo Island and the Indonesian Island chain.
I bought an Olympus ‘Tough’ and an underwater casing at the Low Yat Electronics Plaza. I’ll let you know how it goes on the 21st.
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