To Singapore and Beyond

It was a good idea to stop over in Singapore on the way to Europe.  The plane trip was relatively brief - our good friend Derek dropped us at Tullamarine quite early in the morning (thanks again, Derek!) and our flight departed on schedule at 10:00am.  When we arrived in Singapore it was hot and humid, as we expected it would be, but we took a taxi to the hotel and quickly showered and changed and headed out into it. 

Having visited Singapore before, we had no particular agenda, but it was good to see it again because so much of the landscape had changed since our most recent visit, just two years ago.  That's the thing about Singapore - it's always vibrant and changing.  Building sites seem to be fully operational 24/7 and there is always something new rising up out of the depths of excavation.  Workers in gangs are still hard at it late into the night under floodlights, and we even witnessed the beginning of a fresh concrete pour close to midnight as we returned home from our late evening out.

A definite highlight of this stopover was our visit to the Marina Bay Sands complex.  You might have seen photographs of this staggeringly beautiful building, as it has taken modern architectural engineering to a whole new level and its construction has been well publicised.  We had seen photos and even a doco on the building of it, over several years and finished fairly recently.  It is a building consisting of three towers with an extraordinary construction joining them on top - it looks very much as though an aeroplane has landed across the top of the buildings and is just lying atop them.  I don't think there is anything else like it anywhere in the world.  We took the elevator to the Observation Deck, right at the top, where you can get a 360 degree view of Singapore - an extremely impressive sight in itself.  It is such a built-up city of skyscrapers, and there is a mind-boggling number of shopping centres to be discovered and enjoyed, each one more magnificent than the last.

Anyway, our stopover came to an end with the arrival of the airport shuttle, 36 hours post our arrival, and after a really lovely sojourn in Singapore, a little mini-holiday if you will, it was time to embark on our REAL adventure, Europe!

D1 (Debbie)