Singapore: The Lion in the Jungle
The Gardens by the Bay, a mostly free public garden that’s become synonymous with Singapore.
Walking through the canopies of Singapore’s towering forests, it’s easy to forget that you’re in a city of 5.6 million, one that boasts the world’s sixth highest number of high-rises, and also one of the world’s busiest ports. The only reminders are the far-off condos that peek through the tree tops and the sleekly designed metal walkways under your feet, miraculously spotless and rust-free, despite snaking through miles of tropical jungle. Even in the middle of summer, it’s blissfully quiet. It’s a stark contrast to the city’s more well-known forest, the concrete and steel beauties that make up the Supertree Groves at the Gardens by the Bay. Those are stunning in their own right, but there’s something about being completely alone, surrounded by green as far as you can see, feeling like the last human on the planet.
This particular canopy walkway is just one of several located among Singapore’s many national parks and green spaces, connected by an intricate network of paved trails and over-engineered paths. Like much of the city, it’s the perfect marriage of modernity, nature, and aesthetic design, a study of contrasts and intentional urban planning that seems to exemplify Singapore. It’s a city that’s brutally efficient, with trains that are as plentiful as they are somehow always on time. And despite the humidity, everything is pristine, without a speck of rust or rain-battered paint in sight.
If there’s one singular illustration of Singapore’s ethos, it’s Changi International Airport, often touted as one of the best airports in the world. Walking through it, it’s easy to see why. Unlike many of the airports in the United States, which are bleak but necessary way points to somewhere better, Changi itself feels like a destination. In Terminal 2 alone, there’s an orchid garden with a koi pond, a gym, a free movie theater, a gaming center loaded with computers and consoles, and a sunflower garden where you can bask in the humid sunshine and watch the planes take off. Attractions and art installations frequently change, with new additions popping up every season. This year alone, travelers can look forward to a suspended trampoline walkway, a treetop canopy walk, a hedge maze, a mirror maze, and others. After 18 hours on an airplane, Changi feels like paradise.
From there, it’s an easy subway or taxi ride into the city proper. Cliched as it may be, we decided to make the Marina Bay Sands our home base for the next three nights. Built only nine years ago, it’s already one of the most recognizable fixtures in Singapore’s skyline, with its soaring towers and cantilevered space ship observation deck.
A view of the Marina Bay Sands hotel from the Chinese Garden inside the Gardens by the Bay. Along with rock and plant features chosen to invoke vignettes of Chinese landscapes, there’s also a thoughtful sculpture dedicated to the Chinese diaspora.
It’s a little on the pricey side, but since the rest of the trip was booked using a mashup of Star Alliance and Starwood points (scroll to the bottom for a rundown on how we leveraged points and patience to bankroll most of the trip), it felt like a worthy splurge. For first-timers, it’s definitely worth it, if even just for one night. There is little that compares to plunging into the iconic 490-foot infinity swimming pool, perched over 200 feet in the sky. Wading to the edge for the first time is a glorious, heart-pounding moment that’s worth the flight alone.
The stories are true—you definitely won’t be the only person trying to stage the perfect sunset shot at the edge of the famous Marina Bay Sands infinity pool. Luckily, the pool is massive, measuring well over the length of an American football field. And since it’s restricted to only guests of the hotel, there’s a natural cap on attendance. It helps that patrons are also overwhelmingly considerate, scattering once they nab their shot and making way for others. Everyone also dissipates once the sun sets, so it’s the perfect time to hang out by the edge and watch the lights go up one by one in the city.
For a truly peaceful experience, go to the pool when it opens at 7 am. For at least an hour, it’ll just be you and half a dozen other guests. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to watch the sun rise over the Gardens by the Bay and the Singapore Strait from the backside of the deck.
Another big upside to staying at the Marina Bay Sands is the convenience, especially if you’ll only be in Singapore for a few days. It’s conveniently located on top of the Bayfront Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) subway station, which services the Downtown and Circle Lines. The trains will give you easy access to just about anywhere you could want to go in the city, with clearly marked station signs and maps in English, Simplified Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. If you’re too exhausted from a day of sightseeing and eating, you can also just shuffle to the hotel’s massive, connected mall, which also contains convenience stores and a small grocer, as well as its own hawker center. The prices there are three-times higher than ones you’ll find elsewhere in the city, but the food is remarkably good quality, and it’ll do in a pinch when you just can’t walk another block.
The biggest draw is how close it is to the Gardens by the Bay, with traffic-free access either through the hotel’s skybridge, or the underground tunnel that also connects to the Bayfront station. It’s a walk you’ll want to take often, especially since most of the gardens are completely free and open 21 hours a day—and there’s nothing quite like laying under the flora-studded Supertrees that have become synonymous with Singapore. Those wanting to make a day of it can purchase entry into the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest, both of which are a welcome break from the humidity and well worth it even for those ambivalent about plants. The former is a massive greenhouse with changing displays focused on different plants and regions, while the latter is a towering, living mountain of tropical plants, continuously misted by the eponymous “clouds” and cut by a spiraling walkway that’s as visually stunning as the plants it was designed to view.
The largest of two Supertree Groves. While the OCBC Skyway that brings you eye-level with the tree tops has an admission fee, the groves themselves are free and open every day from 5am to 2am, as is most of the gardens.
Although simple in concept, the Cloud Forest is a highlight of the Gardens by the Bay. While the rare plants and orchids are beautiful, one of the best features is the walkway itself, which exemplifies the elegant, geometric design aesthetic seen throughout modern Singapore. The line to access the walkway can get a little long, but there are plenty of things to gawk at along the way.
Inside the Flower Dome, which at the time we were visiting was showcasing rare orchids and motifs inspired by Peranakan architecture.
In addition to those attractions, the Gardens by the Bay also hosts rotating art and flower installations, children’s play areas, and a variety of themed gardens and waterfront areas.
The Joy of Eating
If you’re anything like me, though, you probably came to Singapore to eat. It has a well-earned reputation as a foodie destination, thanks in large part to its positioning as the crossroads of Asia. As people came to the growing port city for work and trade, they also brought with them their culinary traditions. Now you can go to any hawker center (there are over 100 hawker centers, with tens of thousands of individual stalls) and sample dishes from every corner of the continent, often from recipes passed down through multiple generations. It also boasts a solid offering of homegrown Singaporean food, a unique cuisine with touches of Malay, Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, and Peranakan influences. Even the latter is a marriage of cultures, stemming from the early Southern Han Chinese people who settled along the Malaysian peninsula and surrounding areas. From this culinary mish-mash, there's face-meltingly good dishes that are Must Tries for any visitor, including chili crab—mud crabs stir-fried in a thick, peppery tomato sauce; a dazzling array of stir-fried noodles with flavor profiles ranging from tamarind to coconut; and Hainanese chicken rice—succulent poached chicken served alongside rice cooked in ginger, garlic, and chicken fat. Everything you try will become your new favorite food, and you’ll wonder how you’ll ever eat outside of Southeast Asia again.
Traditional breakfast of toast slathered with butter and kaya, a rich jam made with eggs and coconut. All of that is dunked into soft-boiled eggs, and complemented with a hot cup of coffee. Despite Singapore’s Asian and British influences, it’s very much a coffee country (although tea is plentiful). There’s a handful of microroasters where you can get your single-origin fix, but when you go to a kopitiam, you’ll likely get a version of the country’s signature brew, Robusta beans dark-roasted in butter (or lard) and sugar, and served with condensed milk or cream.
With a long list of foods to try, we set aside an entire day to saunter from one hawker center to the next, starting with the historic Lau Pa Sat (18 Raffles Quay). Built in 1894, it's one of the oldest Victorian buildings in Southeast Asia, which means you can slurp noodles while basking under soaring cast-iron columns older than the last six United States. Our morning started with a traditional breakfast of buttered kaya toast (Malaysian coconut egg jam) dipped in soft-boiled eggs, and washed down with a cup of hot kopi. Not content to stop there, we chased that with a steaming bowl of zhajiang mian (Beijing-style noodles with soybean paste) and fried spring rolls. With most dishes costing only a few dollars, there’s no reason to not pursue every craving that hits you as you prowl through the stalls.
From there, we headed to Amoy Street Food Centre (7 Maxwell Road), cooling down with freshly juiced sugar cane before lighting our tongues with bak chor mee—minced meat, fish cakes, fish balls, dumplings, and lettuce on a bed of egg noodles tossed in a spicy chili-vinegar sauce, served with a side of deeply fragrant meat broth. The stall we purchased it from, Ah Ter Teochew Fishball Noodles, is famous not only for its handmade fish balls, but amusingly, its handsome young chef, the third generation to run this stall. We were stuffed after that, but couldn’t resist the smells wafting from J2 Famous Crispy Curry Puff, and opted for an assortment of crispy, buttery pastries packed with different curries.
To get to our next stop, we took a detour to wander through the beautiful Telok Ayer district that still retains some of the original shophouses built in the 1820s. Like many parts of old Singapore, it has a checkered past, serving as the original Chinatown as decreed by the early British colonists. Despite British plans to segregate the various ethnic populations, Telok Ayer nevertheless cultivated diversity, as illustrated by the multiple houses of worship including mosques, Hindu temples, and Chinese temples. These still stand today, and together with the clay-tiled buildings in Telok Ayer, stand in stark contrast to the soaring skyscrapers that ring the neighborhood.
Determined to keep eating, we headed to Maxwell Food Centre (1 Kadayanallur St), home of one of the longest lines you’ll ever see for Hainanese chicken rice (Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice), although several other vendors in the center also serve perfectly delicious versions of the Singaporean staple. And with around 100 stalls, you certainly won’t run out of food options to sample. After our requisite chicken rice (Ah Tai), we opted for banana fritters, vermicelli and prawn soup, more sugar cane juice, and char kway teow, a stir-fried noodle dish ubiquitous in Southeast Asia.
You can spend a good hour or more rifling through the trendy boutiques on Haji Lane, sipping vibrant juice cocktails, or just checking out the street art.
With stars in our eyes and a metric ton of food in our bellies, we took a break from eating to cool off back at the hotel infinity pool, where daytime crowds are surprisingly scant. Fully rested, we hopped back on the blazingly efficient subway and made our way to Haji Lane. Famous for being one of the narrowest streets in Singapore, it is also one of the most photogenic, with classic Peranakan shophouses brightly painted in every color of the rainbow. Within the walls are boutiques, restaurants, jazz clubs, juice bars, and coffee shops—everything you’d want to make you skip down the streets, were it not for the throngs of visitors all equally enamored with the same things. It’s a fun way to while away a few hours, while seeking out pockets of air conditioning and tropical juice cocktails before ducking back into the sweltering heat.
A few more subway stops and you’ll be at the Singapore Botanic Gardens, itself worth an entire day of picnicking and meandering. Free to enter, this sprawling 160-year-old garden was dedicated a UNESCO World Heritage site five years ago, and is a popular spot for locals and tourists alike. Within its grounds are a bounty of tropical trees and plants, museums, lakes, and a fun assortment of feral animals, including red junglefowl and massive monitor lizards. We spotted the latter lounging comically close to the "Evolution Garden," a themed garden dedicated to educating visitors about the history of plant life on Earth. If seeing a living dinosaur near the primitive ferns was a little too on the nose, it didn't seem to notice or care.
Those keen on getting a peek at the lifestyles of the “crazy rich” can skulk around the perimeters of the park for glimpses of the Good Class Bungalows (GCBs) dotting the surrounding areas. A glance online shows these spacious, pool-bedecked, multi-storied, single-family homes go as high as $27 million USD.
One of the many lakes inside the Singapore Botanic Gardens’ lush grounds. Keep an eye out for six foot long monitor lizards, brightly colored birds, red-bellied plantain squirrels, and maybe even a hornbill or two.
At night, the Lau Pa Sat hawker center transforms into Satay Street, a chaotic explosion of sizzling meat and seafood, as dozens of vendors jostle with each other to sell skewers by the handful.
For the rest of us, there’s always the solace of more food. As night fell, we found ourselves back at Lau Pa Sat, which transforms at night into the tantalizingly nicknamed “Satay Street.” It’s not just a name—come evening time, dozens of satay vendors set up their stands along an entire city block outside the hawker center. As you wade your way through the hundreds of tables and chairs that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, hosts scurry to seat you in the sections in front of their carts, flagging over partnering hosts who will offer you frosty pitchers of Tiger Beer and dishes to complement your satay.
I’m sorry to report that if you’ve ever thought you’ve eaten good satay outside of Asia, you probably haven’t. Here, vendors expertly flip bouquets of lamb, beef, pork, chicken, and prawns over crackling charcoal flames until the entire block is permeated with the seductive smell of smoke and sizzling animal fat. Ordered in bountiful sets, the meat arrives at your table simultaneously crispy and impossibly juicy, kissed by the open flames that just can't be reproduced in most closed-air kitchens. Seasoned with blends of cumin and other spices, each stick will have you reaching desperately for the next one, even as your stomach begs you to stop. The only interruption is the other dishes you’ve ordered, including the famous chili crab that will make you wish you could bathe in the leftover sauce. If you’ve never been brought to near tears by food, Satay Street might change that.
The Southern Ridges
While Singapore is teeming with museums, gardens, and shopping malls, it’s also home to an impressive array of nature walks, including the one mentioned at the beginning of this post. Small as it is, Singapore boasts over 300 parks and four nature reserves, many interwoven among housing developments, residential areas, and commercial centers. If you’re looking for something that takes you off the beaten path and away from the crowds, the Southern Ridges trail system is a good place to start. Comprising over five miles of connected walkways, it links multiple parks with an assortment of trails, paved roads, and the canopy walks that this city loves so much.
We chose to start at Kent Ridge Park, which we found after a short subway ride and a trek through a peaceful residential neighborhood. Its trails will take you through a smattering of forests before depositing you at Hort Park, a unique park that combines educational facilities with art installations, design and horticulture exhibits, and themed gardens. There's also a decent “garden-to-table” French restaurant (Vineyard) that will serve you a decadent wild mushroom pizza while you try to stop sweating from the relentless heat. From there, it’s onto Telok Blangah Hill Park, which is home to a 0.8 mile forest walk that will take you eye level to the treetops. At the end, you'll find yourself on the iconic Henderson Waves bridge, a gleaming, undulating bridge that ripples through the forest like a post-modernist fever dream. From here, you can join the steadily increasing crowds to the top of Mount Faber Park.
Many of Singapore’s parks are connected by an intricate trail system of elevated walkways and paved paths.
Singapore in a nutshell.
The Henderson Waves. The inside is lined with curved slats of Balau wood that race along the structure like a churning river, which offers creative photo opportunities for the crowds that make the short trek from Mount Faber.
Here, the reverie ends. After a day of lazily wandering through forests, listening to birds and looking for monkeys, your only path forward is down. The fastest (and most expensive, but entertaining) way is by cable car, which takes you across the harbor and onto Sentosa. Depending on which side of the island you end up, you’ll either be on an exclusive island resort, or most likely, the Singaporean version of Universal CityWalk (complete with an actual Universal theme park). Here, money is king, and depending on how much you want to shell out, you can visit family-friendly attractions like water parks, artificial snorkeling ponds, indoor skydiving zones, aquariums, and a smattering of Western food chains. It's a vaguely soulless monument to Western consumerism, though that’s an admittedly biased view coming from an American with copious access to similar things.
One fun free attraction is the largest Merlion statue in Singapore. It’s not The Merlion statue, which stands guard over Marina Bay, but it’s good for a photo opp. Part lion, part fish, the merlion is the official mascot of Singapore. It embodies the city's history as a fishing village, as well as its original Malay name, Singapura, which means "lion city." Merlion statues can be found all over Singapore, and feature prominently on merchandise as well (even Funko Pops). When you’re done wandering the area, you can hop on the immaculate subway and head home. Unsurprisingly, the food court near the train station is also chock full of tasty and affordable options, including hot pot stalls where you can pile a giant bowl full of fresh meats, seafoods, and vegetables for the vendor to cook for you.
The Supertree Grove at night. Keep the mosquitos at bay with Tiger Balm mosquito repellent patches, and enjoy the view.
Since it was our last night in Singapore, we felt we had to go back to the Gardens by the Bay for one last stroll. If you get there in time, you can catch the nightly light and music show in the Supertree Grove, where colorful lights pulse to the beat of whatever themed music is being blared out of the sound system. It sounds a little cheesy, but it’s a captivating experience, and you’ll find yourself happily clapping along with a bright-eyed crowd of visitors, cheering on a grove of inanimate objects. Afterwards, the trees stay lit, so you can lie down underneath their twinkling canopies and soak in the atmosphere, already planning your next visit back.
When I first announced that I was going to Singapore, a few of my friends told me to not bother spending more than a few days there. Now, I can’t possibly imagine spending less than a week there, maybe more. It’s a spellbinding city, full of kind people, gorgeous public spaces, and a dazzling array of food. There are undoubtedly problems hidden underneath its shiny exterior—the country has a widening income gap, with 73% of Singapore’s wealth owned by only 20% of the population—but as a tourist, you likely won’t have the privilege of digging deeper into the “real” Singapore, whatever that may mean. The closet you’ll get is its vibrant street food scene, where young and old, rich and poor gather together to celebrate the tapestry of cultures that weaves the country together. Frankly, you could spend an entire week doing nothing but eating street food and strolling through Singapore’s parks, and you’d still never get enough.
Pointers (a.k.a. Getting Here and Traveling S.E. Asia on Points)
One of the reasons we chose to use Singapore as our jump-off point for Southeast Asia (we also spent time in Malaysia, hopping from Penang to Langkawi to Kuala Lumpur—stay tuned for those posts!) is because there was a killer deal for points on United Airlines. As I scrolled through the awards calendar, I spotted a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Singapore in United Airline’s Polaris business class for 75,000 points. There’s different ways to value points, and different philosophies on how people should spend their points, but essentially, it’s a $3,000 plane ticket for roughly $750, assuming a $0.01/mile ratio. So I methodically searched through the calendar until I found two seats at that price, and jumped on it.
With the exception of our stay at the Marina Bay Sands and our transportation between destinations (some of the flights were only $30!), we paid for everything with years worth of hoarded credit card points, or a combination of points + cash—but only if the math made the latter worthwhile. This meant we could spend our money on other things (mostly food and a couple of splurges, like a hand-drawn pandan leaf spa bath in Langkawi and a tasting menu overlooking the Andaman Sea), but still live in luxury for our honeymoon. Having the Chase Sapphire Reserve card also gave us access to airport lounges participating in Priority Pass, which let us take a much-needed post-flight shower in Changi Airport, or get tipsy during our Taipei layover on the way home.
