During the rest of our time in Singapore we paid for two of the big attractions; namely a day at Universal Studios Singapore and a night Safari at the zoo.
First up was the day Zoe had been so excited about and I was mildly looking forward to, not being a massive fan of theme parks.
We made our way across nice and early and collected the reduced prices tickets I had managed to find without any issues. We were about 45 minutes early so actually one of the first in the queue for the gates opening.
They did a bit of crowd work, getting everyone excited about it opening and offered some skip the line passes for the person making the most noise. Needless to say the little gobby welsh lady I was with won it.
Zoe and Sue weren’t keen on doing the big rides as they said no glasses so I went on the two battlestar galactic rides by myself. It’s the worlds tallest duelling rollercoaster and I managed to bag front seats on both of them due to being early.
I haven’t been to a proper theme park for probably twenty years but those two rides reminded me how terrifyingly brilliant they can be. The Ceylon ride especially was terrifying with five separate upside down inversions and two plunged into dark foggy pits.
I did manage to get Zoe on the mummy returns ride which wasn’t advertised as being that bad but was of a similar vain to the others, only mostly in the dark with crazy and scary light effects. Needless to say she screamed for the entire time and wanted to get off after about 20 seconds.
Much more her cup of tea were the 4D Shrek adventures, the meet and greets with various characters, sesame street live stage show, the enchanted rollercoaster and the Jurassic park rapids (I got soaked)
On one such meet and greet with the cast from Madagascar we had our picture taken with them, whilst Gloria the hippo rubbed my stomach and implied I was as fat as her which was mildly insulting.
Around midday we went to watch the Waterworld where they said you would get wet if you sat in certain seats. It was absolutely baking hot by this point so we sat in the seats were you would get wet thinking it would be a nice gentle shower.
Before it started they were messing around getting the crowd going etc etc. I normally don’t bother getting involved with that type of organised fun but I was actually joining in making the noises and clapping along.
The main orchestrater of this then picked me out of probably 500 people in the entire crowd and claimed I wasn’t joining in enough so dramatically picked up a bucket of water and stood over me with it, whilst everyone laughed. I thought he was taking the piss and getting a cheap laugh – but he then proceeded to empty the entire thing over me, completely soaking me through. I managed to move my phone out of the way so no harm done and it was a way to cool down I guess.
We literally stayed in the park all day, from opening till just before closing and I am not sure 8 hours has ever gone quite so quickly before. We didn’t manage to do everything even with the skip the line passes Sue won and we only had a small gap in the middle to quickly eat some overpriced fast food.
Zoe has now turned her attentions to Disneyland Shanghai which if planning goes our way we should be doing on her actual birthday.
The rest of our time was spent doing a number of other delightful touristy things like messing with the Merlion statue and Marina sands from distance and spending time at Marina Barrage, all enjoyable and all wonderfully free.
Universal studios managed to somehow injure my leg so I spent the last two days hobbling round which did curtail the fun alittle and meant that we didn’t get to the tree top walk we had originally planned.
We did to a certain degree enjoy watching the spectacular Marina sands light show from across the water but having been spoilt by the UAE’s efforts it didn’t really get any pulses racing.
On our last night in the country we went to the night safari and the new Lumina attraction at Singapore zoo. Again having been spoilt with a number of actual safaris we were all alittle disappointed with this version of essentially sitting on a tram being driven through the darkened enclosures of the nocturnal animals.
You couldn’t see a lot of the attractions that were claimed due to the fact, that you know, it was dark.
Potentially we would have had more fun if we had wandered around more but with my leg still giving me grief and with the time ticking away no one in all honesty put up much of a fight to leave.
We all enjoyed the Lumina attraction, located next door, much more which made use of the actual zoo at night by lighting it in a variety of clever and engaging ways but I particularly still felt it was a bit of a let down considering the price and the reputation it has gathered since opening in June.
During our time here many a random food was tried including ice Kacang a traditional shaved ice desert with sweet corn, cubes of jelly, condensed milk and red kidney beans. It tasted like you imagine it tasted.
In other food news our hotel smelt like a mild Chinese restaurant in the morning due to the proximity of our room to the restaurant; it was very strange to wake up to a gingery garlic smell every morning.
Hopefully China doesn’t smell quite like that, which we will be able to tell you as we finally got our Chinese visas! (Despite a last minute panic about actually paying for them) Whoop Whoop.
So on Friday (the 18th) we are off to China and I am really looking forward to it – after the issues in the process I hope it proves to be worth it. With that settled we have firmed up the number of days in Japan (16) and almost Taiwan (15) and now we can look to organise the Australia (Christmas) / New Zealand side of things.
Good job we have a 12 hour trip with a wonderful 5 hour layover in GuangZhou airport to plan things out.
The Jude's Wanderlust 