Gardens by the Bay

Last Thursday Will and I had a good wander around one of Singapore's newer attractions, 'Gardens by the Bay'. It's a huge complex, basically a botanical garden with a big emphasis on resource management and sustainability. It has 2 big biomes, similar to the Eden Project in Cornwall, England. The big steel tree-like structures are called 'super trees' and a few of them you are able to go inside. Unfortunately the skywalk that you can see in the pic below was closed due to the threat of lightning. We had some torrential tropical monsoon showers when we were in the biomes.

The cloud forest biome was our favourite. It was based around a huge big multi-levelled waterfall that you walked in and around. The scale of the place had to be seen to be believed. As you got higher and higher the plant life represented what would be found at that altitude in the rainforest.

The flower dome wasn't quite so spectacular for us. However that's possibly because a lot of the plants featured we grew in our garden! I guess if you lived in a typical Singaporean high-rise apartment, plants like roses, geraniums, fuchsias etc would be pretty exciting! The succulents section was pretty cool though.

That night Warren and Norsh met us at our Chinatown hotel and we wandered down to a restaurant for crispy duck pancakes. A few weeks before leaving on our holiday I had started browsing the Singapore GroupOn voucher deals. I found one for a whole duck for 2 people, half-price. Warren and Norsh also bought one, so we had a nice meal out.

After dinner we walked it off with a big long walk, eventually ending up at the Marina Bay Sands area which you can see lit up below.

I had to take a photo of the 'Merlion' statue, lit up like a Christmas tree. A cross between a mermaid and a lion, it must be one of the more bizarre national symbols!

We made it to Marina Bay Sands just in time to catch the nightly light and sound show. This was pretty hard-case. They project a show onto a really fine mist from fountains in the marina. It also involved huge bubble machines! I took some video on my phone, but here is a really good quality version I found on YouTube. There are also a few pics below. 

The next day we were off to Thailand for five nights of serious R&R.