Return to Orchard Road
After spending a week exploring the island of Phuket on-foot and by motorcycle, the day fast approached when we were going to have to head back to Japan.
Early on Thursday morning, while I was dreaming of
sand, sun, beach, bikinis, authentic looking fake Prada,
Burberry, Chanel and Lo
uis
Vitton bags, and cocktails by the pool, when the wake-up call came.
Within an hour, the mini-bus would arrive to begin the first leg of our
13-hour overland journey back to Singapore. After our last
breakfast, we piled into a mini-van stuffed with eleven foreigners all
heading
to different destinations in Thailand and Malaysia.
We left the resort at 8:00am and were only two hours into our trip when Thailand's infamous rainy season finally caught up with us. Giving up reading, I turned towards the window and watched as motorcycle riders took cover under bridges and palm tree leaves bowed to the onslaught of rain. By the time we arrived at our first changing spot in Krabi, I was pretty much content with the driver's skills and the other passengers in the car.
Two minutes after we transferred to a new mini-bus
however, the fairytale ended abruptly with the hacking coughs of a new
passenger. I opened my eyes from a light doze and I skipped right
from the thought of catching a cold or the flu to SARs. I
can't read Chinese but I'd been in Asia long enough to recognize that the
coughing woman's husband was reading Hong Kong newspaper. My sistah-friend
must have been reading my mind cause two seconds after I opened my eyes,
she was passing back a small while packet. Not giving a second
thought to the looks of envy or irritation, we put on our face masks and I
for one started praying. I'd seen what the medical services in
Thailand looked like and I had no aspirations to be quarantined in a Singapore hospital.
We wore our masks from the border of Thailand down to Singapore. Even managed to scare a border guard as we went through Malaysian customs. Just glad the man didn't have a gun because I'm sure I
looked like
something out of a horror B-movie. If I had known that the mask helped battle the stench from the nightmarish toilets, I would have during the first trip to Bangkok.
Our last day of vacation ended on a
nice note.
Singapore, a modern
city-state with over 3.5 million
people. Our first stop in Southeast Asia and the last stop before the
plane ride home at 6:00am on a Saturday morning. After checking into
the hotel and jumping into the shower, we spent Friday
walking around while trying to stay dry from the intermittent rainstorms.
We looked for a for some signs that Singapore was like it's Japanese
counterpart and were pleasantly surprised that it has earned it's reputation
of being a clean and beautiful city.
Blue
skies and pristine air met with clean streets
skyscrapers, enormous shopping
malls, tree lined motorways and gigantic blocks of
apartment building, only dispersed by beautiful
parks, open courtyards, and some magnificent
colonial buildings.
After exploring Orchard Road, the upscale shopping district and fast paced International center of Singapore during the day, we had a nice dinner and that night took a bus to experience the famous Night Safari, I'd heard so much about.
For over two hours, we
explored the many acres of wildlife from the comfortable seats of a slow
moving tram or an up close and no bars point of view as we walked along the
trails. In the midst of a tropical rainforest in the middle of the
night it's easy to forget that we were in a city. From just over the
top of a waist high bush, I watched hyena's playing tag, Asian elephants
eating some of their hundreds of pounds of dried grass, a horned bongo
licking its baby, lions rolling over in the dirt and a rhino chilling
in a small pond. Saw the pythons, cooed at the sloth bear, ogled the
gazelles and waved at the lemurs, but didn't go nears the bats. Yeah,
they were the no-flying type but a girl can never be to careful...
