Singapore

We've been having a lovely time in Singapore.  It's not too hot, not too humid - so far there haven't been any torrential downpours.

One big advantage to this hotel is that it is very central.  Within easy walking distance of most things that we want to do.  And a five, ten minute walk from Suntec City, which is where the Hippo Duck tour people are, who I bought tickets from for things to do while we're here.  We did go slightly astray on our first morning, when heading to Suntec (I misunderstood the receptionist's directions) but fortunately we have a map which set us right - and took us past Raffles on our (amended) way!

So we spent the morning of Monday touring around Singapore on a hippo hop-on-hop-off bus (although we did no hopping). We walked to Plaza Singapura on Orchard Road in the afternoon and visited Build A Bear and had a humongous iced coffee. We found a supermarket and acquired some wine. And we had dinner in the Chinese restaurant at the Recreation Club. Rather more expensive than I was expecting, but also very good quality and very delicious.  And so to bed.

We seem to have moved more or less on to Melbourne time, though we are in fact in the same time zone as Perth. But we were ready for bed strangely early on Monday night and awake very early on Tuesday morning.  No worries.  We'll be in Melbourne on Thursday. Won't hurt to have acclimatized to Melbourne time in advance. And no one is inconvenienced by our sleeping and waking early except for perhaps us :-D

Yesterday we took a hippo coach to the zoo. And a very, very beautiful zoo it is too. It's in a remnant of a rainforest and almost entirely surrounded by water.  We rode on a boat and on a road tram. We walked and walked and walked and walked. We saw cheeky otters having their lunch. We had lunch!
(Not an ottery lunch - we had chicken and rice and soup in the human cafe). We saw loads of different monkeys, and lemurs, and orang utans. We saw elephants and lions and giraffes. We saw lots of things. And we saw mouse deer. MOUSE DEER!!!!!  I've been wanting to see mouse deer ever since I discovered their existence (not a long held ambition, I only found out that they existed about 18 months ago) and now I've seen lots. I've seen greater mouse deer and lesser mouse deer. And it seems they aren't deer at all but are more closely related to goats. They don't look like goats though. They look like deer

Lesser mouse deer

Greater mouse deer

There is a photo album for Singapore but I can't edit it properly on the ipad. I'll do it when I have access to a laptop or desktop computer. You'll all have to contain your impatience until then :-d

Oh. And it's very awkward trying to eat with chopsticks when you have a poorly finger tip on the middle finger of your right hand. I can't manipulate the chopsticks properly!!!

Last day here today. We checkout at mid day but our flight isn't until tonight. So we'll abandon our bags and go exploring along the river, I think. And then leap (or fly ) into another time zone