The last week of our trip we spent in Singapore. It was fantastic. Singapore is a beautiful city with interesting architecture and gardens all over. We stayed at the Marriott South Beach and the hotel was pretty good but we probably wouldn’t choose to stay here on a future trip.

We took a big bus tour to get an overview of the city. I have pretty low expectations from these tours but included with our ticket was a night tour- and the night tour was pretty good. It took us to the bay to watch kite flyers, we had some street food and found a spot to watch the light show at Gardens by the Bay.

We spent a few days exploring Gardens by the Bay. It’s an amazing park full (botanical garden?) of flowers and trees of all kinds. They have a couple of huge greenhouses, the Flower dome and the Cloud forest. The Flower dome was full of live flowers in artistic arrangements. The Cloud canopy was a replication of tropical highlands and the flora you’d find as you rose in elevation complete with fog and waterfalls. They had an Avatar attraction during our visit and there were statues of flora and fauna from the movie scattered around. We also spent a lot of time in the Orchid house which was also a fantastic garden. In the middle of the park they built these ‘supertrees’ which roughly resembled trees with solar panels. Based around the trees is the nightly light show which we viewed during our visit here and also during the night tour.

We also went to the zoo for the River Wonders and Night Safari. River Wonders is a part of the zoo dedicated to rivers of the world and many of the critters found near them. We saw manatees (for the first time) as well as a lot of other interesting wetlands animals. They have a pretty nice boat ride that takes you through a number of exhibits (that you can ride multiple times). They also have pandas and red pandas. The Night Safari was also pretty great. The animal enclosures have very minimal fencing, so it feels like there are few obstructions between you and the exhibits. There were even a few animal enclosures you could walk through like the bat exhibit with the Malayan Flying Fox with a wingspan of around 5 feet.

Another place we went to was Haw Par villa. This park was basically a precursor to theme parks with dioramas and statues depicting scenes from Chinese mythology, folklore, legends, and history. We stopped at Maxwell center for chicken and rice in a clay pot from a michelin listed food stall. Naturally, a stop at Raffles hotel for a Singapore Sling was also a necessity.

Overall, Singapore was a wonderful city to visit and we would love to go back someday.