Day 2 – Singapore Sight Seeing
The plan for day 2 was simple. Go sight seeing. I bought an all day ticket from a travel agent in Chinatown Point for one of the many tourist buses that circle the city. Unfortunately by the time I walked outside with the plan of finding the closest bus stop where they stopped the rain had begun…… and it didn’t stop…… for most of the day.
On my walk through Chinatown, I met up with a group of French tourists from Paris. We talked for a little while about our visit so far then parted ways (we did run into each other a few times trying to walk avoiding the rain).
Eventually I found the bus stop I was searching for and waited for the Hippo Hop-on Hop-off bus to arrive. Unfortunately due to the rain it wasn’t feasible to sit on the open top roof of the bus, instead sitting inside was the only option. By this time it probably wouldn’t of mattered, I was soaked anyway from trying to cross the street in the rain.
The bus circled the city for about 20 minutes and finally stopped at the Suntec Centre, a large shopping/office building complex which was it’s home base.
I spent the next few hours walking around the shopping center trying to find lunch, see if anything was good to buy and so on.
I ended up doing a back and fourth through the whole center for about an hour looking for one shop to buy a gift for one of my friends back home.
After all the walking, and due to the rain, I took another hop-on, hop-off bus back which stopped near my hotel. From here I jumped off (almost got run over crossing the street) and went back to the hotel.
After arriving back at the hotel I decided to take some photos of the building before it got dark. Here is the Parkroyal on Pickering Street in all it’s glory.
I decided to try some asian food for dinner, so went to Din Tai Fung in Chinatown. This restaurant is very popular. Dinner was also very tasty, but was too much to eat.
After dinner I ventured to Little India to the Mustafa Centre. This is a massive “department store” which has many many levels and sells everything you can possibly think of. It’s also open 24/7 and even late at night has hundreds if not thousands of people milling around looking for a bargain.
As it’s Deepavali there are lights everywhere which are absolutely awesome to look at lined up down the street.
Here’s a video driving down Serangoon Road just for good measure.
After getting back to the hotel quite late I went for a final walk before settling in. I took the following photos of the hotel at night.
And here’s a timelapse of traffic at the corner of Pickering Street and South Bridge Road at 1am.
Have You Seen?
Day 2 – Exploring Singapore – YOU ARE HERE NOW
Day 3 – Singapore to Kuala Lumpur
Day 4 – Exploring KL and The Petronas Towers