After a surprisingly long sleep for me, I ended up waking Karen at 7.20am to get ready for the day. After a good shower, we headed to breakfast, where we were once again greeted by name in the Club Lounge — this morning by Ivan. He was rather too attentive, and at one point I thought he might insist on spoon-feeding us.
We both allowed him to cook us an omelette, and he insisted on making Karen a “wellness” drink of cucumber, pineapple and something that sounded suspiciously like gravel. She said she could still taste it hours later. The omelette itself was small but perfectly formed.
After gathering our things from the room, we headed down to catch the 10am hotel shuttle to a downtown MRT station. The temperature was already 28°C, but it was sunny and, for now at least, not too sticky.
We were lucky enough to share the shuttle with some very important Chinese tourists — or at least I assumed they were very important, as they clearly felt important enough to push past us to get on the bus first, for no obvious reason at all.
The journey was longer than I expected, as we were the last stop at Outram Station. We worked out our route and line, then headed deep underground on long, steep escalators to await an impeccably clean train.
The journey itself was smooth and surprisingly long, with mobile signal the entire way. Eventually we arrived at Tanah Merah, where we found the bus stop and waited for Bus 2, which would take us to the helpfully named stop “Opposite Changi Chapel Museum” — our first destination of the day.
We had visited back in 2012, but I wanted to return as the building had been redesigned and my own knowledge of the war years here had grown considerably since then.
Entry cost roughly a fiver each. There was a steady stream of visitors, mainly Australian.
The walk-through exhibition was both interesting and poignant, and I took many photos for future research purposes. I was disappointed that Dad’s details didn’t appear on the large search screen, but I completed the online form to ensure they will be added in future.
We then visited the chapel itself. It’s worth noting that this is a replica (apart from the original donated Changi Cross at the altar), and the location is actually around five miles from the original site. While it is thought-provoking, it isn’t quite as moving as you might expect because of this.
What did move us was a wall where visitors with relatives who had been held captive there had left messages. Strangely, there were several messages addressed to someone called Robert Clare from his family. I wrote one for Dad and added it to the wall.
After a quick browse in the gift shop, we headed next door to The Bark Café. It was popular and very reasonably priced, even if they didn’t have Wi-Fi. Karen had a large beer, while I opted for a Coke Zero, accompanied by some garlic bread for a snack-like lunch. It was all rather pleasant, sitting in a Chinese themed outdoor café some 6,700 miles from home.
Getting there that morning had taken almost two hours by shuttle bus, train and then bus. We decided to splash the cash and get a Grab car (Singapore’s equivalent of Uber) to the ever-present Raffles Hotel. Our driver was talkative, and we had to assure him that we were neither rich nor wasteful enough to be staying there.
After wandering around the hotel grounds, we considered heading up to the Long Bar for a Singapore Sling. However, there was a queue, we’d done it twice before, the drink is eye-wateringly expensive, and neither of us actually liked it. We concluded that Karen would much prefer a bucketful of coffee.
We headed out in search of a nearby shopping mall, confident it would contain something suitable, and indeed it did — The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. It wasn’t great, but it was fine and did the job. Unfortunately, the only available tables were outside in the growing stickiness of the day. Until the caffeine kicked in, Karen was becoming decidedly tetchy thanks to jet lag, overheating, and an increasing concern about the rain that we could see — and feel — approaching.
Our walking destination a little way around was the Lavo restaurant at the very top of the Marina Bay Sands hotel, where I had made a reservation for 6.45pm today some weeks earlier. This was my cunning plan to avoid the $21 charge to go to the observation deck alone, while still allowing us to be up there at the right time to see the Rhapsody light show on one side, followed almost immediately by Spectra — the water and light show over Marina Bay — on the other.
It was quite a walk through a maze of underground shopping passageways to the Marina Bay Sands complex, but we arrived a full hour early, having narrowly avoided a torrential downpour while underground.
Being an hour early was too much even for me to chance blagging our way up, so we waited around for 30 minutes before trying. It was oddly satisfying to watch how many people were being turned away for not having made a reservation weeks in advance.
Thirty minutes early, we were finally in the elevator, being whisked up to the 57th floor. The views were magnificent. On check-in, we were congratulated on our wedding anniversary. Karen looked bemused but gamely played along. I had forgotten I’d ticked that box when booking and quietly hoped we might benefit from it somehow.
Lavo is a destination restaurant with a specified dress code, which we had made sure to comply with. You could tell that many people were there either celebrating a special occasion or on a date. The menu was very much at premium prices, but pleasingly the service — and indeed the food — matched that status. I had a carbonara, while Karen opted for a tomato-based pasta. You could really taste that the pasta had been freshly made that day.
We deliberately took our time, so we were still in the restaurant for the first display at 7.45pm. Karen was debating whether to order dessert when that decision was taken out of our hands, as a generous chocolate dessert arrived to share, complete with “Happy Anniversary” written on the plate. Given the size of the bill, I felt absolutely no guilt whatsoever about the small deception — especially as our actual anniversary had only been three months earlier.
The Rhapsody light and music display was very good from the vantage point high in the sky. The Spectra water and light show at 8pm, on the other side, was less impressive. There’s only so much you can do with fountains and lights, and perhaps this is one best appreciated from ground level rather than from 57 floors up.
After that, we headed back down to the lobby, where I decadently ordered a Grab to take us back to the hotel. It was a slightly hair-raising journey, with the driver seemingly attempting to travel in the slipstream of every moving object ahead of him.
Back in our room, we reflected that we’d had a full and fun day, and once again found ourselves saying yet again, “We do some stuff.”
Singapore is a great place for a short break — but the stickiness is something else entirely. The temperature hovers around a constant 30°C. How Dad and the other POWs survived with that on top of everything else, I will never know. The human spirit really is an extraordinary thing.
Karen also wondered aloud whether she could live long-term almost on the equator somewhere without distinct seasons and where sunset times vary by only about 30 minutes throughout the year.
