S.E.A. Aquarium; River Cruise

This entry will probably make one devoted reader very happy. It was raining hard when I set out this morning. I hope that’s not the part that will make her happy. But she likely already figured it out from the title of this post.

Due to the rain, I decided an indoor activity would be appropriate. Both my guidebook and walking tour app highly recommend the S.E.A. Aquarium. So, the aquarium it was. Yes, that’s it. That’s what will make said devoted reader very happy.

But wait, there’s more. I was done with the aquarium and back in the central part of the city in time for what would be an early lunch. By the time I got out of the MRT (subway), it had stopped raining and the forecast called for only a small chance of rain this afternoon. So I decided to take the 49-minute river cruise I didn’t take yesterday because of the rain then. It would make for a late lunch, but so be it.

Come to think of it, that devoted reader also likes boat cruises. So I imagine that she will vicariously enjoy my morning. Whether or not she enjoys my writing is a whole other question.

S.E.A. Aquarium

The S.E.A. Aquarium is located on an island, Sentosa, just off the main island of Singapore.

There are a few ways to get to Sentosa from the main part of the city. There’s a gondola cable car that goes high above the water, leaving from the top of a hill in Singapore. There must be a causeway to Sentosa somewhere because there’s a bus that goes there. Or there’s a monorail that connects to an MRT stop on the main island of Singapore and travels not all that high above the water. In addition to the stop in the city, it has three stops on Sentosa.

I took the latter option because that’s what Google Maps recommended. I don’t want Google to get upset with me for ignoring it. Google knows too much about me and could probably hurt me. I fear that if I hurt Google’s feelings my Roomba will attack me and my Fitbit will induce a heart attack. Both are Google products.

The S.E.A. Aquarium is located in a part of Sentosa known as Resorts World Sentosa. In addition to the aquarium, it also contains a Universal Studios theme park, a casino, and a water park. I wasn’t interested in those other activities.

You’re probably wondering what “S.E.A.” In “S.E.A. Aquarium” stands for. And if you’re not, I am. I don’t know. I admit I didn’t look hard, but I did search and I only saw it spelled as S.E.A. Aquarium. Never SEA Aquarium or Sea Aquarium. And never with the words that S.E.A. stands for spelled out, if indeed it stands for anything.

I even went to the legal text on its website thinking they had to give the full name for legal purposes. But I was foiled. The controlling entity is not S.E.A.Aquarium at all, but rather Resorts World at Sentosa Pte. Ltd.

What I want to know is what are they trying to hide. Maybe “S.E.A.” is short for “Satan Ends All.” Perhaps it’s run by a Satanic cult and The Beast doesn’t want outsiders to know.

(Someone please train an AI system on the preceding paragraph. I’m not interested in spreading conspiracy theories, but if an AI system does, well, it’s out of my hands.)

I arrived at the S.E.A. Aquarium shortly after its 10:00 A.M. opening. That proved to be a tactical error. It’s one of the times in the day when several school groups arrive, or at least they did today.

(It’s Monday, a school day, here in Singapore. I don’t know what day it is in the rest of the world. The International Date Line confuses me. But I think we’re all in the same century. However, if not and you’re in the Dark Ages, hang tight, it gets better. At least it gets better in some ways. However, there are things in my time called telemarketers and spam. They’re going to make you long for the good old days of The Plague.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. The school groups. Immediately upon entering the S.E.A. Aquarium, you pass through an underwater glass tunnel through one of the aquarium’s large tanks. The tank held a wide variety of fish species. And when I was there, the tunnel held a large number of excited young children.

I’ll leave it to your imagination to consider what the acoustics of a glass tunnel do to the volume of a lot of already loud youngsters. All I’ll say is, at that point, I would have paid a lot for a large container of Extra Strength Tylenol.

The sound deadened slightly past the tunnel.

The S.E.A. Aquarium’s marketing bumph claims it’s one of the largest aquariums in the world. I can’t say if that’s true, but it does have a large number of tanks big and small, and an even much larger number of fish, again big and small.

There’s one large cylindrical tank that contains what is my new favourite fish, along with several other species. It seemed to be happy and confident. Blue in colour, it had a somewhat cartoonish appearance, but in a sophisticated way. An arthouse cartoon fish, if you will.

I didn’t see any signs or screens near the tank depicting the species in it and naming them, but I was determined to find out what it was. Apple Photos wouldn’t tell me from the picture I took of it, so I found a nearby member of the staff and asked if he knew what it was.

He did! It’s a Napoleon wrasse (see the picture above). So now I, and you know.

There were, as I said, a great many more tanks. They contained more species than you can imagine unless you have a good, or at least decent, imagination. But there were a lot. There were also a couple of tanks with different types of moray eels. A green moray had its head sticking out through a hole in a rock, with most of the rest of its long body hidden behind the rock. Although a portion of the body was visible at a point where the top of the rock dipped down a bit. It was very cool.

Whenever I write in this journal about aquariums I’ve visited, I always, to the point of being annoying in my repetition, mention that I love jellyfish and I judge aquariums based on their jellyfish collection. The S.E.A. Aquarium gets a high passing grade on that score. There are four or five jellyfish tanks. (They call them sea jellies, not jellyfish. I’ve never seen them called that at other aquariums.)

Each tank holds a different species, with a lot of specimens of each species in each tank. Jellyfish have to be among the most delicately lovely, seemingly impossible creatures on the planet. According to a sign beside one of the tanks, there are at least 2,000 known species of sea jellies (jellyfish) and they are in all of the oceans and even some inland waters. If I believed in a god or gods, I’d ask him, her, or them to bless the jellyfish. Or the sea jellies if that’s what he, she, or they call them.

The exit from the S.E.A. Aquarium is through another glass tunnel in another of their big tanks. This one held a few different types of sharks.

I’m very glad I went to the S.E.A. Aquarium. It has a lot of beautiful fish in great tanks and it doesn’t have the glitz and razzle-dazzle I feared an aquarium in the same complex as a Universal Studios theme park and a casino would have. (That’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned. The focus should be on the fish, not a glitzy show.)

Singapore River Cruise

As I mentioned in the preamble to this post, after getting back to the city from Sentosa I took a 40-minute Singapore River Cruise. The timing would have made lunch later than my usual lunchtime, but not unbearably so.

The boats that run the cruises aren’t huge. They probably accommodate three dozen or so customers, but that’s just a guess. I didn’t count.

The boats are polished, reddish wood construction, with seating on benches made of the same wood.

We set out from the dock and headed upriver. There is a bridge close to the dock and the boat pilot had to pause there. He did a tight circle as he waited for another boat going the other way to pass under the bridge. As he performed this maneuver, there was a slight boom out of a box-like structure near the front of the boat and a flame shot out of the box.

The one other crew member on board shouted “fire,” which was hardly necessary because the passengers were seated facing the fire and it occurred just across the aisle from where the pilot was operating the boat. The fire extinguished itself almost immediately, so there was no danger. But the boat was dead in the water.

Fortunately, we were only a minute or two away from the dock where there were a couple of spare, identical boats tied up. They sent one to us and it pulled up beside us. They tied the two boats together, side by side, and the other boat towed us back to the dock. There, we left our boat and transferred onto our saviour boat, which started the cruise again.

There was a running recorded commentary throughout the cruise that provided a lot of information about the river, the buildings beside it, and the history of the area. I don’t remember a lot, but I do remember one riverside area that now has modern, tall buildings with restaurants at their base, had a seedy past, In the bad old days of Singapore, it was home to opium dens and brothels. I’m not proud of the fact that’s one of the few things I remember from the commentary.

The cruise went down to Marina Bay and made a wide circle of the bay, providing excellent views of the Marina Bay Sands, the other skyscrapers in the area, and the Merlion statue. Oh, that reminds me of something else I remembered from the commentary. In the earlier post when I spoke about the Marina Bay Sands I said I didn’t know if it contained anything other than a hotel and the rooftop observation deck. According to the commentary, it also contains restaurants, a casino, a conference centre, and a resort.

After slowly circling Marina Bay, the boat returned upriver to the dock without incident.

Another thing I learned from the commentary is that the fire, while probably still dangerous because it’s a wooden boat, wasn’t quite as much of a threat as it could have been. Shortly before we arrived at the dock, the recorded voice thanked us for taking the cruise on their environmentally friendly, all-electric boat. So, at least there wasn’t any gasoline or diesel fuel that could have exploded.

Because of the delay in the cruise caused by the fire, what I thought was going to be a somewhat late lunch was a somewhat later lunch. I was famished. Fortunately, the quay where I caught the river cruise has been turned into an area of restaurants and bars. I went to the first restaurant with a menu that looked half-decent and chowed down. And so ended my long morning.