Singapore Zoo

Today was another day of improvised plans in Singapore. It started as I intended, at the Singapore Zoo. But then my afternoon plans went off the rails. Or, to be less metaphorical and more literal, they washed out.

I won’t describe that here in the introduction, but never fear. Because I didn’t get up to much this afternoon, I will make this a single journal entry day rather than splitting it into two entries as I have usually been doing for the last several trips. There’s little to say about this afternoon.

Coincidentally, I will probably write only one entry tomorrow as well. I fly out of Singapore tomorrow a little after noon and will have only some of the afternoon at my next destination to write about.

This being my last day in Singapore, you’ll find my brief city summary below. Don’t worry. You won’t have to look hard to find it. It’s right there. Down at the bottom. Stop and ask for directions if you can’t find it.

Getting to the Singapore Zoo

The Singapore Zoo takes a little bit to get out to, about an hour from my hotel to be more precise. It required a half-hour MRT (Singapore’s terrific version of a subway/metro system) ride, with no transfers required. After disembarking the MRT, I had to then take a twenty-minute shuttle bus ride into Mandai Wildlife Reserve, which contains the zoo and a couple of other attractions.

For you math whizzes who did the addition of two numbers, yes, I know that doesn’t total an hour, but there was some walking from my hotel to the MRT and from the shuttle bus stop to the zoo entrance.

In the Singapore Zoo

The Singapore Zoo is set in large, lush grounds beside a big reservoir. Just wandering around is enjoyable in itself. But it’s too expensive if that’s all you want to do.

The Singapore Zoo has a large variety of animals. Then again, you’d expect that of a zoo, wouldn’t you? If it had, say, a large variety of paintings, it’d be an art gallery; archaeological artifacts would be a museum. Zoos have animals. That’s just the way it is. I shouldn’t have to tell you these things. You’re clever people. Or at least I used to think so.

The enclosures at the zoo are generous and try to replicate the animals’ natural habitats.

The zoo divides its exhibits into geographic and/or animal-class zones: Australasia, Elephants of Africa, the Fragile Forest, the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, Orangutan Island, Primate Kingdom, Reptile Kingdom, RepTopia, Tortoise Shell-ter, Treetop Trails, and Wild Africa. (No, I didn’t remember all of those. Don’t be ridiculous. I pulled them off the zones page on Singapore Zoo’s website.)

Where possible, non-human animals are separated from human animals by moats and low fences rather than high fences. A few enclosures required glass walls, but there were no old-style zoo cages.

In enclosures with animals that spend at least some of their time in the water, the water was held back from the humans by a glass wall. This allows the allegedly intelligent* primates, aka humans, to view the other animals when they’re underwater. The pygmy hippopotamus was such an animal.

(*I said “allegedly intelligent” because, what can I say, Americans elected Donald Trump as their president. Again. I have my doubts about the allegation based on that.)

When I was at the zoo, the only pigmy hippo I could see in the enclosure seemed to be sleeping underwater. Therefore, I couldn’t get a great picture of the cute, but lumbering creature through the glass and water. You take what you can get when you are an intrepid, but impatient traveller. When you’re a timid and impatient traveller, such as me, you get even less. And you get what you get when you read this journal.

The Singapore Zoo considers its star attraction to be its Sumatran orangutans. The Sumatran orangutans’ (or possibly orangutan’s; I saw only one) enclosure has a full glass wall between it and its visitors. When I first got there, the only orangutan I saw was asleep in a hammock provided for it. Nice life, if you can get it. I took a picture, but it didn’t look like much more than a huge, reddish-brown lump of fur on a hammock. I came back later and the orangutan was sitting up and made for a handsome picture.

Then she walked around and I got another good picture, although she wasn’t picture-perfect for her full perambulation. For part of her walk, she rubbed up against the glass wall for a while and, from my perspective, looked like little more than a fur wall. Nevertheless, damned, they are glorious beasts.

The sign by the Sumatran orangutan said that it is a critically endangered species. The one orangutan I saw was a female. The signage said the zoo also has a male, which, based on the picture on the sign, is less reddish and has different facial features. I might have just missed it, but I didn’t see it anywhere in the enclosure. They are big animals. So I wouldn’t have thought I’d miss it.

Um, if the Sumatran orangutan is indeed a critically endangered species, they might want to keep the two together. Maybe give them some wine. Light some candles. Create a little romance. Suggest they follow each other on Instagram.

The zoo also has some Bornean orangutans in an enclosure next door to the Sumatran orangutans. They stay further away from the crowds and swing on some tree branches and ropes. There is no glass wall separating their enclosure from the public, but they also don’t get nearly as close to the paying public as their Sumatran neighbours do, so it’s a trade-off as to which is the better viewing experience.

(Spelling note. The zoo is inconsistent in its spelling. It uses both “orang utan” and “orangutan.” I think the single word is the dominant usage there. But the spellchecker on my iPhone is unhappy with both. It suggests “orangutang” as the correct spelling. The spellchecker on my Macbook is happy with “orangutan.” I need to remember to check if they’re both set to the same version of English. You decide which spelling you prefer..)

I also saw a lot of other beautiful animals, but none that I have any stories about that aren’t even more boring than the stories I told above. So, I’ll spare you the torture of me talking about them. Instead, satisfy yourself with the many pictures I included on this page. Many though they may be, they represent only a very few of the animals I saw at the Singapore Zoo.

Leaving the Zoo

I spent more than a half-hour longer in the Singapore Zoo than I wanted. A little before I was ready to leave the zoo, I had only one more area I wanted to see. (There were also a couple of areas I decided not to take in because the zoo is huge. It’s too much for one day.) It started to rain as I got to the remaining area. I persisted for a while there until the rain became heavy. I then spent that half-hour-plus standing under an uninteresting canopy waiting out what had become a heavy tropical downpour.

When I left the hotel this morning there was barely a cloud in the sky. The forecast showed a low probability of precipitation all day. So, being a devotee of the Church of What’s Happening Now, I didn’t bother taking my umbrella. Let that be a lesson to you. Always be prepared.

I said, let that be a lesson to you. As for me, I’ll probably never learn. You can’t teach an old curmudgeon new tricks. Even as a young curmudgeon, I wasn’t good at learning new tricks. Now I’m even worse. But never mind that.

After a while, I gave up. The canopy I was under, was a stop for the zoo’s slow, free “tram.”

I put “tram” in quotes because that’s what they call it. To me, a tram has steel wheels and runs on tracks. These have rubber tires and drive on roads through the zoo. The trams have open sides, but in the rain, like today, they pull down plastic on both sides.

Having given up, I boarded a tram and took it to the stop closest to the exit.

My Last Afternoon in Singapore

This left me with a quandary. What I planned to do for the afternoon was to visit another attraction also in the Mandai Wildlife Reserve and immediately beside the Singapore Zoo, River Safari. It recreates the habitats of some of the world’s famous rivers.

My guidebook told me that only a couple of the rivers are particularly interesting. But what interested me is that they have pandas in there, both red pandas and giant pandas.

I love looking at giant pandas. Doesn’t everyone? The Singapore Zoo entry/exit, which is right beside the River Safari entry/exit, is a covered area, but I could see outside from there. I stopped and assessed the situation for a few minutes and the rain didn’t look like it was going to stop any time soon.

Because River Safari is, undoubtedly, mostly an outdoor experience, I decided to forgo it. Instead, I walked along the covered walkway to the shuttle bus stop and took it back to the MRT station. I figured I’d head back into the city, hoping the physical and temporal distance would bring an end to the rain.

Something I wanted to do in Singapore, but hadn’t yet, was to take a look at a recommended architectural feature, a row of brightly coloured, decorated, terraced Peranakan houses. I saw a picture and I thought they were worth viewing in person.

Getting there is not a trivial exercise from the Singapore Zoo. Google Maps offered a couple of options, but the one that made the most sense to me involved taking the same MRT I took to out to the zoo and use it to go back to the stop closest to my hotel. That’s an interchange station from which I had to take another MRT line for six stops, then walk for 18 minutes. That would have been great in dry weather, but I wasn’t interested in doing it in pouring rain.

In the large core of Singapore, the MRT runs underground. But outside the core, it runs above ground. The stop near my hotel is underground. So when I got there I didn’t know what was happening weather-wise on the surface. I thought about checking my weather apps, but the two I’ve used here have been unreliable. I’m not just talking about their forecasts. I get it. Weather forecasting is tough. But they’ve also failed me when telling me the weather as it allegedly is at the moment I look at the app.

Sometimes, both of them have told me it’s sunny when it’s pouring rain, or raining when it’s sunny. You’d think they could have someone look out the window and reliably enter the current sun vs. cloud and possibly precipitation status into the system, but no. They don’t.

So I decided to try my luck and caught the connecting train in the direction of the terraced Peranakan houses. When that line emerged from underground, I saw it was still raining, but not hard. By the time I got to the open-sided station where Google Maps told me to get off, it was pouring again. Rather than leaving the station, I crossed the platform and took the MRT back to the station closest to my hotel.

Getting to my hotel involved a walk of only a few blocks. Some of that was under a covered walkway and porticos so I was able to get there while avoiding an H₂O overdose. So, as I said above, my afternoon was a washout. But as a consolation, and as I mentioned yesterday, the hotel I’m in offers me free cocktails and hors d’oeuvres from 5:00 to 7:00. So I was able to drown my sorrows about my washed-out afternoon.

Singapore Summary

I can’t believe how quickly my time in Singapore has gone. It honestly feels like I just got here hours ago. Time flies, yada, yada yada.

I stayed six nights in Singapore. Because I arrived early in the morning, that translated into six full days. It was not enough. Apart from the weather, it’s a fascinating city. When I mention the weather, I’m not just referring to the serious rain I had today and one other day, but that too. It is muggy to the extent that’s barely bearable for a lifelong Canadian. I hate our winters too, but I would prefer something a tad cooler and drier than Singapore.

I’m fussy about my preferred ambient temperatures. I’m curmudgeonly about absolutely everything else. It’s a subtle, but important difference between fussy and curmudgeonly. It’s not easy being me is all I’ll say about that.

The weather notwithstanding, I would have appreciated at least a couple of more days here. There are things I didn’t get to see. The River Safari and terraced Peranakan houses are two, but there are more. What’s more, there are some tours and other cruises in addition to the river cruise I took that I could have taken if I had more time.

It’s an exciting and interesting city. I know it appears over the top when you look at it through the lens of outside sources. And it is over-the-top in some areas when you’re here, but it’s also a delightful city in many ways.

One thing that particularly surprised me is how green the city is. That’s not to say it’s the greenest city I’ve ever been in, but I had the impression of Singapore as a skyscraper city with a few dazzling features like the Gardens by the Bay. But there are also several large parks like the Singapore Botanic Gardens and Fort Canning Park and other smaller parks. Plus there are a lot of street trees. What’s more, some of the buildings have trees and other vegetation on balconies on several levels that turn them into almost vertical forests. I read somewhere that Singapore is getting even more of these.

Then, of course, there are the water features of Singapore—the river, Marina Bay and the sea beyond that add to the attractiveness of the city.

To sum up, I very much enjoyed Singapore. If I were younger, I’d certainly want to come back. Unfortunately, and this might come as a surprise to you, I’m not younger. And it’s a big world with lots of interesting and fun places to see. So, I don’t know. Regrettably, there’s a high probability that I won’t return, but I hope I do.