It was a over night journey for us (myself and my parents) from Chennai to Singapore (here after referred as SG), which made us a little dizzy because of the 8 hrs of waiting in the airport and almost a ShivRathri for us as they served us the breakfast (according to SG timezone) at around 3 am IST time, so that left us hardly any time for a small nap in the flight. Well we landed in SG Changi airport and being the first trip outside India, we were AW'ed by the airport and its facilities and its grandeur (! is that the term?). We got our airport pickup after the customs and immigrations, on time and on our way to the hotel (Hotel Fortuna) got to get the hang of the city's skyscrapers,
clean and green roads, lane disciplined traffic, etc etc.... We had to wait for an hour for the checkin and since our first tour was in the evening around 6pm SG time, we had enough time to lie down and gather ourselves together and then went for a small shopping in the Mustafa center. Did I tell you that my dad already went and did browsing for half-an-hour and informed my bro about our safe arrival, in the mean time we were getting our room ready ??. Well, he did that. Now when we were settled and had our brunch in the nearby Komala's Restaurant, we went to check out on the handycam for our trip in SG. We got a good deal in a shop outside Mustafa and we bought it ;). So we had all our equipments ready for the tours.
Our first day tour was the Night Safari.
I have been to the Bangalore Safari, but this is totally different. We were picked up in an A/C volvo bus (dont they know anything else other than the Volvo stuff and the A/C stuff.. God, the weather was already chill & everywhere we went there was A/C.... !!! Whew!!) with all other families (around 15 members totally) and we were there in the night safari. It was cool, we went around in the tram to see all the animals wandering and some came very near (deer, hyenas [I dont like these], pigs with mush [forgot the name] etc etc...). It was a 30-45 mins drive. My camera didnt work that well in that dark without the flash and my dad was trying to get the handycam working but since it was our first, we both failed to get a good video altogether. But after that we had our "Creatures of the Night" show, it was amazing. The girl/lady who conducted it had a great sense of humor and command. Without her I guess the show wouldnt be the same. We saw pythons, Fox howling, hyenas everything. It was for almost 20 mins and then we had the tribal fire dance show. It was cute. We had time to buy something, if we wanted to. There was also options (obviously not for us), to go on a walking trail around the place, and there were a few other options also, but since it was already 9 pm we had to return back to our coach and we headed back to our hotels. Best part, we did see quite a lot of animals which were new to us, obviously whose names we still dont get or remember quite well. But it was definitely a good place and especially for animal lovers and kids. (Do they train these animals to be so quiet ? ) It was a little scary because it was as if you are going into the jungle and since it was quite dark and even the tram lights were off, it gave me some goose bumps at times, but was very thrilling. We enjoyed the trip a lot.
So much for the first day's details. Will be posting the experiences of each day separately. I wouldnt want to miss on any details because later when we want to remember the pleasantries these posts might help.. dont they ;)
Missed out to tell you that I tried watching "Julie & Julia" and "Love Aaj kal" during my flight journey, but ended up watching half of each. I was torn between my sleep and my yearning for completing these movies.
