On Monday, Eric went to the Indian consulate to collect our visas, checked out with customs and the One 15 marina, then headed off to the Raffles marina boat store to pick up some ropes we ordered. He covered a lot of miles.
Christi, meanwhile, (more…)
Several people told us to go to Singapore’s Zoo and Night Safari Park since they are some of the best zoos in the world. But, we are from San Diego, which also has a top zoo, so the regular zoo didn’t excite us too much. But the night safari park sounded interesting, though. All the animals are nocturnal and you can see them when they are up and active. We did chores during the day. One of the chores was laundry. While we have a small washer on board, sometimes it is nice to use the bigger machines in the marina so the laundry gets done quicker. Christi had (more…)
It turns out the boat store located in the Raffles marina complex was the right store for us. Raffles Marina has won awards as being one of the best marinas in Asia. It is a popular marina with cruisers. We decided not to go there because it is pretty far out of town and we wanted to check out the highly touted brand new marina One degree 15. Pretty far out of town is right. It was a 30 minute train ride west from Vivo City to the Boon Lay train stop – the end of the line. From the train we took a 15 minute cab to the marina. Out here there is something we have seen virtually none of in Singapore to date: vacant land. What is weird is there are high rise complexes that look kind of like low income housing in and amongst the empty fields.
Raffles Marina is absolutely beautiful. Like One degree 15, it is a private club. It is just as nice, if not nicer, than One 15. One 15 is very sleek and modern, Raffles is more colonial opulence, kind of like Raffles hotel.
There is a website we look at sometimes written by a cruising couple from Seattle that are about our age, Warren and Steph on Micro Verde (see Useful Resources). We knew they were staying in the marina, so we found their boat and knocked on their door. Warren was home and (more…)
Today we set out in search of a boat store. We had found the store listed in the directory from the marina, and had absolutely no clue where it was. We gave the taxi driver the address and he took us to the southeast part of the island, an area much farther out than we have already been. As we got further from downtown, the skyscrapers thinned out. This area has a lot of turn of the century row homes, but most of the buildings are newer townhouse style residential buildings or low rise condos. There were even a few (more…)
After the history museum, we went to the butterfly and insect museum. This museum is certainly much more detailed than the one we had visited in Kuranda, with geological exhibits and tons of species in glass. They have some nasty looking creatures in there. You move from the museum area to the butterfly sanctuary, where many species of butterflies flitted about amongst beautifully landscaped terrain. Unlike Kuranda, most of the plants are flowering. There are food stations with sweet food on the table to supplement the nectar from the flowers. In the pictures below, the first photo are of Clippers and the second of Tree Nymphs. There are also tropical birds and turtles in the sanctuary, too.
Even though this sanctuary is nicer overall, we liked the Kuranda one better, probably because (more…)