Gambling, Girls and Gorillas - My first visitors

Ok so I am very very lazy and found the Gibbon experience too difficult to squeeze into one little blog. So here it is summarised....Muddy, Smelly, Hot, Beautiful, Leeches (blood), and Chickens. For a detailed and rather funny description of what we did on our trip see http://brisinga.blogspot.com/.

This time however I want to talk about rediscovering the tourist in me. I must admit I haven't been very constructive with my time off as I could have been. I've been here for coming up to 8 weeks and spend most the days shopping and eating. However last week I had Tracy and Clive over 4 short days on a stop over from their holiday in Perth!

On the first morning I treated my guests to their first ever Singaporean breakfast, Runny eggs, Toast with inch thick butter and Coconut jam and Kopi (coffee). Tracy decided against the runny eggs (probably a wise move) and had the other typical breakfast...Peanut butter on toast :)

I think it's safe to say Tracy and Clive were pretty unimpressed by my lack of preparation for their arrival. Unfortunately the weather wasnt really on our side, it rained pretty much everyday....and being the wonderfully prepared tour guide I am, on the first day we walked around the best part of the afternoon with the lonely planet map running down dodgy roads and just generally being lost around China town. When we felt we had wasted enough time we met Brian later that evening at one of Singapore's Top 10 rooftop bars in Chinatown where Brian came and met us for some drinks and dinner at Lau Pat Sa which is our favorite Hawker Center with a live cover band who play every night.

Rooftop bar in Chinatown

The next day we took a trip to Singapore Zoo!!!! Not the most easiest of places to get to from where I live so we had to travel a little out of the city. The nice part about going this way is the MRT, usually underground, comes out of the tunnel to show alot more of suburban Singapore. Which is typically pretty green and high rise buildings set a little further apart than where we live.

After a lovely day at the zoo we went to Raffles Hotel where I finally got to try the Singapore Sling. At a mere $25 dollars (?!?) we pretty much downed the famous cocktail in about 5 seconds. Although I'm pretty pleased that I have tried it, I may not feel the need to sell my kidney to have another....for those of you coming to visit me in the future, I can make you one in my kitchen for a quarter of the price. Later we then took a short taxi ride over to the Marina Bay Hotel. For those of you not in the know, the views from the top of this hotel are supposed to be pretty amazing. People can pay $20 to go up to the bar to pay for another $25 cocktail and not even a glimpse of the infamous infinity pool. However Rain prevented us from going up so we went straight to the Casino!!! The Casino was pretty huge, two floors infact. Tourists and foreigners can enter for free but Locals have to pay $100! Apparently the governments plan to cut "Gambling Addiction" for the locals, and make a ton of money off tourists. Brian really wanted to play the Blackjack, except the $25 minimum bet put him off a little. I pretty much stuck to the Slot machines where I somehow spent $20 dollars and won back none....this is when I decided gambling is not for me.
The final part of our evening involved a trip to the four floors of whores on the Orchard Road. This was probably the most surreal experience of my life. The building was set inside a shopping center with several bars which covered, literally, 4 floors. We were told that the quality of prostitute depended on the altitude, so 1st floor + Not so great and so on. We started on the 1st floor, where we had entertainment in way of dancing girls, who in my and tracy's opinion could have done a lot better. The room was dark with fluorescent grafetti and happy hour beers. Old men would walk in on their own in groups and instantly have a swarm of girls pouring over them. It was pretty horrible to watch. We then went up to the 4th floor of the building swarming with some questionable looking women, and when I say questionable I mean man...or woman....!

On my visitors last day. We decided to head down to China Town to People's Park for a massage. This is another shopping center in Sing where there is one floor filled with shops just for massages (not the creepy kind!) They all try and call you in as you walk by with "special prices" so we picked the one that looked least dodgy. The massage started off with tiny fish eating the skin off you're feet!!! Tracy and Clive were very brave...I decided my fear of fish was too great so pretty much chickened out!. This was followed by being taken to a breezy seated area where we had Foot Reflexology....in my opinion they must have been taking tips from the Thai massages because once again I went from having a chilled foot rub to be pounded on the legs with fists. You tend to come out somewhere between content and relaxed, to confused and bruised.

There are two things I have learned on my first Singapore guinea pigs..1) Preparation...we spent 80% wondering around aimlessly (In my defense I'm still technically a tourist) and 2) Westerners have delicate stomachs...so stay away from runny eggs and Jelly type substances!!! Overall it was great having them here and to rediscover Singapore as a tourist city, as you tend to start taking it for granted the more you settle into routine.

Our first Asian adventure - Chiang Mai

Our trip began at Singapore airport, we took a neat little flight over to Bangkok and a quick transfer up to Chiang Mai. We were to have an evening in CM and 3 nights in Laos for the Gibbon experience.

Thailand was my first experience of "real Asia". Singapore is described as Asia for beginners...now I can see how that's true. CM was noticeably different from anywhere I've ever been before. The culture seemed to just emanate and there were golden temples lining the streets and markets and general hustle and bustle. But what stood out the most was the difference in people (the locals) particularly in comparison to Singapore where people are generally pretty unfriendly. The people of CM were so lovely and willing to help and their English speaking skills were arguably better than people in Sing. Most of the time we would converse just for directions, but when we were looking for a particular clothes market the tuk tuk driver's sister came over and talked for about 20 minutes about better markets and tailors. In this case they were genuinely being helpful, but we quickly began to realize how and when we were bring taken for a ride. One thing to be weary of our the "Tourist prices"...always agree the price first!!!

Our first day in Chiang Mai was pretty much spent seeing every temple going. First of all I would like to say, they are incredible and do make you feel very humbled and wish to learn more about Buddhism. The second thing would be after you've seen one amazing temple, you've pretty much seen them all. We saw a lot of temples that day....

We left for Laos early the next morning which was a 6 hour coach ride to the border. Having heard nightmares about cramped rickety old buses we were pleasantly surprised to find a cool air conditioned bus with plenty of room and a waitress! She would stagger down the aisle on our mountainous bumpy road serving us Water and Crackers....sounds like prison food, but most people get nothing!! We arrived suitably refreshed at the Laos border to begin our next adventure (Laos blog to come).
After 3 days in the jungle we returned to the shores of Thailand. The amazing thing about Asia is 9 times out of 10 you don't need to book anything in advance. We still had a 6 hour bus back to CM and no way of getting there. We managed to find ourselves in a cheap minivan filled with only 6 other people to take us back to CM. This was slightly different from a spacious coach, but they got us back in under 5 hours arriving at around midnight! This was perfect as it meant we had a whole day in CM the next day. So we decided to go for a "half day tour" arranged by one of the many many tourist operators. The half day tour involved a private driver who would drive us to the Elephant Village and "Orchard farm" (Dull, I won't talk about this). we were also able to see tigers!!! The tigers were pretty scary...except for the fact they appeared to be very heavily drugged. We got 15 minutes inside the cage with the wild beasts who could barely lift their heads off the ground while the guys in charge would bash them over the head with sticks. After our big cat experience our driver whisked us off to the elephant village. This was probably the most surreal experience of my life. We discovered that elephants not only play football, but they can paint pictures and throw darts (?!).The next day we had a flight to catch, but not before squeezing in a quick Thai Massage....scrap massage...Thai Torture...it was like being pulled to death limb from limb by ye old stretching machine. Brian for some reason remained mellow and relaxed, but the minute I was lying face down on the pillow with my arms pulled back behind me being yanked up and down like a seal, I got caught sight of Brian's face and lost control, pure hysterics. I kinda felt sorry for the girl, but I think we were past appropriate when she had her foot practically in my groin. Needless to say, I ended up feeling like I had just been in a boxing match (literally, she punched me in the armpit) rather than relaxed and calm....I'll stick to a foot rub next time I think.

I would definitely visit Chiang Mai again, it was so green and mountainous and beautiful. The
locals are lovely and it felt strangely safe. Laos blog still to come...prepare yourselves for leeches!!!