The World is My Oyster

In the Beginning

When I asked a few friends, looks like the most popular topic that everybody wants to see is the time when I backpacked around South East Asia in the beginning of 2006 for 30 days. I guess the fact that I was away for 4 weeks alone interests people. Moreover it wasn’t the time when I was jobless, I actually took leave from my job in Melbourne to go travel for that long. Aaww what a nice boss I had :)

Anyway, it took me about a month or two to do the research. But really, for me researching is already part of the trip. So it was all good fun. I specifically planned what to do day to day, including the predicted price of activities and all.

To summarize, I went from Melbourne to Singapore to Malaysia (KL, Penang, Langkawi) to Thailand (Chiang Mai, Bangkok) to Vietnam (Hanoi) and lastly to Hong Kong. I spent about $2000AUD for all the air tickets (bought from home, a bit steep cuz I flied from Australia) and another $2000AUD for everything else (which included a lot of shopping too). My travel partner and I actually spent every cent of that $2000. From our last stop in Hongkong back to Melbourne, we transited in KL for a few hours, and I couldn’t even buy fast food fries cuz we had only 2SGD and thousands of Vietnam Dong (that actually values very little). I did ask some money changers to change my 2SGD to Malaysian Ringgit, but they didn’t let me. Didn’t reach the minimum amount (Come on, what’s the big deal? Argh).

Obviously my posts will be in many many parts, separating places, restaurants, and hostels when I see fit. Unfortunately the journal that I managed to write about everything in details every day that time is now in my parents’ house in Sydney, so I’ll go through things from memory, existing pictures, and info from the net.

First Stop: Singapore

Okay one would ask why I chose to go to Singapore when a few months after that I would live there anyway. There were a few reasons. 1) My travel partner had never been to Singapore and he’d like to go there. 2) I had a lot of memories in Singapore :). I haven’t landed on it for 6 years long, so yea I wanted to see Singapore again. 3) That time I didn’t know that I was gonna go to Singapore to work in a few months time.

We arrived at Changi airport late at night at around 10pm. One cannot pass Singapore airport without being amazed about their free computer stations and internet. I was gonna blog here, but it was late and we sorta needed to rush.

You cannot see it here, but I was so excited to be in Singapore :D. I always have tingling feeling about the country. Long story :)
Anyway since I arrived near Chinese New Year, the airport got all decorated too. Having not seen anything Asian for a long time, I got all jumpy and excited. Seriously, I was excited about anything! The lanterns, the all-asian faces, the MRT, the food (omg the food), the snoopies in 7-Eleven, I was even excited to hear the Singaporean accent. We joked about the accent all the way through the entire month-long trip.

Forgettable Orchard

Subtitle is a bit misleading. Orchard is really not forgettable. In fact, for the first timers, you REALLY should go to Orchard Rd. I had my first love with Orchard Rd in Christmas eve 1998. That time was probably the first thing that struck me hard and later led me to be obsessed about seeing new places. It was totally different with where I’ve been in my entire life (first time going overseas, mind you, at the age of 17).

I said it’s forgettable because I can’t remember much about going here in this trip nor do I have pictures of this famous shopping haven. The only picture I have is this dome:

Interesting dome near Orchard MRT. We passed the dome a couple of times. I don’t know why and I don’t know why the dome is there. I have been living in Singapore for the past 10 months and I haven’t passed that dome again. Oh I think we hung around Borders at Wheelock place for a while being a bookworm that I am. Got all excited about Asian books. Was thinking to buy a couple of books but then realized that books are heavy and the prices weren’t really that different with ones in Australia or amazon (I found this fact applies to the all Asian countries I went to during the trip).

Colorful Clarke Quay

I went here following Cliff‘s suggestion.

Please don’t mind my penguin pose.

One thing I noticed about Singapore architecture is the colorful building! From touristy place to HDBs, a lot of them are colorful. Not as in artistically colorful, but simple flat colors, red blue green yellow.

To prove my point I will throw in a couple more pictures:

Note that the last two pictures are not in Clarke Quay, they’re just random buildings around Singapore.

I thought it was an interesting style. But then after that I heard from some Singaporean that the people are just lazy and they wanna save on paint.
O well, reasons don’t have to matter, do they?

Going back to Clarke Quay topic, we took a small junk boat to go along the river. Cost around ~7SGD from memory. It was raining a bit that time. But I could still manage to take some pictures.

Esplanade, also known as the Durian. That’s like the Sydney’s Opera House or Melbourne’s Art Center of Singapore. I watched Forbidden City there and it was really pretty inside.

It’s the symbol of Singapore, Merlion, half lion half mermaid. Freshly made by the Marketing Department of Singapore (no, seriously). For those of you who don’t know, “singa” means lion in Malay language, while “pura” means temple (the original name of Singapore is Singapura, read: see-ngah-poo-rah, so Singapura means temple of lion). The lion looks a bit stupid here. Somehow I always find the Merlion hilarious. Not only its figure, but also the name. They’re all sooo made up! LOL.

The silhouette looks so much better :)

After that we stayed around along the river, waiting for the night to come. I wanted to have the famous Singapore chili crab on the side of the river. I saw Singapore slingshot (not the drink). I think you can ride it for 30 SG bux. But I wasn’t interested because I rode it once in Melbourne. It was cool and all, but 30bux is a lot of money for 1 minute of thrill and excitement.

As soon as the sun set, we walked along the row of open air restaurants on the side of the river and chose one after many many “we serve the best crab” talk from all 20 restaurants that we passed (I actually listened to a lot of them!). Somehow they all bragged about serving Sri Lanka crabs. It’s probably the best crab of all crabs. They also said Indonesian crabs suck. Finally we chose one with a lot of big fish tanks displayed in front of their place. It gave us the illusion of fresh seafood. I picked my own crabs and prawns. Then we ate. No picture guys, sorry, we were so hungry, I could’ve eaten my camera. It was good but not yet the best crab I ever had. The best one so far was the ones I ate at No Signboard restaurant in East Coast. The crabs were gigantic, the chili sauce was heavenly, and the fried buns were out of this world! After I stay in Singapore though, the locals said all those touristy places don’t serve good crabs. The best one is at legendary Ang Mo Kio. So I’ll go there next time and try it for myself.

The view at Clarke Quay at night is really pretty with all the lights along the riverside. It’s worth going. If you don’t want to spend a lot of bucks on food, go for a drink. Too bad with my camera that time I couldn’t take nice pictures of the night view. Nighttime is so pretty and yet so difficult to capture *sigh*.

Man, it’s just the first day and already it’s taken me a long time to compile. I have no idea when I’ll finish this series.