Day 2 Wednesday, 26 October 2011

As we only had the one day in Singapore, we decided on a morning city tour which covers many of the must see sights. We drove through the Civic District passing the Padang Cricket Club, the historical Parliament House, Supreme Court and City Hall.

We next visited Merlion Park to enjoy views of the marina. This was a terrific photo opportunity. The Merlion is the symbol of Singapore and is a mythical creature that is part lion and part fish.

We then visited the Thian Hock Keng temple one of Singapore's oldest Buddhist-Taoist temples. Next stop was the National Orchid garden within the Singapore Botanic Gardens. It boasts a display of 60,000 orchid plants, and we spent a tranquil hour enjoying the serenity of this lovely spot. Our final stop was the busy and crowded Little India with its varied shops and smells.

We had lunch at the shopping mall attached to the hotel and then took the shuttle bus to the Orchard Road Shopping Centre and from there a taxi to the Bugis Street night markets where we managed to buy our souvenirs.

We were picked by by our airport transfer driver who obviously had somewhere else to be as he picked us up and hour and a half early and gave us a scarily quick trip to the airport to pick up our flight to Cairo which left at 1 am.

Day 1 Tuesday, 25 October 2011

An early flight to Singapore on Singapore Airlines on 25 October began our Egyptian adventure. After a pleasant and uneventful flight we checked into our comfortable and well appointed room at Trader Hotel, not far from Orchard Road.

We immediately booked a night safari at Singapore Zoo and spent an enjoyable evening riding the road train observing the nocturnal animals. We saw rhinos, elephants, tigers, hippos and many nocturnal animals. It is an open zoo and habitats have been created to replicate environments from the Himalayan foothills to South-East Asian rainforests.
At the conclusion of the visit we enjoyed a performance by fire-eaters of the Thumbuakar troupe.