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April 20, 2008

Finally got back home on Thursday, unpacked, washing done, and slowly adjusting to the PST timezone – 15+ hours with an 13 hour flight really plays havoc with ones internal clock, especially when flying east (flying west I never seem to have as much trouble with).

Anyway, as mentioned in previous posts, my wife and I have been in Singapore for one week (I had work there), and then on the way home we stopped off in Hong Kong for 5 days for a bit of vacation time.  I’ve been to both before, but only flying visits, so didn’t really get time to explore and see either of these places so it was nice to have a few free days to have a look around.

Singapore was excellent.  We stayed in the Conrad Singapore which is a fantastic hotel.  Bit pricey (although not fantastically so for a top-class hotel in a major city), but with corporate rates and lots of Hilton points we had a good room overlooking the fountain of wealth.  The one thing I will say about the hotel, and service in Singapore in general, is that it’s really good – so good in fact it borders on stalking!  The staff grab backs off you immediately, escort you to your room, if you need anything they are on it straight away, it’s all “sir”, “madam” – for someone like me that just doesn’t get on with that it’s a little off-putting.

Having 3 days over the weekend to myself before work give us time to explore the city a little.  The joke of Singapore is that it’s the only shopping mall that has a seat on the United Nations, which when you get there it sort of becomes apparent why – everything seems to be a shopping mall of some description.  All the major buildings were full of shops, and full of people.  Apparently there’s two reasons for this.  1) is that a lot of Singapore’s income is from retail and tourist shopping, and 2) that it’s just too humid outside to walk around so everyone uses the malls to navigate and stay inside the nice air-conditioning   We didn’t do a lot of shopping (and for some reason there’s a lot of UK shops there like M&S), but picked up a few things to bring home.

That’s not to say that Singapore has nothing to offer other than shopping (although there’s certainly a lot of that to be had!).  I always find that the best thing to do when in a new city is to see if there’s an open-top bus tour as it’s a very simple and quick way of finding out where everything is, and get a narrated history.  Hippo Tours was directly over from the hotel, so we grabbed tickets and saw the city highlights as well as the heritage tours encompassing the major districts of the city like Little India, Chinatown and Kampong Glam.

Other than exploring the city, the highlights (other than once again meeting the guys I was working with – hi if any of you are reading this ), lunch at Raffles was, as expected, simply fantastic, as well as Singapore Slings in the Long Bar in the evening (which were really nice drinks, and not as “strong” as I thought they would be based on the ingredients in them).  While I was working, Tara got to explore a little further including going out to Sentosa for the day.  Summing up, I really like Singapore as it’s a really nice mix of both Western and Asian cultures.

As I haven’t really had any “real” vacation time in something like 18 months, we decided to take a few days in Hong Kong on the way home.  Hong Kong was “interesting” – I don’t mind busy, as I have spent a fair amount of time in New York, but HK is just totally off the scale.  There’s a even greater divide of the “have’s and have-not’s” there as just within a few blocks (and sometimes even on the same block as areas get “gentrified” and redeveloped) the buildings go from new steel and glass to broken, dilapidated and stained concrete.  We weren’t staying directly in the city, so I must admit I didn’t exactly like where our hotel was straight off, but it was quite safe and right on one of the tram stops.

Talking about the trams, we found they were a great way of getting in and out of the city.  We certainly got some looks using them (seems that it’s mostly “locals”), but for HKD$2 (about 25 cents!) you could go as far as the tram will take you.

Generally, we just explored the city during the day – the markets, the peak, etc – as well as the smallest Disneyland I’ve ever been in (there really was very little there, but we had to visit as that means I’ve been to every Disney in the world!).  At night we headed to Lan Kwai Fong for drinks and food.  Bit of a tip there – go to the main restaurants rather than the ones on the street(s) – I ate at one of them last time I was there and thought it was “ok” – this time though the quality of the meat was, well, dubious, and although we hardly ate anything that night we both felt unwell for the next few days.

The day before we headed home we went out to see the world largest sitting Buddha.  It was a really nice (long) day which included a huge (sometimes scary) cable car ride, and a nice ferry ride from Mui Wo back to Hong Kong.

Once again, in summary, pleased that we had some time in Hong Kong, but didn’t enjoy is as much as Singapore – it’s a little too busy, the “attitude” of people there riled me a little (although, to be fair, if you have to live in such density, personal space probably just goes out the window), and although I usually like Chinese food, it was a little too “variable” in that we really had to look out for what/where we ate and unfortunately after that night in LKF, we just stuck to “western” establishments to try and settle our stomachs. If we were to head back there again, I’d probably want to venture out of the city more (like on our last day) and go to the New Territories and seem more of the “real” Hong Kong/China.

Anyway, back to work I suppose.  Put a small selection of photos up here if anyone is interested.

Posted in Trip Report