Friday 20 November 2015. Acclimatisation in the Botanic Gardens

After an easy journey to Singapore on a half-empty plane, I was a bit taken aback at the appalling night's sleep I then had. Weirdly though, I emerged feeling quite lively and decided to set off to the botanic gardens for my first excursion. This involved a reasonable walk to Orchard - for some the epicentre of the shopping paradise of Singapore; then a turn West to the Gardens. It was, in normal circumstances, an easy walk but for me it was a first real insight into the heat and humidity of Singapore. Not unpleasant; but it certainly slows one down.

The gardens themselves are one of Singapore's crown jewels. On a par with Kew, they stretch over many acres and afford the chance to see, in the outdoors, the orchids that have to huddle in the artificial tropics of Kew's Princess of Wales house. To complete the contrast, Singapore has a large house that recreates cold climates.

Orchid breeding is one of their specialisms and one of the displays is of orchids named after celebrities.

Though the orchid itself looked as though it had seen better days.

Unlike Kew, all of this is free - apart from the orchids which costs 'seniors' a dollar / 50p. To be fair to Kew, it has the edge in terms of extensiveness, the various huge houses to maintain and all the other ancillary stuff like cafes and the vast ever-rotating borders. Nevertheless, Singapore's gardens are excellent value for money - combining education and relaxation and with some interesting additional items like the Chopin sculpture contributed by the Polish nation.

While in the Gardens, there were a few downpours - not unpleasant in the heat but guaranteed to soak one quite quickly - It seemed sensible to use the MRT to get back to the hotel where I took advantage of their evening offering of drinks and snacks, followed by an early night.

This was a pleasant day but I was rather concerned that there was not much more to the island than shopping malls and the gardens. Certainly the various websites like tripadvisor and lonely planet were not gushing with the sorts of things I normally like and all I had seen so far was extremely recent building for living, working and shopping.