Despite landing in Singapore with only about nine hours of sleep, I didn't sleep very well the first night. I woke up at 3:30 am. I grabbed my tablet and hung out in the hallway so I didn't disturb Risa. After she woke up, we dressed and headed into Little India, the area just north of our hotel. Since Singapore is such a hodgepodge of cultures, there's been plenty of mixing of ethnic groups, but one of the lasting legacies of Sir Stamford Raffles is areas that are more ethnically divided. He segregated the various races into districts and those districts later became those known as Chinatown, Little India, the Arab Quarter, etc.
We walked around a little bit, but went into the Mustafa Center (forgot to get a picture), which is a 24-hour, 4 floor shopping center. It's huge and crazy. They sell pretty much everything there- groceries, cloth, electronics, toys, over 150,000 types of items according to Wikipedia. I meant to get a sari before I left, but I forgot. Next time!
We wandered the various floors in search of a money changer. Normally, they're in the basement and have the best rates, but it was too early in the morning and we finally found one in the jewelry department. Afterwards, we walked across the street to a vegetarian restaurant, Ananda Bhavan, a name that amused me because I was obsessed with naming a future child Ananda when I was in high school. It means "bliss" in Sanskrit.
It was too early to order any curries, so we both got a dosa, a crispy crepe made from rice and lentils. It came with a couple of different chutney and a type of yogurt. It was pretty good.
I don't know what this flower is called, but it's all over the island.
Mosque near Little India
Dosa, also known as a thosai, for breakfast
After breakfast, we grabbed a cab and drove up to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, which is near the center of the island. It's the equivalent of a state park and the tallest point on the island. Bukit Timah is Malay for "tin hill" even though there's no tin in Singapore (plenty in Malaysia). There are some quarries there, but they mined granite. It's full of flowers, trees, monkeys, butterflies and nature in general. There used to be tigers in the area, but they shot the last one sometime in the early 20th century.
We decided to hike up the long way, to go by the jungle fall valley and then take the short way down. What we didn't know was not only the jungle fall valley was the hardest of the trails, it took you near the top of the hill, then descended down near to the base, and then you either had a climb a million stairs to get back up, or hike up the other side. Fortunately (sort of) we had come down the side with the stairs, we hiked back up the path. So essentially, we climbed the hill twice. The worst part? There's no waterfall. There's a little stream that comes out of a pipe under a bridge. I guess that's the "fall" part of it.
Visitor's center
You can't see how steep it is, but it's majorly steep and it's right at the beginning.
Everyone seems to be facing towards the top, but about half the people were actually going down backwards. It's easier on the knees to walk backwards down the steep hill.
We hiked the yellow trail to the top and then took the red trail down with a small detour to the look out over Hindhede Quarry (blue trail). The outside yellow trail is a bike trail.
Yeah, the monkeys aren't really afraid of people.
The "Waterfall"
Summit: 163.63 m (537 ft)
There was a family of monkeys (2 large ones and probably about 7 smaller ones of various ages) swinging around the trees. While I was watching, the smallest one fell out of the tree trying to get to the next branch. He scrambled back up the tree, looking embarrassed.
Mama and baby climbing a tree
You can see Hindhede Quarry through the trees.
After we got down to the bottom, I was severely dehydrated and not thinking very clearly. I remembered a shopping center near there, so we walked over and got some water, but I had a pretty bad headache and wasn't feeling very well. We also had difficultly getting a cab because we were on a really busy road that wasn't near any stops and neither of us had a phone. We literally chased one down that had let a fare off at a church.
The cabbie was actually a pretty nice guy. Very chatty. He talked about various stuff about Singapore, most of which I already knew. He did say that there was a large Korean population in Singapore which was news to me. Apparently the expansion being done on the MRT was contracted to a Korean company and it brought a lot of Koreans to the area. I did notice later that there were a lot more Korea restaurants than I remembered and it was even possible to get kimchi in the stores. Surprise.
However, somewhere near Little India, I started to get really queasy. And threw up. Risa had handed me a ziploc bag earlier, so fortunately, I didn't mess up the cab. I did however get my hat. We got to the hotel and I proceeded to throw up some more while Risa went in search of painkillers. Thanks to the convenience store in the basement, she found some paracetamol, because this is Singapore and aspirin will get you shot. Only sort of joking. After about three tablets, because the first two wouldn't stay down, I was able to finally get some sleep.
Unfortunately, it was barely afternoon, so my little episode left Risa to entertain herself for a few hours. I had intended to go to the Arab Quarter. When I finally woke up and took another paracetamol, the caffeine from the medication left me jittery and talkative, so she also had to put up with crazy Miranda a few hours after whiny sick Miranda. She's a really good friend.
I also had washed out my hat, which is when I found out that the dye in the paper really sucked. It got red dye nearly everywhere, and it just kept coming out. The bathroom looked like a murder scene. By the time I had finally washed it out and it stopped leaking dye, I had washed out all the sizing, so my wide brim hat became very floppy headgear. Sigh.
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