This was a busy day for the group. Those students who had lost passports had to arrange new (delayed) airline tickets for the return journey to Sydney. Attempts to do this revealed that Singapore Airlines had lost the entire group’s reservations for the flights, but these were re-booked with only a little fuss.
The morning was taken up with a tour of Singapore city and suburbs, including the Central Business District, Chinatown, high rise apartments, Mount Faber lookout, two factories in a high-rise factory complex (a pewter factory and a batik works), Tiger Balm Gardens and the “Singapore Experience”, a 45-minute eleven-screen slide presentation on the history and geography of Singapore.
After lunch at Lucky Plaza, the group travelled by ferry to Sentosa Inland, travelled around the island by monorail, and returned to Singapore island by cable car. Upon return to Mount Faber, we experienced the only real mishap in travel arrangements during the entire trip when the Archipelago Travel bus failed to meet us. Repeated phone calls failed to locate the problem (or the bus and its driver), and the group had to be returned to the YMCA by a fleet of taxis and minibuses. The evening was left free for shopping and resting.
“Singapore is the bargain basement, boiler room, backyard, bus stop and boomtown of South-east Asia. On a single inland, 600 square kilometres of diamond-shaped jungle and concrete, a visitor with enough energy can sample every culture of Asia. Adjectives beginning with “multi” are common sounds on the Singapore scene, and a genuine racial tolerance is part of the city’s character.”
