Singapore Day 2 (part 2)

Readers will remember that we left the action (?) after an excellent visit to Fort Sentosa. After visiting the fort, I opted for a visit to the aquarium and dolphin lagoon. This was rather disappointing – the aquarium isn't actually all that great and even the “underwater” walkway wasn't all that spectacular. It's not an easy place to take pictures, but here are a ray, a dugong, a rather blurred shark and some kind of very big fish (if these scientific terms are causing difficulty, just let me know):





The dugong was pretty amazing, just hard to take a picture of, but here're another couple of attempts:


The dolphin show was a little better than the rest of the aquarium, but I'm never very sure how I feel about highly intelligent animals being expected to do tricks for my entertainment. I'm told they're enjoying themselves and perhaps they are, but surely they'd enjoy themselves more out in the open sea? Well, they did their tricks and jumped out of the water on command, hit footballs and played hoola-hoop with their snouts. When I arrived at their pool, there was a fur seal having its photograph taken with visitors. I'm sure it's the most photographed seal on the island, so here's another one so that he didn't feel slighted that I wasn't interested in him (her?):

Given that the aquarium cost 3 times as much as the fort, required a 45 minute queue to buy the ticket and lasted about half the time, I kind of wish I hadn't bothered.

After getting back to the main island, I took a wander along the Singapore river by Clarke Quay. The quays along the river were the original harbour that the colony was built around. The commerce has long since outgrown the narrow river, but the banks of the river now play host to lots of little bars and cafés and looked wonderful in the dark.

Here's a curious sign at one of the bridges:

Clearly they must have been having trouble with people taking horses and cows over the bridge...

And, finally, a combination of train and bus to visit the Night Safari – a zoo that you visit in the dark. I took the option of the tram ride rather than walking round. I figured I'd done enough walking for one day! It was a fascinating ride, often in near-total darkness – I have no idea how the driver could see where he was going. Anyway, we saw all sorts of animals from tiny otters to elephants with everything in between. We saw lions (one was licking his paw in exactly the same way that Marcus used to) and tigers, different types of hyena, hippos, various goat-like beasts, and so on. Given that it was dark, and I was on a moving tram, I couldn't take pictures, but take my word for it, it was good!

And then, really finally, this time, I boarded another bus to a different MRT station and made my way home.