The big plan for today was a trip to the fairly newly opened Universal Studios Singapore which is situated on Sentosa Island which is a stones throw from the main land.. This is one of our only big treats planned planned where we expect spend large amounts of our hard earned money. To get to Sentosa island there's a monorail link over the small stretch of sea. While queueing for monorail tickets Charlotte noticed big screen saying Universal Studio's tickets were sold out for the day. “How!?!?” we were asking, we had got up early and it didn't even seem busy at the monorail station. After quickly whipping out the Lonely Planet book and our map we soon had a plan together for the day.
Even though we couldn't go to the main attraction on Sentosa Island we decided it was still worth going to see what it had to offer. If you look at the guide to the island you would see a long list of attraction that can be found here but we picked one of the least advertised. Having seen theme parks, cable cars, go kart’s, giant statues just to name a few things in view out of the train window we found something far more spiritually rewarding. A beach. It was a small beach with a row of nice wooden shack style bar looking out to the sea with ample comfortable seating shaded by palm and other exotic style trees. We sat for an hour or so sipping ice tea (a new experience for both of us and made far more pleasurable once we discovered adding copious amounts of sugar) and looking over the white sand beach to the sea which was cluttered with huge cargo ship waiting to go into port. We then strolled across the island looking at some of the other attractions costly but decided our money would get us far better value doing other things.
The next port of call for the day was the banking district. We made our way through the skyscrapers to the bank of the Singapore river in search of the famous Merlion (half mermaid, half lion). After a fair amount of walking and dealing with getting caught in our first tropical down pour it turned out the Merlion looked better on the tourist map but in retrospect it was a pretty impressive piece. We stopped for coffee and the caffeine perked us up and drove away any feelings of jetlag.
The last sight seeing of the day was a walk down Orchard Road which is the main shopping district of the city. It housed many stores I wouldn't dare going in even if I was still working in banking in London let alone a poor traveller.
As the day had been much cheaper than expected with no trip to Universal Studios we treated ourselves to curry in little India.
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