Sentosa Island

On Tuesday, Andrew and I got up and headed out to the MRT going towards Sentosa Island. Our first stop was at Harbourfront where we went up to the food court for Toast Box for breakfast. I had some Kaya toast with soft boiled eggs. Kaya is a mixture of egg, sugar, and coconut milk that is flavoured with pandan. It is spread on toast and makes it a little sweet and quite good. For the eggs, they have a bowl with some black bean sauce, and a mixture of salt, pepper, and dried chicken stock.

We headed over to the cable car to take it across the Singapore Straight to Sentosa Island, right across the cruise ship docks. The cable car starts at the top of Mount Faber, and can be boarded at the halfway point at Harbourfront (which we did).

After getting off the cable car we went to Images of Singapore, which is kind of like a museum going through the history of the country, from it’s origins, to it’s time as one of Britain’s harbours in the far east, through WWII, to it’s independence. Next we went to street luge, which was more of a wheeled luge with a steering handle. They had two different runs, so we bought a two run pass and took the first one. The tickets include a chair lift ride back to the top, and just as we got back up, there was an entire armada of school kids there. We opted to do our second run later. It wasn’t very conducive to take pictures on the luge, but they had a camera set up at the finish line so we planned that out for the second run. I did get one on the chairlift though.

  

The next stop on the island was the Merlion statue. It’s a mythical creature with the head of a lion and the body of a fish (mer-lion) and is the mascot (some say national symbol) of Singapore.

From there we wandered down along the beach towards the western edge of the island. Sentosa is called the southern part of mainland Asia because Singapore is connected to Malaysia by a bridge and Sentosa by an bridge to Singapore. This was the furthest south I have ever been in my life, 140km north of the equator.

On the west side of Sentosa Island is Fort Siloso. It is the only remaining of the original three forts on the island that were used to protect the harbour.

They have guns and artifacts from the 1890s, WWI, and WWII eras.

And they have a series of tunnels that were used as part of the defenses that you can go into.

And as usual there were military exercises going on and a C-130 was flying nearby.

After the fort, we went on a hike through the hills on the island. They are all covered in dense, dark forest, and sure enough at the top of the hill there was another gun emplacement.

From there we walked back and did our second luge run, before heading over to the main food/mall area and having lunch at Din Tai Fung. They are known for their xiao long bao so we had two different types of that, along with pork dumplings in chili. Next we went to the Maritime Experiential Museum which had just opened next door. We walked through, and there wasn’t too much there; it was more based for activities for younger children. They are building an aquarium associated with it, but it wasn’t opened yet. Then we went to the spot we were spending the rest of the afternoon/evening: Universal Studios Singapore.

It is quite a bit smaller than the ones in Los Angeles or Orlando, but fun none the less. Being a weekday, there were relatively short lineups too. Their big roller coaster was Battlestar Galactica, a dueling roller coaster one side being human, one side being cylons. Because I’m substantially taller than the rest of the population here, I could only sit in certain seats (about 60%) of the coaster, and they would stamp my hand each time I went on so the crew seating people on the ride knew where to put me. So by the end of the day I had “Human” stamps all over my left hand and “Cylon” stamps all over my right. Although one of the spots for the tall people was the front row, so that was fun.

We checked out the Water World show (quite similar to LA), and the land of Far Far Away.

The brand new attraction (which opened on Sunday) was the Transformers ride. That was the only ride we had to wait longer than 5-10 minutes for, it was about 45, but it was worth it. You put on 3D glasses and were in a 12-person car with a lap belt, going through motion sequences at different screens. You have a shard of the Allspark and have to evacuate it with all the Decepticons chasing you. It is similar to the Harry Potter ride in Florida, but with 3D glasses and less movement and less animatronics.

From there we took the MRT back up to Little India to go for a traditional Singaporian dish, fish head curry. We were able to get into The Banana Leaf Apolo restaurant, which has some of the best fish head curry. We had that and some butter chicken and it was amazing. The curry was subtle with the right amount of flavour, not too strong or too weak, and the fish was so tender and delicious.

And as is standard, you have to eat the eye.

It was pretty good, not nearly a jelly like as I was expecting.

From there we cabbed home, I planned out my excursions for Wednesday and Thursday, and we booked our trip to Bintan, Indonesia.