Singapore
We had to dock at the container terminal as the ship was too large to tie up at the passenger terminal. Visitors wanting to tour Singapore on their own were taken by shuttle bus to the passenger terminal. Those going on tours were able to board coaches already waiting on the dock side. We chose a traditional tour of the city hoping to see as much as possible.
Singapore is the world’s largest port as it handles the distribution of materials for most of Asia. The city was founded in 1819 by a clerk from the East India Company, Sir Stamford Raffles, as he became, a Scotsman who learned the local languages as a way to do business. He was smart and set out the development of the town to cater for the four distinct ethnic groups, probably to avoid conflict at that time, Malay, Chinese, Indian and Arab. These groups were a mixture of traders, merchants, craftsmen and workers.
The areas he designated are still there today. However, governmental policy is to mix them up, due to the day long riot between the Malays and the Chinese. These were so terrible that it gave everyone pause never to let this happen again
Gone are the swampy mangroves and jungle it is now a wonderful mix of high rises and stunning buildings, parks and treasured Sultan palaces and Victorian Government civic buildings, churches, Buddhist and Hindu temples and luxurious mosques. Lots of embassies near the orchid gardens and some very expensive houses.
First stop was the orchid gardens which were spectacular. It covers an area of three hectares which includes tropical foliage and water features such as fountains and small streams. Many rare orchids, over 1,000 species and 2,000 hybrids in various colours and sizes, plus ferns, magnificent hard wood trees, bamboo and foliage fill the park. There is a Cool House, which I must admit was a delight to enter to escape the heat. There is a constant cool mist for plants that grow in cooler climates like the high elevations of the tropics. The National Flower of Singapore is a Vanda orchid named Miss Joaquim. The orchid was first found in the garden of a Miss Agnes Joaquim in 1893.

We then visited the Sultan’s palace and learned how Raffles and the Malay Sultan made a treaty to allow the area to become a major trading center but allow the Sultan to keep some control. The Sultan’s Palace is now a museum with letters between Raffles and the Sultan together with photographs, sculptures, weapons and models of boats used in that period on display History reports that Singapore worked very well until the Japanese came in 1941 by way of Malaya.
A monument stands in the main park to remember the 50,000 residents killed by the Japanese. Similar monuments record the terrible treatment the captured allied prisoners received under the Japanese. Our Chinese tour guide made the pithy comment that they were from the Empire of the Rising Sun until it set in 1945.
We toured the town’s four districts and purchasing postcards in little India. In Chinatown we were guided through the markets finally visiting a museum created from a tailor’s shop that once housed several businesses and apartments. It had three floors of tiny rooms that housed sometimes as many as ten people to a room without windows. The rooms with windows cost more. The conditions were brutal. The passageways were very narrow and it took some doing for us to pass by each other. How the inhabitants managed to live and work under these conditions in amazing. The guide informed us that most of the people living here came from southern china where conditions were even worse. He had first hand knowledge of this and explained things in great detail. Most of this type of building has been demolished and replaced by government affordable housing. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, instituted a rule whereby there was a mixed ethnic community created in every high rise housing development. There were quotas for each race. The official language is Malay but everyone speaks English, learned at school, or Singlish which is a dialect.
Before leaving the city for the ship we visited the largest hill in Singapore at 538ft., where we had a panoramic, bird’s eye view if the city. There are some amazing buildings in Singapore. They are trying to be the first and best at building the most unusual. One of the newest has three towers which has a huge platform overhanging the towers by hundreds of feet. Trees have been planted to give a look of a park in the sky. It also has swimming pools.