You said the things you did in the past / Were all because you’re living too fast

The ques­tion I found myself ask­ing over and over again this week in Sin­ga­pore is “Where all the tourists?”. The ques­tion, of course, has an obvi­ous answer, but still, in a place that is nor­mally swarm­ing with Ock­ers and Swedes in stub­bies and Nikons, it was a tad disconcerting.

We could’ve swung a Moray Eel around at the nor­mally over­flow­ing East Coast Seafood and not hit a sin­gle Swede or elderly British cou­ple (fondly remem­ber­ing empires lost).

Bali has had a fairly sub­stan­tial down­turn in tourist num­bers too, regard­less of the ‘offi­cial’ fig­ures you read. One only has to look in the restau­rants, wan­der the streets, or look at the beaches to know that some­thing ain’t right. But, unlike Sin­ga­pore, Bali has a safety net, that being the always depend­able Aus­tralian bud­get tourists. When all else fails (and Bali has been try­ing to move itself a lit­tle more upmar­ket in the last cou­ple of years, with some suc­cess, hence the thou­sands of vil­las and the col­lapse in infra­struc­ture in the new villa areas), it can always turn to the pack­age tourists from the work­ing class ‘burbs of Perth and Mel­bourne to swamp the island in their search for Bin­tang T-shirts and “plat­ting of hair”, god help us all. And if you check the uglier side of par­adise, pri­mar­ily the hell­holes of Tuban and Kuta, there are increas­ing swarms in the DVD shops and the Oz Steak Bars.

So Bali gets that…that and the niche tourists, like the not insub­stan­tial pink tourist mar­ket and the Euro­pean trust fund babies who come every year to add to the traf­fic mayhem.

Sin­ga­pore on the other hand has really painted itself into some­thing of a cor­ner. It’s far too expen­sive for the low-end tourists from Gee­long or Black­pool, and rather unwel­com­ing to the gay, and the wild and free Euro babies.

But for all that I rather like it. That is, I like it rather more than I used to like it. Sure it hasn’t put behind it all the things that have always dri­ven me rather crazy about the place…the rules, the odd design overkill, the rules, the exces­sive order­li­ness, and the rules.. are all still scar­ily evi­dent. But some­how it seems to have devel­oped the begin­nings of a soul, an edge, or at least it’s man­aged to pull that edge back to just under­neath the polit­i­cally ordained veneer that has sti­fled it for the best part of three decades. There are those who say it’s always been there, and maybe it’s just me, but either way, I’m happy to have finally made its acquaintance.

Rule num­ber one in every Asian city is to side­step or ignore the guides, online or in print. This rule just about trans­lates world­wide but, from expe­ri­ence, is most espe­cially rel­e­vant any­where in Asia. There are, for exam­ple, some pretty wor­thy online guides to any expe­ri­ence you’d want to have in Lon­don, NYC or Syd­ney. Not so in Asia, where local knowl­edge or informed explo­ration are your only choices (per­haps exclud­ing Bali where the estab­lished guide books are per­haps your best chance of avoid­ing the inevitable over­charg­ing and scams that face a novice here, and there are really no reli­able online guides).

Sin­ga­pore in par­tic­u­lar is a place where avoid­ing the restau­rant and bar guides, tear­ing up Time Out, and dump­ing the Lonely Planet are really com­pul­sory if you have designs on doing any­thing out­side the square or see­ing the some­thing that isn’t ordained as the accepted tourist experience.

Our only foray into Time Out’s rec­om­men­da­tions was a trip to Divine, the bar in Parkview, a build­ing that, in a very Sin­ga­porean way, apes Deco to excess, but thor­oughly misses the point and the essence of what they are doing. It ain’t the Chrysler Build­ing as much as it tries.

In the same way its always worth tak­ing a rain check on the grue­some swill­ing tourist / expat tack / sleaze along the river at Clarke Quay, Boat Quay and Robert­son Quay.

Much more sat­is­fy­ing and, for want of a bet­ter, less overused word, sophis­ti­cated, are the groovy lit­tle bars found around the south­ern and east­ern ends of Chi­na­town, in the maze of lit­tle streets full of intrigu­ing design bureaus, book­shops, cafes, restau­rants, bou­tique hotels, and, yes, bars.

Or the new, lets pass on the banana leafs and mass mar­ket slop please (like the awful Mutha’s in Race­course Rd), cui­sine ori­en­tated Indian eater­ies around Lit­tle India.

We always start our arrival into Sin­ga­pore with a fight with the hotel. It’s a tra­di­tion. Hotel check-in staff are, almost with­out excep­tion, rude, inflex­i­bly rule-bound, and unhelp­ful. Ser­vice is lit­tle more than an early chap­ter in the cor­po­rate rule book they read and then for­got (I have to be fair, The M Hotel is been a happy exception….they even sent a girl to my room at 1am one night…Are you Mr. Rao said the small­ish Indian lass. No, said I rather sleep­ily. She looked relieved when I shut the door, but I guess she still needed to track down the afore­said Mr. Rao for the ren­dezvous. At The Merid­ian on Orchard (a dump if ever there was one, but reas­sur­ingly over­priced as hotels in Sin­ga­pore tend to be) the door­man asked me if I’d need any­thing extra later? I sim­ply pointed to Brigid and explained I was well covered.

And so, yes, The Amara said we could either have a smok­ing room with a dou­ble / king bed or a non-smoking with twin beds. That we’d ordered non-smoking with a king and pre-paid for such seemed irrel­e­vant. If you want that, you need to pay $100 more…

No sir, yes ma’am, sorry sir repeated the rule bound James, a junior man­ager, as he remem­bered by rote, chap­ter 6 of the rule book, the one about loudly angry for­eign­ers threat­en­ing com­plaints to all and sundry.

This is between you and your book­ing agent, sir.

We made a sub­stan­tive (but very calm) noise and then made some more and said we’d be back in an hour for our dou­ble bed in a non-smoking room or we would make a fair amount more.

Noise works in Sin­ga­pore. It ain’t prop­erly cov­ered by that chap­ter in the rule­book. No one com­plains in Asia, most espe­cially in Sin­ga­pore where national com­pli­ance is taught from birth in the state sanc­tioned birthing units, and then drilled in for the next two decades.

On return, we were gath­ered by the gen­eral man­ager and escorted to his desk. He said he had some­thing to show us and we both expected it was into a sound­proof room to allow us to make our noise as loudly as we wished before we were ignored again and herded to out defined twin room under threat of expul­sion for non rule compliance.

But, no. Hell, no! I don’t know if it’s the lack of tourists, or the begin­nings of a new national spine, or a re-written rule book (scribed by some­one bought in to advise on these sorts of things), but he took us to the 16^th floor, the Club Floor, to a non-smoking king bed with a view (of a con­struc­tion site to be sure but it’s bet­ter than look­ing through into another smok­ing room with twin bed, or worse, a non-smoking room with a dou­ble bed that we’d been refused).

Is this okay?

What’s the catch?

None. Would you like free Internet?

Yes.

What time is your flight?

7pm.

Would you like 4pm check out?

Uhh, yes. No catch?

No. It’s offered with our apologies.

To any­one who’s spent any­time in Sin­ga­pore, the above is bizarre, almost certifiable.

Then Mr. Habim (that was he) let it slip:

I lived in Jakarta for 14 years.

Ahh, so you’ve encoun­tered ser­vice before…….you bloody boat rocker, you.

Either way, it does make you feel bet­ter about Singapore.

I bought a 320GB travel drive in Funan IT, per­haps the best IT cen­tre on the planet but also, tra­di­tion­ally, the rud­est and most unhelpful.

Don’t buy that one sir..this is much bet­ter value, faster and cheaper.

I was floored again.

And then I got the warm and fuzzies, a glow of pos­i­tiv­ity, at the quite extra­or­di­nary new National Museum of Sin­ga­pore, which, amongst very much more which I sim­ply didn’t have the time for, leads you on a inter­ac­tive his­tory of Sin­ga­pore quite unlike any­thing I’ve seen anywhere…with dozens of audio and visual alley­ways that demand you go down them and I’m not one to refuse.

The impos­si­ble had started to hap­pen. I began to feel good about Sin­ga­pore (feel­ings that may only have been sub­merged since I’d spent sev­eral years there as an Air Force brat, in the days, when, as seems incon­ceiv­able now, New Zealand was tasked with defend­ing the island.

I’m really not that sure I’m com­fort­able with my new found affec­tion for the place.

Tagged with: Singapore • travel