Singapore: Day Eight

Day Eight: Sentosa Island.

What can I say about Sentosa?

Sentosa is a tiny island off the coast of Singapore. It was home to a tiny fishing village before World War II when it became a British military outpost. During the war, it fell into the hands of the Japanese who turned it into a prisoner of war camp. After Japan lost the war, the British again took possession. In the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, the Brits handed it over to Singapore. The Singaporeans turned it into Singapore’s answer to Disneyland, a tourist mecca full of overrated and overpriced attractions.

All the guidebooks tell you to go. All the Singaporean taxi drivers tell you to go. All the Singaporean Tourist Association employees tell you to go. All the glossy brochures in the hotel lobby tell you to go. So you go. That’s what being a tourist is all about.

Getting to Sentosa is easy. It can be reached by taxi, bus or cable car. It costs $2 SGD to get onto the island--not including transportation, which can be as little as $2 SGD for the bus, or as much as $15 SGD for the glass-bottomed cable car. We, of course, opted for the cable car.

We had to buy a ticket for the cable car which meant standing in line for a long time. During the wait we decided to go ahead and buy a package deal that, for about $50 SGD, included the round-trip cable car ride, a tour of Sentosa, and entry to Underwater World and the Butterfly and Insect Museum.

The cable car ride was actually pretty cool. Each car holds up to 6 people and it wasn’t very busy so most people were able to snag a car that held only their group. It almost looked like Akira and I would have a car to ourselves, but at the last minute a group of three sqawking twenty-something Singaporeans squeezed into our car. Ugh.

While the cable car takes you over the waterway, some largely useless recording plays on the tinny speaker set in one corner of the car. The only thing I remember about the recorded message was my attention being directed to the oil refineries in the bay and the 37 meter tall merlion statue ($8 SGD to enter).

We were dropped at the visitor arrival center and told to meet our tour at the gift shop. The tour guide was a young Singaporean woman with about thirty people around her. She gave a brief introduction to Sentosa that I mostly missed because I was so enthralled by the merlion cigarette lighters and the merlion bottle openers and the merlion toilet paper dispensers in the gift shop. After her introductory speech, we were herded onto a bus and taken to Underwater World.

After a warning to use the toilet facilities at the aquarium, we were told that we would have a hour and fifteen minutes before we had to meet the bus to be taken to the next destination. Neither Akira nor I were interested in being rushed (at that point, we were both sure that the aquarium would be be too spectacular to tour in an hour and fifteen minutes including a potty break), so once off the bus, we decided to abandon the tour and just see what we wanted to see using our tickets.

Underwater World ($19.50 SGD) was nice but almost embarrassingly tiny for an aquarium in that part of the world. There was a small “touch pool” where people could pet baby banded bamboo sharks, sea stars, blue spotted stingrays, and pufferfish. A crowd gathered around the pool touching the animals. I slid my hand along a stingray and a tiny shark, their strangely thick, velvety skins pure pleasure under my fingers--but then decided that I wouldn’t want to be trapped in a tank and touched by strangers all day, so I pulled my hands out and dried them on my jeans. I gathered Akira and we moved on to the next exhibit.

The next exhibit was a display of various types of crabs, including the strangely beautiful giant Japanese spider crabs that are thought to have hundred year lifespans. The slow moving giant crabs can grow up to 13 feet in length, and though the crabs xon display at the aquarium were nowhere near that big, they were still impressive. I took a couple of pictures of the alien creatures.

There is also an enormous tank, similar to one I visited in Australia. (What city? Now I don’t recall. Maybe Darwin?) A tunnel runs through the tank so that the animals swim around and above you. A moving sidewalk ferries you slowly through the tunnel. There are sharks and groupers and even a single lonely, ghostly dugong. I took a few pictures.

As it turns out, an hour and fifteen minutes would have been more than enough time for a leisurely tour of the aquarium and an equally leisurely potty break--and an equally leisurely gander through the gift shop.

We spent four hours or so on Sentosa Island, saw Underwater World, the Butterfly and Insect Museum (home to about fifty live butterflies on the day we visited), and Fort Siloso, once a British fortress, now a museum that largely documents the Japanese occupation of Singapore and the later use of the fort as a POW camp.

We had lunch in a cafeteria-like restaurant near the aquarium, where food is about three times the price of the hawker center near the hotel. I paid six dollars for chicken-rice, and another $2.50 for a can of diet Pepsi. Akira ate noodles with roast duck for $8.50, and drank Pepsi. We had ice cream at the Ben and Jerry’s stand.

Akira commented as we leave the island by cable car, “I don’t know why everyone says to visit Sentosa Island.”

It’s true that it is an expensive, manufactured bit of fun. I spent about one hundred dollars for four hours entertainment--Akira has spent about the same amount.