Day 72 - Friday March 10 - Singapore

Singapore Day 2 photos

position at 7:30 am: N1 15.44 latitude E103 49.07 longitude
(Gulf of Thailand, about 75 miles NE of Singapore, our next port)
temperature: 80F, 95% humidity, partly cloudy
distance since FLL: 23,424 miles

Today, our goal is to visit the Singapore Zoo. There are special events at the zoo throughout the day and we wanted to do some of them. For example, you can have Jungle Breakfast with Wildlife for S$18 pp. It is done between 9-10am and we wanted to do this. Their website mentions reservations, so Debbie emailed them a couple of days ago to check on this. We did not receive any response. But early this morning, Clay checked our AOL spam folder for another email he was expecting, and in the spam folder was a response. It said yes, you needed to make reservations two days in advance. This upset Debbie because it looked like we would not be doing breakfast with the Orangutans. She did try on the 8th to make this reservation and provided all the info needed in her first email, except a local telephone number which we did not have anyway. Her backup plan was just to be there when the doors opened and take our chances. We went to the Night Safari Zoo last time we were here and wanted to see the regular Zoo this time. So, we headed out early anyway, leaving the ship just before 7am. They even had chocolate croissants at the Coffee Corner on the way out. At that time of morning, there were no lines to leave the ship and there were no lines at passport control so we easily got past that bottleneck. We took the MRT from HarbourFront up to Dhoby Ghaut, where we changed to the red line and continued up to Ang Mo Kio where we caught bus 138 which took us directly to the zoo. Going out, we sort of had a worst case experience, just missing each connection and having to wait for the next one to come around. With the MRT, that was like 5-7 minutes, but with the bus it was 20 minutes. Anyway, an hour and 45 minutes later we walked into the zoo, bought our S$19pp which includes both entry and unlimited use of their tram inside the zoo. We got there only 8 minutes after they opened the gates. We then went directly to the Jungle Breakfast restaurant and were able to get in as we were about the 4th people in line. But later, the restaurant was full, and they may have turned some people away. After paying for the breakfast, they gave us a sticker and told us to walk over to the amphitheatre where they would soon be bathing elephants, and then come back to have breakfast. This we did, and sure enough, we saw another elephant poop in his bathing water. This one was a grownup though not a baby who might not know better. Debbie got to feed them too. Then we went back for the breakfast. The food itself was not memorable, but they did have some sweet steamed dim sum buns and fried eggs and omelets. They did bring out some animals that live at the Zoo. You could go up and have you picture taken with a python, or with a mother and baby orangutan! It was great fun.

After breakfast, we went to two more shows, Wonders of the wild, and Elephants Painting. You could do shows all day long, but we had a time limit as the ship had all aboard posted as 3pm and sailing at 3:30pm. The original schedule was for sailing at 4pm and we had thought we would have more time here. The guidebooks say to allow at least an hour to get from downtown to the Zoo and we had found that it actually took longer to get around than expected. The reply to Debbie's email had confirmed that we had the fastest way to get there from a guidebook and it had taken us a lot longer. Since we were doing public transportation and we needed to build in a margin, we did not want to play it too close. We wanted to be on the way back before 1pm. (Since the elephant rides did not begin until 1pm that did not happen.) It was after 11am when we left the last show we would see and caught the tram for a loop around the entire zoo, just to see what we could see from the tram. If we had more time, it was a good Zoo to walk in as the terrain was not too hilly and the animals were all in the open and seemed to be readily visible and pretty active. We even heard monkeys making Tarzan sounds. They wound wind up by puffing up their necks bigger and bigger and then let loose with some really loud hoots. They were swinging around it trees right over our heads. That was a first, have never seen that in a zoo before. The white tigers were up and moving, same with white rhinos and in general all the animals seemed active. By the restaurant they had the coolest bathrooms with a wall of falling water on one side. As we were walking about this morning though Debbie kept lagging and she had to suck all the hard candies she carries in her purse to keep from gagging from the swelling in her throat. Her eyes were burning and her knees started aching and she thought she had a fever.

By 12:30pm, we were out in front of the Zoo to catch the 138 bus back to the MRT station and reverse our route home. It was about 2pm when we walked into the terminal building. We strolled through the parts of the mall where we had not been, looking for a pharmacy and bought something for a sore throat for Debbie. We assume that she has now come down with whatever it is going around the ship. We were trying to spend the last of our S$s and each had a New Zealand Hokey Pokey ice cream and bought some more photo paper. It was 2:30pm when we walked through passport control for the last time, also with only a minimal line. But on the way through the gangway building, we encountered a whole ship load of people that had just landed, Star Cruises, SuperStar Virgo. Since there is only one passport control area, we suspect the lines just got much longer.

Back on ship, Debbie found she had a fever of 100.2 and she took ibuprofen and one of the lozenges and took a nap trying to throw off the sore throat. The raw throat and the gag reflex it is causing made all of that difficult. The first try on swallowing the ibuprofen caused her to vomit the ice cream. Clay never had a fever when he had this bug. Clay went up and ate a Cuban sandwich on deck 11, and then watched the sail away from our balcony. It is very hot in the sunshine, and we cruised though a haze to get out of the harbour. The waters of the Straits of Malacca are calm and we hope for many more days of smooth sailing. Singapore is just a very easy city to visit. We wish that we had had more time here. It was a very quick turnaround, about 24 hours. We sailed at 3:30pm and the new passengers did not get in their cabins until about 30 minutes before. The boat drill for them happened about 2 hours after sailing.

Tonight is Casual and we have reservations for TGIFridays. Don't know if we posted it before but, we got a letter a day or two ago from Laurens, the F&B Manager that said TGIFridays was being extended to the 12th and we could come again. We saw him about the same time checking out the sign they recently hung above the Latitudes entrance for TGIFridays. Some other changes as well, they now have tortilla chips for the tortilla soup. They no long have the juggling bartender and in his prominent, front and center place they had a screen hanging from the ceiling that they were projecting a DVD of NFL bloopers on. Clay got a burger this time and said that if Fridays at home served fries this bad they would be out of business. Debbie did manage to get out of bed and changed to eat dinner, but did not have much appetite and things all tasted funny. She had the cheddar broccoli soup instead of the Southwestern Tortilla this time around, but got the same Jack Daniels chicken and it was the same as she remembered it. We both repeated our desserts, sundae and cheesecake. This time the waitress who on our last visit here had warned us about the virus that has been going around insisted that Debbie also have hot green tea. She said she was very sick with this virus before and that only green tea had helped her, so Debbie drank some hot green tea too.

The letter about TGIFridays also said that there would only be 3 nights of Indochine menu back at Latitudes before it converts to a Taj Mahal dinner. We have reservations for that on 3/17. We will post more about that as it becomes available.

On this segment, we have been told that about 200 people left in Singapore. Many more than that must have joined us because all sources state that this segment is booked to the gills. There is not a bed left vacant. Today being what it has been we have not noticed whether there are more people or not. There were more empty tables than full ones in Latitudes/TGIFridays while we were there from about 7:30pm to 8:40pm.

When we got back to the room, Debbie tried to take more pills and some cough syrup, but again the swollen throat and cough produced a gag reflex and she vomited it all up. We will just try to get some sleep and try again whenever she wakes up. This really sucks, she has managed not to throw up from seasickness for 72 days and now this is causing it! Clay is feeling better but still has a productive cough. As for the fall-injured ankle, he is back to normal walking, but the injured ankle still swells up to twice the size of the other. No idea when that might stop happening.

Tomorrow we expect to be in Penang, Georgetown, Malaysia for the afternoon only. So, we hope to take it easy there. Unless things look better for Debbie, easy may mean napping on the ship! We have never been to Penang before and would hate to miss it but it is only an afternoon there anyway. We'll just have to wait and see how it works out. The next day is a sea day and we really need a good calm one.

Oh, other news. We made it on TV. We were asked if we were on the next segment and if we were could we be filmed on the top deck during the sail in to Hong Kong. Every segment they have made a little video of clips of things and people and played it on TV. Sometimes we have caught it and sometimes not. A woman came up to Debbie in exercise class yesterday morning and said that she saw her on the TV. She did not know which channel. We surfed until we found it and sure enough we are in the opening shots. Our brief moment of fame.

Singapore Day 2 photos