INDONESIA TRIP: SINGAPORE, PART III - GARDENS BY THE BAY AND JUMBO SEAFOOD RESTAURANT

 June 30, 2023

After our time in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, we called up another Grab ride to take us to the Gardens by the Bay, one of the iconic tourist sites in Singapore. We drove through the business district/downtown area to get there, and I was struck by the variety and aesthetics of the city's architecture.  Almost every building had something unusual or interesting about it.

By the time we got to Gardens by the Bay, we were hot and tired from walking around the botanic gardens.

We needed an ice cream break and a cool place to sit. We found it. Udders is a Singapore-based ice cream company, and I think that's a clever name. 

I was less impressed by the brand name of the fans that were everywhere.

I was a little surprised to see the Merrill Lynch bull grazing in the grass. This version is entitled Magnificent Bull and was sculpted by America artist Walter Matia. It was donated to the Gardens by the Bank of America (which acquired Merrill Lynch & Co. in 2009).

I was also surprised to see a Shake Shack here, a fast food chain started in New York City in 2004. Apparently the first Shake Shack in Singapore opened in the Changi Airport in 2019, and now there are at least eight locations in the country.

A series of unique wood carvings throughout the complex emphasize the connection between art and nature.

 

That's all well and good, but the reason people come here (and the reason WE were visiting) is not for the ice cream, the fans, the hamburgers, or the wood sculptures, but for the Supertrees, the Cloud Forest, and other structures that make a visit feel like a journey into the set of the movie Avatar.

The Supertrees are 82-foot- to 160-foot-tall man-made structures that look like trees and serve as "vertical gardens," each one home to a variety of species of ferns, orchids, bromeliads, and vines making their way slowly up the skeletal structures.

The tallest Supertree has an observatory and a rooftop deck that opened in 2019.

There is even a 420-foot-long elevated walkway between two of the Supertrees

An elevator takes visitors to the viewing platform, but there was a bit of a line and we were hot, tired, sweaty, and still recovering from our 17-hour flight and the 15-hour time difference. I wish now that we had taken the opportunity.

On the other hand, views the Sands Hotel were getting to be old hat.

That glass and metal building behind the Supertrees is either the Flower Dome or the Cloud Forest, both of which are part of the Gardens by the Bay complex. The Flower Dome, which replicates a cool-dry Mediterranean climate, is the largest greenhouse in the world. The Cloud Forest replicates the cool climate of tropical mountain regions and includes the world's second tallest indoor waterfall (115 feet tall).

Again, the lines to get into the Flower Dome and Cloud Forest were long, and the admission price was steep--$49/person. In our jet-lagged, no-sleep state, we didn't think we could get our money's worth, so we passed.

We did get to see another heavily-armed cannonball tree at no cost on our way out.

We also got a good look at the Singapore Flyer. Its 28 compartments, each big enough to accommodate 28 passengers, are air-conditioned. At 541 feet tall, it was the world's tallest Ferris wheel until the High Roller (550 feet) opened in Las Vegas in 2014, and then the Ain Dubai (820 feet) in Dubai opened in 2021, crushing them both. However, the Dubai Ferris wheel has been "closed indefinitely" and no reason given. That doesn't inspire confidence.

You can see in this photo that the Singapore Flyer is very close to the glass greenhouses that are part of Gardens by the Bay (bottom right in photo below).

It was time for dinner, so we called a Grab to take us to another food hacker centre that we had scouted out before our trip, but when we got there it appeared to be only four or five stalls, nothing like the place where we had eaten in the morning, and none of the stalls looked unique or particularly appealing. Bob had asked our Grab driver where we could go to get chili crab, which we had read about before our trip, and he gave us the name of a place near where he had dropped us off. When we Google-mapped it and saw it was just a 10-minute walk away, we decided to go there instead.

(*Note to self: Ten minutes of walking in hot, humid conditions feels more like 30 minutes.)

In spite of the heat, it was fun to do some walking and see the Chinese influence that remains in the storefronts in this part of town.

When we got to Jumbo Seafood, there was a long line at check-in, but we didn't really have another option, so we put our name in and waited 15-20 minutes.

There are at least four Jumbo Seafood restaurants in Singapore, and we were at the Riverwalk location next to the Singpore River, a 2-mile-long waterway that winds through the heart of Singapore and empties into Marina Bay. The green-domed building in the distance is the old Supreme Court building, constructed in 1939, which is now the National Gallery, which we had visited earlier in the day.

The river was dredged and cleaned up in the 1970s, and today it contributes to the charm of the city.

We were finally seated and given bibs, a good sign at a seafood restaurant.

We were pretty hungry, so we started off our meal with a duck salad and mixed seafood in a clay pot. Both were very good.

Our main dish was chili crab, made by stir frying mud crabs (a species found in the estuaries and mangroves of the area) in a thick, sweet and savory tomato and chili sauce. The dish originated in Singapore and Malaysia in the 1950s. CNN Go listed chili crab as #35 on its list of the "World's 50 Most Delicious Foods." They write, "You can't visit Singapore without trying its spicy, sloppy, meaty specialty."

"Sloppy" is definitely a good description of the dish. The chili crab came whole but cut into a few pieces, and we had plastic gloves because the only way to eat it is with your hands. It was delicious.

We noticed people at several other tables around us also eating the crab. The price had not been listed on the menu, and we probably should have asked, although it probably would not have deterred Bob from ordering it. The total bill was $217 Singapore dollars, or about $160 USD, and Bob added a generous tip that made our waitress quite excited. 

We called a car to take us to our hotel, where we retrieved the luggage we had left there in the morning. Our room was on the top floor (12). The hotel was rated with 4 stars and a 9.0 guest rating, but we were not that impressed. It was fine, but there was nothing special about it.

We were in bed and fast asleep by 8:00 PM, having survived our first full day on the ground after a very long flight and a 15-hour time change.