Metropolis Singapore

Could the contrast be any greater? We were just on Tanna, a tiny island in the South Pacific, whose architectural highlights consist of bamboo tubes and palm leaves, and three days later we are looking at the skyline of a city where buildings with less than 20 floors are the exception!

From our small hostel in Arab Street, we start our tours of the city: to lively Chinatown, to Little India, Downtown, where we feel very inappropriately dressed in our backpacker outfit, to the Botanic Garden of Singapore, which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, to the Orchid Garden, with hundreds of different species of orchids, to the Gardens of the Bay - two huge domes that house impressive garden installations - and of course we drank plenty of Singapore Sling. In our neighborhood of Kampong Glam, there was a large food market during Ramadan, where we could try all kinds of Far Eastern dishes to the sound of the muezzin's chant.

The city's huge buildings are more than impressive - and unfortunately also prevent any breeze, so that every time we go out we try to escape the heat as soon as possible - whether it's a restaurant, bar, museum or shopping mall... It's so hot that just standing in the city makes sweat pour down our backs in streams! The brevity of this report probably shows how sluggish the heat makes me... Although the city is very impressive and there is certainly much more to discover, we were looking forward to sitting in an air-conditioned bus to Malaysia after four days to escape the heat a bit!