A trip to Singapore using a GPS ------------------------------- This document was written by Paul Edwards and is released to the public domain. On 1999-07-02 at about 21:00 BST we left Heathrow. We arrived in Singapore a bit after 18:00 Singapore time on 1999-07-03, making it about a 14 hour flight. I went outside the airport to take a waypoint, and it didn't take long to get a 2D fix, but despite the fact that there were stacks of satellites visible, it wouldn't make a 3D fix. I knew a 2D fix was useless because assuming the last known altitude, puts it in an aeroplane, so 10km or so, making it incredibly inaccurate. No matter where I walked, it refused to lock in. I moved out into a park, so no chance of reflections, plenty of satellites, no go. After about half an hour of this, I decided that there was something wrong with the Singapore ionosphere which was screwing things up. But in desperation I decided to switch my machine off and on again to let it reacquire. Bang, 3D fix (SNGAPT). It is presumably a bug in my Garmin 12's software, but I've since upgraded it to 4.55 in order to fix another terrible bug, it sometimes getting the date wrong, so it might already be fixed, time will tell. I then came back in and withdrew some money from the ATM and put down a $10 deposit at the hotel-booking facility they had in the airport. We then caught a taxi. The need to do this surprised me somewhat, for as we all know, Singapore is so small that you can visit the entire place in about 2 hours, usually without even having to get off the plane. But catch a taxi we did, and it was a very long ride. I had the GPS operational which allowed me to do something you normally can't do in a foreign country - make sure you're not being ripped off by a dishonest taxi driver. Even though I didn't know where I needed to go, I could tell the route I was taking was not some sort of spiral. Although there was the separate problem in that the driver hadn't heard of the Grand Central Hotel at the corner of Orchard Street and some other street we had been given. I refined the location to simply "Do you know where the Grand Central Hotel is?", which he did know, and he added that it wasn't on the second street I had given him. Come to think of it, with the sophisticated use of technology Singapore is renowned for, they should have just got their computers to work it out between them, even though the taxi was independently caught, not that he even had a computer in his car. We arrived after about half an hour, the price was $15.20 which was the <$20 that the hotel lady had told us. I gave the driver $20 and he gave me $5 change and said not to worry about it, which I thought was pretty amazing for a taxi driver. I insisted he give me $4 instead. I had an interesting conversation with the driver. Although English is the official language, and every sign is in English, it may be translated to Chinese or it may not, but there's no doubt that it starts off in English. But everyone's mother tongue is usually Mandarin (Chinese), so they're usually not as fluent as you would expect. I asked him whether Singapore was a democratic country, and he said no. My wife asked, "Do you have a democracy?", to which the answer was yes. He didn't see any anomaly. I didn't actually get a straight answer out of him on that one, but it wasn't because he was afraid to speak his mind lest he be thrown into jail. He didn't support the government, and people his age (old) generally didn't. One thing he did point out was the fact that I couldn't see any police cars on the street. Indeed, through my whole time there, I didn't even find out what a Singaporean police car looked like. I did see what might have been Singaporean police at the airport. No guns though. He said there were no incidents of road rage, it's all very serious stuff. And see how clean the streets were, it was thanks to massive fines, developed over 30 years, increasing all the time because people still continued to litter. He was particularly upset about the price of cars in Singapore, the government was too strong and too rich, making them having to work 2 jobs to survive. It's certainly an opinion I've never heard before - someone's government being too rich! All the ones I know are permanently broke. He also pointed out a couple of food courts, the first one being an open air one (FOOD) which I took a waypoint of in the car, so not accurate. The second one we (think) we visited later, so got a replacement waypoint, but it was an indoor one, so a bit more expensive but air conditioned! At the Grand Central Hotel (GRCHOT) we duly checked in. The front was pretty nice looking, but the rooms were fairly crappy to what we were expecting from a modern country such as Singapore. The key-switch appeared to be broken, and the porter fixed it by inserting a piece of paper. He said it was residents not knowing how to operate it and jamming the key in too hard and breaking it. This information wasn't passed on to someone to fix properly, nor was the paper-solution passed on to the cleaners. The shower was the worst bit - you couldn't put the nozzle up to the shower level, because it always forced it's way to either hard left or hard right, depending on the hose, which was hard rubber itself, which may have been the cause of the problem. So the only way to have a shower was to hold onto the rubber hose. Oh well, at least they hadn't pre-disassembled it like they had in Glasgow. Later someone doing a survey was to tell us that that was an old hotel, why didn't we stay in something more modern, and named a couple, whose names I forget. But I think the alternatives weren't quite as central. Anyway, we were both very keen to get to the food place, as that is one of the great things about Singapore - a large choice of well priced food. This was to be an eat-all-you-can experience. On the way to our previous waypoint, we passed an MRT (what they call their rail system, like the "Underground" or "Metro" or "Tube" or "Subway", but no-one in Singapore knows what MRT stands for, I assume it's something like Metropolitan Rail Transport (later - I have since been informed it stands for Mass Rapid Transport)) called Dhoby Ghaut so I took a waypoint (MDHOBY). One thing we noticed about Singapore is that there's more pedestrians than footpath space, a lot of places are not well designed. We then arrived at the food court, Kopi Tiam (KOPIT). When we got there there was some TV show being filmed, so we went in via a different door. And it was wonderful! The dishes cost around $3-$4, and are smaller than your usual western dishes, but what a choice. We tried things we'd never heard of before and they tasted great. Even the drinks were different. I saw an incredibly shocking thing there too, some women sat down at a table, then left their handbags there to reserve it. Unbelievable. Of course in Singapore no-one stole it, but I mean there's still the tourists, you'd think they'd at least have reservations about that. You certainly do have a sense of safety in Singapore, what a country. I was even shocked when an insect landed on my glass. My first reaction was that this shouldn't be happening, that's my property so it's illegal! Bugs were rare in Singapore too, I think I only saw that one and possibly one other. And even if the people weren't law-abiding citizens, which they are, there's still plenty of them about in the early hours of the morning, so it's like it's as safe as during the day. In fact, the most serious breach of security I saw in Singapore, was someone throw a cigarette butt. And he might have been a tourist from Hong Kong anyway. One thing that did surprise me in Singapore was that in a country with such strict laws, they allow people to smoke in public. There wasn't very many smokers in Singapore, and I reckon that half of the ones who were, were foreigners (assuming all the whites were foreigners anyway). Why they would allow mainly foreigners to do things that affected their health and comfort I have no idea. I'd set up a firing squad at the airport if I were them. It's amazing the attitude of foreigners, boasting how they can get away with things in Singapore that the locals couldn't. Why they would want to get away with things in the first place is beyond me. Why not just stay back in your own country, perhaps even get mugged, yet another one of your "rights" in the "truly free" western societies. So we left at about 10pm, to go back to our hotel. But we decided to check out some nearby shops first. One, Orchard Point, was still open as far as selling VCDs was concerned, so we went in there, also partially to get out of the flash tropical rain. It had stacks of VCDs. I didn't actually know what a VCD was though. I imagined it was a Video CD but I didn't know whether or not that was the same as DVD. We sat down in the cool upstairs for a while, wondering whether or not to buy some that my wife had seen and wanted, as that meant having to buy a VCD player, cost unknown. So we left without buying any, and on the way back passed a camera store that was still open, so I asked them whether VCDs were DVDs, and they said no. I asked for prices for each, and the VCD players start at $200, DVDs at $700. We then went to sleep, but the jet lag caused us to wake up again at about 3am! So we got to test out the 24-hour food court theory some more. Sure enough, despite being early Sunday morning, we were able to eat at a food court just opposite our hotel (but that wasn't air-conditioned). Sure, half the shops were closed, but there was still plenty open. The plan was to catch the MRT to Raffles Hotel. On the way to the MRT I marked Orchard Point (OPOINT) and Centre Point (CPOINT), two places that were big enough to be marked on the map which we acquired at the airport. We then got to the Somerset MRT (MSOMST), but it was closed! It didn't open until 6am, according to some guys who were around there. I thought that was pretty strange for Singapore, the 24-hour country. We then went back to find a bus. Even crossing the street in Singapore is different. They have these absolutely brilliant pedestrian lights in places, that instead of simply having a green man changing to a flashing red man, so that everyone thinks they can beat the flash, not actually knowing how long ago it actually started flashing, they have a countdown. So if you can from past experience dash across the road in 5 seconds, you can still go if it says say "8". So we practiced dashing back and forth across the road to see who was the fastest. Anyway, we waited for a bus, but didn't know which one to catch. So when one did turn up, we didn't know whether to get on or not. Compounding this was the fact that we were under the impression you needed exact money on Singapore buses, and we didn't think we had it. So we decided to just walk there, as I had created a relative waypoint and it didn't seem to be impossible (it ended up being about 2km as the crow flies). On the way we got thirsty so popped in to Kopit again for a drink. They had the doors open, which we thought was strange, as it would waste airconditioning. Turned out that it was switched off, presumably although they stay open, they don't want to waste electricity on the reduced number of customers. We got a lot of small change as well, so we were ready for the bus/train next time. We passed the Rendezvous Hotel (RENDEZ) before finally reaching Raffles Hotel (RAFFLE). We then went looking for the City Hall. We passed the MRT City Hall (MCITYH) where there were lots of soldiers in running gear. We got to what might have been the actual City Hall, but weren't sure so asked a couple of people standing around. They confirmed that it was this big building. They also told us that the soldiers (which were also in a park here) were on some cross-the-bridge fun run for charity. Now although we had been told that this building was the City Hall, there was a lot of building here. And actually the bit down a bit further looked the most likely "main bit", so we went down there. Unfortunately this turned out to be the Supreme Court (SUPCRT) and so we'd not taken a waypoint for the City Hall. And I wasn't keen to walk back, so we continued on, next thing we came to was Parliament House (PARLHS). Here I was almost shot by the guard when he saw me with the hand-held electronic explosive device. He presumably downgraded me from terrorist to dopey tourist, but I decided not to press my luck by trying to get any closer or even ask if I could get closer. Next we came to the world-famous Singapore Statue (SINGST) of a lion, which is the symbol of Singapore. I'd never heard of it. In fact the only country I associate with lions is Sri Lanka, I think they have it on their flag. Regardless, I don't think you can get out to where the statue is, so I couldn't do what I really wanted to do, which was take the GPS location of the inside of the lion's mouth. So the waypoint I got was just some park where you can have a good view of it. You can probably get even closer on a bridge over a bit, but I didn't find out whether pedestrians can go there, and there was no point unless I was going to use the new location to do an average to hit the lion on the head, which I don't currently have the technical skills to do anyway. Now it was time to go to the zoo. It was 7am so the MRT would be open, and the nearest known MRT was the City Hall one. However that meant retracing old ground, something I'm always loathe to do, and I could see from the map that the Raffles MRT (which is about 1km away from the Raffles Hotel, so must be independently named after the very old British series about a professional thief) was even closer theoretically (in the end it was a dead heat between the two distances). My wife could see another wild MRT chase about to happen, as I headed under some bridge to "see what was there" instead of going her preferred route, but we did manage to cross through the park and across some small bridge down some alleys and after all that, successfully arrived at the Raffles MRT (MRAFFL). Unfortunately although I could see the sign, I couldn't see the entrance. After wandering around a bit, we eventually found it, right near the sign as opposed to in the large building. Roll on DGPS! We then used up our plethora of change to buy our train tickets, a very bad move, we should have been preserving that for the bus trip ahead. Boarding the train is like nothing I've seen before too. They basically have sliding glass doors to board the train, which open when the train pulls up. What this means is that you aren't allowed to suicide on the train tracks, you have to go and use a bridge instead. Yet another strict law. What this does mean also is that the trains need to pull up at exactly the right spot, but they have bigger doors to help there too. Presumably allows more people to pile on too. We got out at Ang Mo Kio MRT (MANGMO) and then caught bus 138 from the shelter just opposite the station. We had sufficient change for a non-airconditioned bus, but not an airconditioned one, and there was no way of telling the frequency of both, so I bought a newspaper (Straits Times) to get some change and to catch up on the news, which was mainly Leeson that day! One good thing about the queue is that it's against the law to smoke in the queue, so you don't have the normal problem in countries I'm used to, where to choose not to smoke you need to lose your place in the queue, so you never actually get to go where you want. The airconditioned bus arrived, and after quite a long trip, half an hour or so, we arrived at the Singapore Zoo (SZOO). The length of the bus trip, and the amount of greenery on the way, dispells the notion that Singapore is just one giant concrete structure with people slotted into holes. It may well be a city-state, but it's one hell of a huge and varied city! The Zoo was excellent. I was worried about getting sunburnt, as I get sunburnt easily, hadn't put on any sunscreen lotion, and this was the bloody equator! But despite the fact that UV rays are meant to penetrate clouds, I passed by unscathed, reason unknown. The fact that it was mostly morning might have helped, plus the fair amount of tree cover, plus the strange cloud. The clouds are not something I have seen before, presumably something unique to tropical equatorial regions. Sort of low and thick. We bought entrance tickets plus the "Breakfast with the Orangutangs" option, so that we could touch an Orangutang. In hindsight we probably shouldn't have done the latter, as you can get your photo taken with an Orangutang separately, from the same place where you can ride an elephant, for probably less than you'd pay to go on a rollercoaster in a western country! The breakfast was basically done first, and then you line up to sit next to the Orangutang whilst it's happily eating. I actually marked the spot where you have breakfast (ORANGB), as you even have to navigate from the main entrance to there (they give you a map)! We got there in time though. We got to see polar bears diving for meat. The polar bears are not even in a special cold climate. I asked the guy about this and he said they were adaptable animals. I wonder why they didn't migrate from the North Pole down to Africa then? At one place in the zoo they had a little air-conditioned hut where people went to to cool down. I don't like hot weather and wonder how other people stand it in hotter places than I'm used to. Interesting to see them simply use the appropriate technology to overcome all adverse conditions. Still don't have a solution for walking around in general though, sure, the shops might be airconditioned when you get there, but there's usually still a fair bit of walking. But the most interesting exhibit that there was, was not even an exhibit as far as I am aware. Very close to the airconditioned hut, there was a path, and walking along it I noticed some animals that appeared to be sleeping at the top. Whilst I was watching, they must have woken up and came all the way down. They were Gibbons I expect, not the normal monkeys. They put their hand out, and I gave them back a stick they'd dropped on their way down. It took it, and then appeared to sniff it to see if it was some sort of special food stick. It wasn't, so he dropped it. They had their mouths open, looked pretty vicious really, but I'm sure they were just after food, and didn't know how to say that in English. You're not meant to feed the animals as they can get sick, but we didn't have any food anyway. When one put his hand out again I held his hand. He didn't scratch or anything, but pulled his hand away when he realised there was no food. That was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had - to hold hands with a very distant cousin from the past. I really did feel related. The Orangutangs' hands were more like ours, but this animal felt very close. We also saw some Neon Tetras (tropical fish) swimming around, which is something you normally only get to see in heated fishtanks, which surprised me a bit to find that they really do exist in the wild. As we were about to leave, we saw some little animal running around, and despite having recently bought a point-and-shoot camera, where you can't possibly go wrong, my wife was unable to take a picture. In the end it was due to the battery being dead, long before it was meant to be. But I wasn't sure of that yet, needed to recheck the manual. So I decided to take the photo myself. As I was about to do this, a Singaporean man offered to take the photo. This was certainly a strange suggestion, I wasn't even trying to get my wife into the photo, nevermind both of us, which is the normal reason to get someone else to take the photo. Besides which it would have been quite difficult, without going into the bush with the animal! I would normally assume that he was trying to steal my camera, or at least put me off my guard whilst he did a bit of pickpocketing. But we had assurances from the taxi driver that there wasn't even any pickpockets in Singapore. I don't know what to say. I've never seen anything like that before. In the end I said it was OK, I could take it. But he was still interested in seeing the camera, and even got me to write down the name of it so that he could get one. Cameras are not my strong point. I have never really been into them, which is why I deliberately bought one that did everything without the operator having to have a brain (I mainly bought it for my wife). As such I do not even have the knowledge to know WHY he thought I was an expert. Since there was nothing written on my T-shirt saying "I'm a camera expert", I can only assume he was expert enough in cameras to see that there was something special about the camera itself. This may well have been the case, because it cost us a relative fortune - 195.74 GBP duty free. You can get video cameras for that sort of money. It is an APS camera, which was the main reason we bought it, to see just how automated it really is. And it is just what we need in that respect, we have great difficulty just winding the film. This one allows you to just drop the film in and it knows how many exposures are left. So you can even drop in one that you don't know whether is blank or not and it will tell you! The camera is very compact too. Basically I like it, but I had my doubts about the flash, because my then current theory based on the fact that the battery symbol flashed especially after taking a flash photo, was that it took some time to recharge. I didn't want him to buy the camera on my "advice", so I told him it took quite a while to recharge the flash, 30 seconds or something (not sure what I quoted). He said that was quite quick, so I said maybe it was 60 seconds (I doubled whatever the first estimate was, to try to put him off buying it without reading the fine print). Later I reread my Nikon Nuvis S manual and in the specifications it says it takes 6 seconds to recharge. Given the unimaginable level of enthusiasm directed at my camera (which I had given to him to look at), I decided to show him what I had that was really impressive - my GPS! After going through the sales pitch on that (I'm thinking of selling GPS door-to-door, I love it so much), I pulled out my Psion Series 5 palmtop to show what I could use to extract the data on the move, plus the cables, which are impressive just in themselves. Firstly the data cable I have for the Garmin 12 also has the 12V car adaptor. From the Psion end I have the standard cable to connect to a PC. To connect the two devices together I actually need a null modem adaptor, but I couldn't find one of them, so had to get yet another cable. But a standard null modem cable is female to female, and I needed male to male, so I needed a gender bender on each end. So that's 3 cables and 2 gender benders to link up. And I need to carry it around with me in my backpack because I need to download track data on the road before it wraps and disappears! I was tossing up whether or not to show him my watch, which has a 4-digit year, and which isn't in MM/DD format, which I paid a fortune for (it has nothing else that a cheap watch doesn't have), but I decided I'd better put everything away before the wildlife started eating it. I asked the guy if he was from Singapore, and he was, and he said he was a taxi driver, and because of that he could get into the zoo for free, so came reglarly to look at the animals or to jog?! And presumably also to hassle stunned tourists! I probably should have given him my web address so that he could read the story about himself when it became available, but I forgot that the Singaporeans are all connected (or close). Anyway, he thanked me for teaching him so many things and I left. I'm still stunned really, I've never heard that the Singaporeans were incredibly friendly or anything. Perhaps they are more free like that because there's less to be afraid of - after all, no matter what happens, neither of us was going to be robbed or physically attacked, this is a safe country. With that safety behind you, you can say or do anything really (not in a political sense of course, this is still Singapore). You can probably even (attempt) to pick up women in front of their husbands etc! So we headed home, and went to buy a suitcase from the store (Centre Point I think) with the "sale worth waiting for" which was in its last day. We bought a suitcase for a good price relative to what we had seen both in the UK and a nearby Singaporean shop. I then went to sleep whilst my wife continued shopping. Later after my wife had decided what to buy, she woke me up and I withdrew some more money from the ATM and she bought the clothes. The queues were so long at the last minute rush that by the time she had bought the last bit of stuff it was too late to go to see the fountain. We weren't worried about that though, as we thought we still had time to see it tomorrow night before the flight. This was a bad call, as we should have checked flight times before making that assumption. That night we woke up early again but got back to sleep. One thing that didn't help was that they'd taken the bedspread off the bed, presumably for technical reasons, so I didn't put it back on. Perhaps it was to encourage us to turn off the airconditioning? I didn't relish the thought of having a hot room though, you can always warm up but cooling down is more difficult to solve. So I put the bedspread back on and was able to get back to sleep. I was woken by some banging on a nearby door. To my horror it was almost checkout time!!! So we rushed around and left in the nick of time, leaving our luggage down at the concierge for the rest of the day. We didn't have time to do the technology museum (which I wanted to see anyway, but was also recommended by our Singaporean friend from yesterday), so decided to just spend the day shopping. My wife was looking for clothes and I was looking for a 9 pin male to 9 pin male null modem adaptor to replace 1 cable and 2 gender benders. We ate at some upmarket food court inside one of the shopping centres, based on the theory that in Singapore you just ate when you felt like it, wherever you happened to be. I got talking to one computer shopkeeper, who didn't have the adaptor I wanted, but on the subject of VCDs recommended tranferring VHS cassettes onto them, using some adaptor that cost $700 or something. I hadn't done any research and was loathe to buy something like that in a foreign country where I can't return it if it doesn't work. After all the shops, there was only a few clothes that had my wife tempted, so we bought enough of them to use up all our money save enough for taxi fare and any possible departure tax (there wasn't any), then it was time to leave. Unfortunately I packed my backpack in the car boot so couldn't use my GPS to see if we travelled the same route going back to the airport, but it cost $16, so close to the previous trip. Once at the airport we were sitting down for a moment when we got accosted by a Singaporean woman. She asked me if I had time to do a survey, and I couldn't see any reason why not. It was basically asking about what we'd bought, what we'd seen, and any comments. I mentioned the crappy hotel shower in the complaints. I also mentioned that they were mispronouncing "orchard", the flower had the "ch" pronounced as "k". She then said it was a different word, and showed me somewhere where they really did have the flower on display, where it was spelt "orchid". I told her I had mainly come to Singapore to learn how to speak English properly! I now have vague recollections of such a thing as an "orchard" where you grow things like apples. I don't know what the difference between that and a farm is, I've never been in an environment where "orchard" has been used. She asked me if I knew that the Singapore Food Festival was on, and I said I think I saw a dish discounted because of that, and she explained that I'd missed the whole plot, during July they had a food festival in another part of town, it was world famous. Basically we'd managed to miss what we would have loved to have gone to. And also apparently June is the month where they have sales. So the ones we saw may have been the remnants of June. Basically what we should have done is come at the end of June so that we caught both that and the food festival. I also commented that it was not what we expected, a small place that could be seen in a day. We should have really come for a week or so, and we'll have to come back. At the airport we attempted to use up all our remaining money. My wife had found a choice of things, but handed the money over to me to first to buy a replacement battery for the camera. It took ages to find a shop that sold one, had to walk right to the opposite end and back. When I returned to my wife, she was anxiously waiting, telling me it was the final boarding call. I often wonder how people manage to leave plane boarding to the last minute. I mean, even leaving aside making the other passengers wait, you'll miss the plane yourself, it's pretty inconvenient having to catch the next one, surely? And here were we, possibly in that same situation. I hadn't heard the announcements, must have only listed the flight number instead of the destination, so I didn't recognize it applied to me, assuming there was one about our plane. I "knew" we had plenty of time so possibly I just tuned out. Either way, we didn't get a chance to buy gifts for the relos back home with our remaining money, we were too busy rushing to the gate! On closer inspection, what had happened was that we still had a reasonable amount of time remaining for the departure time, but they were super efficient here, and instead of having the usual boarding 10 minutes before the flight, with a 20-minute queue of people, they instead started boarding about 30 minutes or more before departure, so that at 10 minutes before departure there was NO queue! Maybe they were even going to leave early! Perhaps transit flights are different from terminal flights, hence the reason its not what I'm used to? In conclusion, I'd say that Singapore is a top destination, next time I think I'll go for a week or two straddling 1st July. There was so much on the map that we didn't see, e.g. Chinatown (as amazing as it sounds to have a Chinatown within a Chinacountry). If they could move Singapore to a more reasonable climate, I think I'd trade my freedom to be robbed with my freedom to be safe any day. It's a shame that they don't have government changing hands, so we can't really tell whether Singapore succeeds because of a defacto dictatorship or whether a free country really can impose drastic rules on itself for a better environment for its people. I didn't get a straight answer from the taxi driver on the way to the airport on that one either, he was also against the government, saying something about the rules being too strict for his liking. What was it he wanted to do? Pass water in public when there was no toilet convenient, smack his children to stop them becoming gangsters, and not have being a gangster in youth held against you in adulthood. Even in a country like Singapore they think the youth are about to send the country to destruction! One really big mistake I made was to omit the normal internet search for waypoints. In my previous European trips I never got very much, but if I had done a simple search for Singapore I would have found a list that puts the below to shame, and would have given me my first experience of touring a city with a loaded waypoint list. What a squandered opportunity. The address that had all the waypoints was http://www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/1093/gps/singapore1.html. (and I've since found out that you can get a free null modem adaptor from the author simply by writing a story about failing to find one in Singapore). Oh, and there's another site I've found since... http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bay/7038/waypoints.htm. And the official Singapore Tourist Board is at http://www.stb.com.sg.