Jenni goes east: (Not quite) 48 hours in Singapore

My family and I have been counting down the days until our African safari for 3 years now. Having first booked it in 2019, it's been cancelled 2 years in a row due to covid, but we figured 2022 would be the year we'd make it. We were wrong! BA cancelled our flights so we added an extra year onto our countdown apps and started looking for what we could replace this year's trip with. And thanks to a little help from my old friend The Internet Traveller, we found the perfect replacement. Although it was hardly worthy of a last minute sub-in; it was literally the trip of a lifetime. Singapore, then Phuket, then elephant hills, which is a luxury tented jungle camp combined with an elephant sanctuary. The trip was more reasonable than you might expect (around £2,000 per person) to say we booked only a month or so in advance. We found this trip on the internet traveller and then asked them to swap Bangkok for Singapore. That's what I love about booking through them; they're so flexible and helpful and will literally help you to create your perfect trip. I was yet to explore any of Asia really so I was mega excited and boy it did not disappoint! Because it was such a mighty trip, it'll be coming to you in blog post instalments. First stop: Singapore...

The journey there was certainly no picnic. That's the problem with exploring the opposite side of the world; you have to travel halfway around the world to get there. Although, our journey was worse than it was meant to be, due to our first flight being delayed for 2 hours, meaning we missed our connecting flight and had to wait 6 hours in Doha airport for the next one! I haven't had much luck with Doha and Qatar Airways; the other time I took the same airline/route, we made the connecting flight but our luggage didn't! Anyway, the only really annoying part about it was that we missed 6 or 7 hours of the time we should've had in Singapore but I guess that's the perfect excuse for me to visit again when I next travel east.

When we finally did make it, it was about 6pm local time, so we checked into our hotel and got ready for the evening! Our hotel was the Jen Orchardgate which is a Shangri-la and was so lovely. The rooms were amazing and the views from the rooftop pool were just something else! It was also in a really good location for exploring and made getting around super easy. It was nice too because the Orchardgate area was the modern, built-up, shopping kind of area so we may not have visited it if we weren't staying there. It even had a little room service robot which was very cool, and it felt quite apt for me to stay in the Jen.

We'd booked club rooms at the hotel which meant you got access to the lounge and they did a little happy hour (well, happy two hours) where you got free drinks and snacks in the evening. Which worked out perfectly as it was a little pre-drinking session before we went out for the evening!

Gardens by the bay is the obvious 'must-do' when going to Singapore and we'd uhmed and ahhed about when to do it; day or night. We'd eventually decided to do it twice but then with our delay and reduced amount of time in Singapore, we thought night would be better so we could see it all lit up. It looked so beautiful and we arrived in perfect time to see the light show, which was just amazing! It was a stroke of luck too because it says online that the shows are at 8pm and 9pm but it actually started at quarter to (worth knowing if you're heading there). I'd have loved to explore more of Gardens by the bay (like the cloud forest etc) but it was enough to give us a taste! For night one in Singapore, I wore a bright pink midi skirt (shein), lemon print black bralet (new look) and black lace up sandals (public desire).

Something else worth noting about Singapore is how early all of the restaurants close! I'm used to a more Mediterranean way of life on holiday and typically eat between 9 and 10pm, but that was sooo not an option here; we found out the hard way. After leaving Gardens by the bay not long after 9, we walked down to where there seemed to be loads of restaurants on Google maps. But loads of them were either already closing or had already stopped serving food, and after a mad half hour of rushing round to every restaurant we could find in that area, we eventually ended up as the last order at a burger restaurant. Not exactly what I'd envisaged for our first night in Singapore (although it was still pretty nice) so we knew we would need to be more organised the next night if we wanted a better choice!

Singapore was very helpfully arranged for exploring, in that it was broken down into very clear cut neighbourhoods (almost all of which had their own temple as the focus point). So we decided to do each of them one by one, starting with kampong glam. This one had the Sultan mosque and was very middle eastern in its culture. Something that pleasantly surprised me about Singapore actually was how many of the buildings are old, low-rise and beautiful. I thought it would all be the uber modern city scape that you imagine but that's actually only a very small part of it. Another pleasant surprise was the sheer diversity of culture. It was truly a melting pot of people, food, religions; it literally changed from one street to the next! I loved the first stop on our walking tour and thought this area was so beautiful. It was a mega beautiful day too (31 degrees and sunny) so I dressed for the heat; white denim shorts, black floral top and white trainers.

The next neighbourhood over was Little India, and you really did see it change literally as you crossed the street. Suddenly it was indian supermarkets, indian flower stalls, indian street food, people in traditional indian clothes. The central point of that area was the Hindu temple, which again was mega impressive and beautiful, and the low-rise old architecture was still very prominent there too. It actually felt a million miles away from the built up skyline of the city.

Then it was on to Chinatown! We started at the gate, which was seriously impressive and then had a wander through in search of lunch...

Chinatown, being adjacent to the central riverside area, had a lot more of what I'd gone to Singapore expecting; the built up mega glossy skyscrapers. It was a lot of the banking district and things like that, but hidden amongst them was the gem we were searching for. After a bit of online research, we'd deduced that the best place for lunch would be a street food market. There were a few different ones but our taxi driver had recommended Lau Pa Sat (for having the best choice and being good value). It was in a beautiful old Victorian building and there truly was so much choice; we thought we must've already lapped ourselves twice by the time we made it around the whole thing. The stall we got lunch from was even Michelin recommended and I tried a sugar cane drink to go along with it.

The next stop on our list was another local recommendation; a woman from our hotel had recommended Clarke Quay and said it was good to walk there from Chinatown as it was super close. So we checked out Chinatown's temple (Buddhist this time), and then wandered through street markets, hustle and bustle, and buildings new and old before crossing the river to get to the complex. It was such a beautiful walk; something you really notice about Singapore is how lush and green it all is. No boring grey cityscapes there! Although it's a good job we did enjoy the walk so much because when we got to Clarke Quay, not a single of the many, many bars and restaurants there were open! It was around 4pm at this point so yeah, not exactly dinner time, but you'd think places would be open for a drink. I'd expected a lot more of a city-that-never-sleeps vibe from Singapore but it's actually the opposite; you really have to plan yourselves around traditional meal times!

In the absence of anywhere to have a drink at Clarke Quay, we remembered we had a beautiful (award-winning) rooftop pool and bar back at base so headed back to our hotel to have a drink there. Well, it'd be rude not to end the day with a cocktail!

I was obsessed with my outfit for night 2! This dress was a recent shein purchase and I just love the colours and the satin fabric. I'd gone with quite the orange colour pop for my holiday wardrobe, so these shoes and bag will appear a lot over the next couple of blog posts. And this dress was what inspired it all!

Given the restaurant fiasco of the night before, I was determined to be organised this time. I did some research to try and find a really nice place for dinner with an Asian flair (it seemed a shame to come all the way to Asia and eat something else), but it proved weirdly difficult (a lot of the top rated restaurants in Singapore are European/American). And some of the ones that did sound amazing were simply crazy prices. Just when we were losing hope, we found a Japanese steakhouse which sounded cool and was located in Chijmes, which we'd been told about by a couple of taxi drivers. It's a converted convent, which is now a complex of restaurants and bars, and so we headed there in search of the Japanese steakhouse. What an amazing decision it turned out to be on all counts! Chijmes was beautiful and the building was incredible - the transformation even more so. It was a two storey open plan area of restaurants, they had live music and karaoke going on in the bar area downstairs, and the place was so rich in foliage and fairy lights. The restaurant we'd chosen was amazing too. It was the kind where you cook your own meats on a BBQ in the middle of the table and so it added a nice bit of fun and theatre to the evening. After pretty much a cow's worth of food, we finished the night with some cocktails. I couldn't very well go all the way to Singapore without getting a Singapore sling now could I?

Then the following morning, we were all packed up and off to the airport to head to our next destination. To say we lost almost a whole day in Singapore, we were still pretty impressed by how much we managed to cram in and it was a city that I truly loved exploring. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone and I certainly plan on returning at some point. But for now, it was time to say goodbye to Singapore, and hello to Thailand...