Singapore

What better way to reminisce about your old stomping ground than starting at the beginning – Orchard Towers – the place where, for some, the magic (and sometimes STDs) happened. Not so much anymore, though. The authorities have put the non-fluffy cuffs on most of those activities here, and the punters have taken their business elsewhere. However, fluffy cuffs are still available at the sex shop around the corner.

To be clear, we didn’t really start our life in Singapore 13 years ago in Orchard Towers; we stayed at what was then the Hilton Hotel across the road. But then, when Orchard Towers was in full swing, it provided some great street entertainment. Now, it provides a great selection of restaurants.

This time, our base in Singapore was Changi Sailing Club. Jamala is visible in the centre of the photograph below, sandwiched between the weekend racers and some other cruising boats. It’s a busy place at the weekend is Changi, especially when the sailing regattas are in full clatter.

Our previous home in Singapore was The Rochester, near Buona Vista MRT station and directly opposite the Star Vista. We watched the Star being built. It’s an interesting place – part church, theatre, and a shopping mall with restaurants. Funded by the New Creation Church (estimated income in 2018 of S$143 million) – it can seat 5,000 of its 34,000 attendees here at the auditorium. Needless to say, Sundays are busy.

We just wanted to look around to see what had changed.

And we made another trip to Orchard Road, this time to the shopping district to see the lights and more decorations.

We met up with some of my old work colleagues from Sony, and you can play a game of spot the difference between the two photographs taken almost 11 years apart. For the avoidance of doubt, the people in the second photograph are still alive and kicking.

After that, we ticked off another thing to do from our list, which was to revisit Raffles Long Bar. Not much has changed there either – certainly not the eye-watering prices.

Maria and I spent Christmas Day on our mooring at the club and celebrated by opening a bottle of sparkling wine and cooking a sailor’s turkey – also referred to as a chicken. The lavish portions and quantities of food have been scaled back to the point of miniaturisation since we have been full-time livaboards. The size of any sort of meat has to be judged by its ability to fit in the air fryer.

And that frugality of size extends to our Christmas decoration, which, when packed away, takes up no more room than a child’s shoebox.

We didn’t spend the whole day in splendid isolation. The club has its own swimming pool, and because most people were otherwise engaged, hardly anyone was there. So we got the water taxi over to avail ourselves of the fresh watery facilities and plonked ourselves on a sunlounger for a morning of basking and floating around.

Practical things such as laundry needed to be dealt with, so we took our over-stuffed laundry bags over to the Good Husband laundry where, as well as having great laundry machines, customers can keep themselves amused by using the massage chairs and grab machines and sustained by the drinks and food machines.

We needed to replace our burned-out alternator, which was taken care of by the wonderful team at Yong Fa Specialist Electrical.

And we decided to buy a new VHF radio. The old one was fine, but technology has moved on a bit in twenty years, so we bought this one, which has built-in AIS and everything.

While on a roll with the outflow of cash, we also went green with the purchase of a new electric outboard motor. I must confess that my long-term reluctance to buy one was unfounded – it is worth the money, after all. Now, we don’t need to wrestle the outboard onto and off the dinghy. All we need to do is clip the battery on and off. And when underway, albeit at a very sedate speed, it is blissfully quiet.

One of the downsides of being here is the soot belching out of the commercial vessels chugging backwards and forwards in the Singapore Strait. Most of that soot seemed to drop on the top of Jamala, as you may be able to tell. It certainly wasn’t like that when we left Batam – honest guv.

With more things to tick off on our mini-bucket list, we spent a few days rushing around to see them.

Then we headed over to Arab Street for the street art, coffee, and another pashmina purchase.

And we spent New Year’s Eve at a micro brewery with Toby and Sam, who are members of Changi Sailing Club and expat Brits.

Gardens by the Bay were next in our sights to see – 12 years on from the last time we visited – so we headed off on New Year’s Day to take a look:

The Colbar is an institution in Singapore. It was created in 1953 to serve as a canteen for British service personnel and has been going ever since. Although it was relocated to its current position in 2003, apparently, it looks much the same as it did when it served the same menu items like egg ham and chips or chicken curry in 1953.

Towards the end of our stay in Singapore, we decided to really mix it with the tourists at Clarke Quay.

And to have a chat with these hardened gentlemen on the way home.

We met with my old friend, Eric, who is doing exceptionally well.

Then we went to see the Banksy exhibition at Scotts Road. There’s something prescient about some of these pieces of art.

And on the topic of incongruity, this appeared going past the sailing club one afternoon:

Some of the now-residents of Changi Sailing Club are Caroline and Fatty Goodlander. Fatty is a prolific writer of sailing books and is a regular columnist in Cruising World magazine. He is a brilliant writer, very funny. We invited them over for drinks onboard Jamala. I encourage anyone interested in proper sailing stories to give him a read.

And that was that. After a final farewell to the lovely staff at Changi Sailing Club, we headed off to Johor, Malaysia.