Going jogging by Marine Parade is not entirely bad ;)
Another great thing: outdoor gyms are available in very many parks around the island
A typical clean street in our hood
And there are beautiful flowers!
However, it's really quite small with the entire country being roughly 700 km2. You can generally drive from the north to south parts of Singapore (Woodlands to Marina Bay ~ 25 km) in around 20 minutes or from east to west (Changi to Tuas ~ 45 km) in roughly 40. Just to compare, Gothenburg together with for instance Lerum Commune is about the same size as Singapore (~710 km2) and you can place more than 52 Singapores in Greater Tokyo Area (The 47 Wards + Kawasaki, Yokohama and Chiba ~ 37 000 km2).
There are a lot of nice 'rain forest parks' here, with the really cool trees almost functioning like sun umbrellas, with several different kinds of plants growing densely 'in the middle' of them; it's perfectly alright to for instance go jogging here, but you have to watch out for lizards and avoid stepping on snakes ;)
Hence, most of the people who have been here for about a year, have probably done more or less all the things you can do and tried out practically all the places you can go on this island (just learned Singapore is actually alike Stockholm i. e. comprised of more than 60 small islands). Many of us have also been tour guides to x numbers of visitors, which of course is smashing having fantastic guests over, but we have been showing pretty near the same route every time.
We did try one new thing not that long ago though: windsurfing!
Therefore, there might be some connection in between traveling in the region and your time of stay in Singsing, since only just coming back from the adventure on Koh Tao in Thailand, had made us very keen on getting back under water as soon as possible and we were not alone.
Parts of the pack on the 20th something floor, planning away on computers and pads for the next trip
The main drive for many of us foreigners, is of course to see as much of the APAC region as possible with a shared passion for diving. It also helps regarding the fact that you can more or less reach most interesting places from Singapore in 1-2 hours. For Swedes, who spend somewhere around 12 hours all in all, going from for instance Gothenburg to Krabi, it's a huge difference and become very accessible.
Our planning session was also helped by a smashingly organized brunch, where the choices of food were immense. Thank you again Lisen and Robert!
The verdict of the next adventure was finalized and a group of highly energetic more or less experienced divers became scheduled to go together to Tulamben! Since this was so outstandingly organized last time by our friends, Jonas and I decided we would put together a traveling plan, flying from Changi, Singapore to Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, staying at Liberty Dive Resort. Jonas also has a friend who has been a dive master on Bali for the past years, so we received a lot of info about where and with whom to dive. I wanted to continue with my advanced dives to finish the certificate and was contemplating if I would dare to go wreck diving with the others at the sunken ship USA Liberty. Since I didn't really like the cave passage dive we did last round, I was a bit hesitant, but thought this might be different.
I had been looking forward to going to Bali since we came to Singapore, so I was definitely expecting beaches even better than the ones in Malaysia
Or Thailand ;)
The only other thing which really freaked me out was the Ocean Sunfish or Mola Mola, where individuals between 3-4 meters at weights of more than 2000 kg have been observed. I actually had no idea they existed until not that long ago (same with the really weird looking bump-head Parrot fish) and they almost look like they are artificial. I found a descent video on youtube which might be worth while watching (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coVp1dhhxIE&feature=related). Again, I was of course hoping for Manta rays, but that's probably every divers secret dream ;)
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