Singapore's Little India

While many people think we lay under palm trees all day, sailing a bluewater yacht across three oceans can be very tiring and stressful. Our 30-year-old cruising friends describe the voyage as a huge challenge; my response is to try it when you are in your late 60s.  We have been traveling everyday for five years and with all the research, planning, and execution, that much travel can slowly wear you down over time. So we were ready to do some stress-free traveling...if it exists.

Staying in Hong Kong for a month straight was asking a lot of our daughter, so we had to find someplace to “park ourselves” for a couple weeks from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Our rationale was someplace where we could totally relax and let someone else do the driving, cooking, cleaning, and planning. At roughly $77 a day we couldn’t find anything else that fit the bill like a nice, big cruise ship, so we booked a 12-day ocean cruise (a busman’s holiday?) from Singapore to Hong Kong on the Celebrity Millennium.

We departed Hong Kong on December 7th and flew to Singapore, arriving at 1:30 am. We had a couple of days to kill before the cruise began so we booked a interesting hotel in the Little India section of Singapore and spent our days exploring the fascinating environs of the neighborhood. It was like being in downtown Bangalore with hundreds of small shops selling the highly popular gold jewelry, saris, and other Indian goods, along with excellent Indian restaurants.  

Serangoon Road is the main street of Little India. It really comes alive at night when the temperature drops from boiling down to hot.

The Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple is a fascinating place to visit.

Mutha's Curry is one of the more popular restaurants in Little India. To make nan, they flatten circles of dough into a small disc and then throw them on the inside of these Tandoori ovens to cook.

Have no idea of the origin of this "umbrella tree" park, put it was interesting to visit.

One of our favorite areas was the Bugis market, a two-square block covered mall with hundreds of small shops selling everything under the sun. I’d been looking for a “man bag” to aleve Meryl of having to carry all my junk, but had never found anything remotely close to what I wanted. I turned around and there was a stall with over 30 types of the specific style bag I was looking for, all at bargain basement prices. We also bought a number of electronic do-dads and stuff we could never find in French Polynesia. The only difficulty was clothing sizes. I was trying to find some workout shorts for the cruise ship but soon learned that an Asian XL size was much different that a US XL.

The Bugis Market is a huge covered market with hundreds of stalls selling mainly clothing.

Street stalls like this are remarkably well stocked with goods at bargain prices.

We loved all the shops selling saris and other Indian clothing.

Indians have an addiction to gold and jewelry stores such as this line the streets.

We tried an audio walking tour ($1.99) using the VoiceMap app on my iPhone for the first time . These tours are produced by locals, in this case an interesting Indian gentleman whose family grew up in the Little India area. The tour is triggered by your GPS location, so as we walked by a place the iPhone would begin the narration. Great fun and we learned a ton about the history of Little India.

We were amazed by the wide variety of Asian medicines available in the stores.

Singapore is an extremely clean, well run (don’t even try to spit your gum out on the street) city with hundreds of shiny new high rises, but also lots of ethnic areas (such as Little India, Chinatown, British Colonial, etc.) Since we only had two days we focused on Little India, but you could spend weeks exploring all the various areas in the city.