Baba House & Gardens by the Bay

Hi all,

We headed off fairly early today, with our first stop being the Lau Pa Sat hawker market. We each enjoyed a breakfast noodle dish.

Then we walked partly through Chinatown towards the Blair Plains Conservation area. We enjoyed Duxton Plains Park along the way that had been converted from a former railway line.

We then arrived at Baba House, an old shopfront Peranakan (Straits Chinese) style house that was restored in 2006. I did a tour here in 2012 and booked Mum and Dad on one this time. There was not an available spot for me, however, the other three people who were booked in did not show up, so I got to enjoy the tour regardless! Our guide, Chai, was very passionate and explained the function of various objects and layouts around the home. We couldn’t take photos there, but the old furniture was gorgeous. You’ll have to trust me on that one! The blue facade was equally impressive, as were the facades of the shopfronts in the neighbouring streets that we explored afterwards.

We then walked to the Chinatown market to get some fresh fruit juice. It was at this point that we got a phone call from the Singapore government saying that we had not completed our supervised rapid test yesterday. We had, it’s just that the clinic we went to has turned out to be hopeless. More on that later, but it partly spoiled our day.The market was very crowded and very smelly! After the last two years it was pretty overwhelming to be honest.

Our next stop was Gardens by the Bay. In 2012 this was being built, and ever since, anyone that has been here has told me it is a must visit and is very enjoyable. It is a huge garden area located behind the Marina Bay Sands. We had an eerie experience again particularly in the outside/super tree area - absolutely no one around except for us. So quiet that not even the ticket offices were open and you had to buy your tickets on your phone yourself. First, we did the skyway walk which wrapped around some of the super trees and gave us a bit of an overview of the area from a higher vantage point.

I’m really looking forward to coming back to the super trees at night time for the light show, they were pretty impressive in the daytime but that’ll be even better. Then, we headed to the Flower Dome. This was a greenhouse type dome that has examples of plants from all over the world. They were also setting up some colourful displays for the upcoming Chinese New Year period, and we enjoyed wooden sculptures that had been carved into animals. They were very clever, and the dragon was my favourite. It was strange being in here though with the constant “wear a mask, stay apart” messages. The dome was so empty that these echoed off the walls and honestly felt like the announcements in ‘The Hunger Games’. I was half expecting them to finish with “and may the odds be ever in your favour”!

Finally, we went to the Cloud Forest. This started with a very impressive indoor waterfall! We enjoyed the luscious rainforest environment and the cloud forest the higher we climbed. There were a lot of references in here to Mount Kinabalu in Borneo on the signage. Mum and I climbed Mount K in 2019, and it is part of a cloud forest reserve. I reckon the cloud dome was the only time I’ve ever been to a rainforest and didn’t get bitten by a mosquito! Being inside a dome will do that!

After enjoying some beautiful orchids in here, we got to go right up to the top of the waterfall and take a leisurely stroll down a walkway here too. We were quite high up. There was a lot of queuing space here, but again, no crowds.

After Gardens by the Bay, annoyingly, we had to travel all the way back to the medical clinic we had our day three supervised test at last night. We never received our result, and today the government contacted us saying they hadn’t either. This was a one hour round trip out of our way after a big day, so we were not impressed. Particularly as we paid for the test and were assured by the man doing it we would get the result later. On reflection, we think he was lazy and wanted to go home early, and didn’t actually care about our result.

A kinder and much more competent man was working today. He showed us their log of results from yesterday - our results were not in their system at all. So he manually entered them into the system for today, hopefully that will be OK. The only other problem was an incredibly rude French man who walked into the testing room yelling and demanding he be tested immediately. He was a Novak "I'm more important than everyone else" Djokovic type. I whipped the teacher voice out for the first time in a while! Rude moron. The whole process was pretty stressful, hopefully we can switch off from it now. If we had not been there and sorted it out ourselves though, we would have been fined thousands and likely had trouble getting home due to the result not coming through.

Tonight we are going back to Lau Pa Sat to enjoy some food in Satay Street. I'll post some photos tomorrow.

Love to all
Claire
Xoxox