Somehow, we just managed to find ourselves at Raffles Hotel to start our night's exploration (no prompting from me, of course).
Raffles Hotel: From the outside, looking in.
Raffles Hotel opened in an old bungalow facing the beach on 1st December 1887 and expanded steadily during its first few decades under the Armenian Sarkies brothers, so that by the 1920s, it was known as the historic hotel of Singapore. It survived the deaths of all the Sarkies family, bankruptcy during the Great Depression, the Japanese Occupation (1942-5) and "modernisation" during the 1950s.
In 1989, the hotel closed for two years to be faithfully and elegantly restored to its circa 1915 appearance. Today it is an international landmark, an icon of travel that, as Somerset Maugham said, "stands for all the fables of the exotic East".
Well, seeing we're here, we might as well go in.
In the Long Bar, Raffles Hotel.
Tradition dictates that you throw your peanut shells on the floor - probably the only place in Singapore where you can throw anything anywhere. Rattan punkahs overhead slowly beat the breeze. These punkahs would once have been operated by a punkah-wallah (fan man) with a string attached to his finger or toe, but, thankfully, such menial tasks are now performed by electric motors in post-colonial Singapore.
Somewhere just after the turn of the century, Raffles Hotel barman Mr NgiamTong Boon invented a pink cocktail for the colonial ladies – the Singapore Sling. His recipe book was considered so valuable that it was kept locked in a safe.
Since we were there, it seemed silly not to have one. (Pat had a beer.)
Full of peanuts, but decidedly poorer, we decided the next place to visit was obviously the Fountain of Wealth. The inward motion of water was meant to bring wealth to Suntec City, the complex where it was located, and it was claimed that visitors, walking around the central base of the fountain three times and touching the water at all times, could acquire some good luck of their own. We needed quite a bit of luck to find the fountain (even if it is the largest in the world, as claimed in the 1998 Guinness Book of Records), and when we did find it, it was turned off. Not too sure what sort of luck that was meant to bring us, but at least it was having a laser show, of varying astonishing colours, so it looked pretty.
In the distance we could see the Singapore Flyer, so, still having a bit of energy left, we decided to track it down. This shouldn't have been too hard - at 165 metres high, it is currently the highest ferris wheel in the world, 30 metres higher than the London Eye. It was getting quite late, but we felt extremely safe walking around here. We had to walk through a few construction sites, but we finally arrived.
Here we are apparently having a huge amount of fun on the Singapore Flyer. A complete rotation of the wheel takes approximately 37 minutes. Initially rotating one way when it opened, its direction was reversed some months later under the advice of Feng Shui masters.
View from the Singapore Flyer.
Below was the aftermath of a rather swish party on the harbourside.
No, the sun wasn't rising when we finally arrived back at our hotel, but it seemed that it did happen quite soon after.
