tickle flies from the skies: Danced along a coloured wind

I had never seen lightning in the clouds before. I'm used to jagged strikes in the air, not clouds bursting into light from the inside, like someone's hiding in the middle with a candle that suddenly flares and dies. I watched it spread too, across big heavy clouds, a private light show.

Sleeping leopard lying at Singapore Zoo Night Safari - a fantastic experience, even if you're exhausted from your 10 hour flight and a day's wandering in the humidity.

It was early morning as we flew into Singapore, and the harbours were filled with scattered lights of boats. The patterns from a small fishing boat rippled in v-shapes over silk as the light got brighter. We landed, and the moment we stepped off that air conditioned plane the humidity and heat made themselves heartily apparent.

Singapore is a small city-state island, built on trade and transit, sitting underneath Malaysia. It is just 716 km square with a population today of a modest 5 million or so, a combination of citizens and foreign nationals with genealogical histories from all around the world. Its modern history began with Sir Stamford Raffles, who saw the island as the ideal place to set up a new trading port and stick it to the Dutch. There were about 1,000 people living on the island then, near the river mouth where the heart of Singapore now beats noisily, essentially a small fishing village. Raffles set up some treaty deal on 6 February 1819 with the Sultan of Jahor, giving Britain the right to establish a trading port on Singapore, and promptly had a thousand streets, hotels, and high rise buildings named after him.

The infamous Merlion of Singapore guarding the river mouth,
and secretly named Raffles.

Everything in Singapore is called Raffles. And everything is in English. There are other languages too - especially Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil - but on signs it is much less prevalent than I would have expected. Even the tube announcements are in English, occasionally throwing something in another language at a particular stop.

Everything in Singapore is air conditioned, except the outside air. The outside air is like you've just taken the lid off a big pot of noodles and leaned over it. It smells a bit like noodles (or steamed buns), it's damp, and it's painfully oppressive to someone with my delicate constitution. There is a breeze, but it's hot and heavy and carries a mixed smell of river, salty ocean, Asian cuisine, and damp heat. The wind in Singapore doesn't have one colour, but many, and all of them are bright but hot and heavy.

Bright colours, but surprisingly heavy.

We dropped our bags off at our hostel, Quarters, and had a shower to wash off the layer of sweat already aquired and some of the haziness from a long flight. There was a chap there whistling Christmas carols whilst bleaching the showers and mopping the floor - most notably a highly tuneful rendition of Jingle Bells. The hostel is near the river's edge and a whole lot of restaurants with wait staff who cry "Lunch for you! Lunch for you!" as you walk past at midday, and quite central really. The rooms are small and seem to have no windows, but when the air conditioning works it does not matter a jot.

Marina Bay Sands - a boat balanced on buildings

The world's best pork bao, plus pandan cake and cool
chrysanthemum tea in a can, from Lau Pa Sat

Two days in Singapore.

High rise buildings shining and shimmering everywhere, a giant boat hotel balanced on high rise buildings, a signature lion fish spitting water out at the river mouth, a cloudy green-brown river, Starbucks and McDonalds on every third street, Lau Pa Sat Festival Pavillion with scores of cheap food stands (including one featuring the most delicious pork bao I have ever eaten, and one featuring pig intestine soup which I did not eat and never will), food and hundreds of shops in Chinatown, a small park with a high of 163 meters above sea level and the was the highest point in Singapore before all the high rises were built, the Asian Civilization Museum with statues of Bodhisattvas and relics from the Indus Valley, Raffles Hotel with their overpriced cocktails (they could keep the place going on sales from those alone, I should think), $1 cans of iced tea and bottles of water from dudes under umbrellas on the street, an incredibly large and wonderful bookshop called Kinokuniya.

The Night Safari out at Singapore Zoo was amazing, and probably my favourite bit. We took the tube and a bus out and arrived shortly after 8pm. A little tram runs around a circuit of the zoo, taking you past flamingos, otters, Gir lions, sambar, babirusa, mouflon, striped Indian hyenas, African laughing Hyenas, gorgeous (but rather large) black and white tapir, hippos, Asian elephants, Cape buffalo. An Indian wolf - skinny, sharp-edged - came out and stood right next to me, howling up at the sky. The tram of course had a tour guide. Ours was incredibly enthusiastic, making good use of cadence and all the frequencies the human voice has on offer. She also had the most peculiar accent, something unidentifiable to my ears but definitely Asian with inflections of English and American.

Fishing cat at Singapore Zoo,
courtesy of the Wild Cat Club site

There were walking paths as well, taking us past pretty little cloud leopards, through enclousures with fruit bats and flying foxes, fishing cats, pangolins, civets, thar. There were two leopards, one of them sleeping right next to the glass, another sprawled over the branch of a tree. I am always impressed by how large and how heavy the are, with dangerous skulls, but still how sleek. I was also impressed by the size of a snail that had popped out of the shrubbery to check out the pavement - its shell would have taken up a good portion of my hand - and quite taken with the tiny bats nibbling away at fruit in the Mangrove enclosure.

I have decided I would like to have a gaur or ankole as my next pet bovine, a red dhole for my canine companion, and a fishing cat to catch my dinner and sit by the fire at night.