Gardens By The Bay

This is the last post from our Southeast Asia trip focused solely on Singapore. I'll get straight to the point here: Gardens By The Bay is my favorite place in Singapore.

Seriously! Have I been to every place in Singapore? No, I certainly have not. But of all the places we set foot in that island / city / country earlier this year, GBTB (I cannot keep writing Gardens By The Bay every time so allow me to abbreviate about half the time from now on) was the best of the best. Maybe one day on a future visit, I will amend my "favorite place" statement about Singapore, but for now, I'm sticking with the opening statement of this post. 

If you are one of the three or four people who reads this blog regularly and actually retains the information, you may be thinking that I already wrote the best thing we did in Singapore was celebrate the dawning of the Year of the Dragon. What gives? Well, that's still true, but that celebration occurred over many venues. It involved Chinatown and our hotel and a couple of restaurants and the Marina Bay Sands casino and really the entire city, including some part of it happening at Gardens By The Bay. There's a difference here between best thing and best place and GBTB was the best place, hands down. 

I'll get into all the reasons why I think the Gardens was the best place we visited but for now just consider this: we spent eight nights in Singapore and we visited this place five times. Granted, some of it was Lunar New Year related but that certainly wasn't the case for every stop we made here. We went there a lot.

Gardens By The Bay was opened in 2011 as Singapore's newest national garden. The first of their national gardens, the Singapore Botanic Gardens, was established way back in 1859 when the place was still under British rule. It is still intact today with a variety of different natural habitats and tons of walking / jogging trails in addition to housing the world's largest collection of orchids. Two things about the Botanic Gardens: (1) the orchid collection is just stunning and (2) yes, people were somehow jogging and surviving in the February heat in Singapore. 

Singapore stuck with that single national garden for a while. Like pretty much a century and a half. They added their second, the Jurong Lake Gardens, in 2006 around the lake of the same name that was created in the 1970s when the city dammed the Sungei Jurong River. After that, they picked up the pace a little. GBTB was opened just five years later just south of the main downtown area and right adjacent to (surprise, surprise...) Marina Bay. 

Size-wise, Gardens By The Bay is the biggest of the three gardens, measuring in at just about 250 acres. If you need a point of comparison (and if you measure distance and area in New York City terminology), that's about 30% of the size of Central Park. That may not seem that big by comparison but if you've spent any appreciable amount of time in Central Park, you'll know it's massive. 250 acres is more than enough, especially in February in a humid place just north of the equator. It kept us plenty busy and sometimes plenty sweaty in our five visits. 

Gardens By The Bay as seen from the roof deck of the Marina Bay Sands. Looking south.

We saw and did a lot in Gardens By The Bay. We looked at plants. We walked a ton. We visited River Hongbao set up for Lunar New Year. We searched for otters. We ate. We took in a whole sculptural menagerie of tons of different animals multiple times. And we got lost more than once on a quest to find one single attraction. It's not super well signposted in places, although the River Hongbao thing may have complicated that. And yes, we saw one otter. Just one. And just the head. It still counts.

We also missed a lot in Gardens By The Bay. Of the five major attractions in the park that require admission fees, we missed three of them, including the Cloud Forest and the Supertree Observatory, both of which I had on my list before we set foot in Singapore. We also missed a lot of the park areas that didn't require admission, including most, if not all, of the heritage gardens that honor four different cultures that make Singapore what it is today. I said the place was big. You are bound to miss some stuff in just a week in town where you only visit once every other day.

With the possible exception of our meal at Satay By The Bay, we pretty much loved everything we did in GBTB, but I did have three favorites. And just so I can remember what I got out of this place, here goes my favorite stuff to do in my favorite place in Singapore. At least until I go back and find something MORE favorite.

Flower Dome

There are two massive greenhouses at Gardens By The Bay. You can see them both in the overhead view photograph a couple of pics before this paragraph. We planned to visit both but found ourselves short on time. Faced with only visiting one of the two, we opted for Flower Dome and passed on Cloud Forest.

Now, given a normal week in Singapore (meaning NOT Lunar New Year) I think I would have opted (and I am wrongly assuming I am the only decision maker here) for the Cloud Forest. Forests appeal to me in a way that flowers do not necessarily. Or maybe it's that when it comes to greenhouses, the ordinary sometimes for me beats out the extraordinary. But the Flower Dome, which features a series of rotating seasonal exhibits focused on (you guessed it...) flowers, was in full-on Lunar New Year celebration mode featuring a series of incredible looking dragons. Thus...Flower Dome won out.

Now, for sure, the dahlias (which before I wrote this post I had no idea were native to Mexico and Central America) were spectacular and the dragons just blew us away. But I found something else in the Flower Dome that had nothing to do with flowers: a baobab tree. Or actually, a number of baobab trees. I'm fascinated by these things. I remember the first one I ever saw in person near the immigration station or hut or whatever it was in Namibia. 

I love how strange these trees are, with massive trunks to retain water for years or even decades with tiny little branches with even tinier leaves. I've been in love with these trees ever since I read The Little Prince. They still amaze me today. The ones in the flower dome weren't quite the size of those in the wild in Africa, but I'll take laying eyes on a baobab tree any day. I feel there is unfinished business out there with me and baobabs, but that's in an as yet unplanned trip.

Next time: Cloud Forest. Have to!

Kingfisher Wetlands

On some level here's how we viewed Gardens By The Bay: it's a giant open space with lots of trees and plants and the occasional body of water. Sounded like the perfect opportunity to see what kind of birds we could find in Singapore. We'd been on a quest for unique birdlife on a guided tour the previous week in Cambodia. Why not see what kind of avian life there was in GBTB. But this time we'd just do it ourselves. 

We picked a spot called Kingfisher Wetlands. They should have kingfishers in Kingfisher Wetlands, yes? Made sense to us.

And I get it...we are a little obsessed with birdwatching. But hey...if there are some species we can't see at home, why not. Plus it's free! And let's face it, this is like one of the big attractions of birdwatching. It costs pretty much nothing.

We set out one morning with our good camera bright and early and hopped on the Singapore MRT down to the Bayfront station and started walking. The wetlands (which are, of course, wholly manmade) are towards the south side of the Gardens, and even though it was an early hour, we still got pretty hot and sweaty on the way there. Or at least I did. Now, bring on the kingfishers.

The pond at Kingfisher Wetlands (top) and not the kingfisher we came to see (bottom).

We know full well that when it comes to birdwatching, the early bird definitely does get the worm. When the sun gets too high in the sky and day is bright and the temperatures are a bit uncomfortable, the birds tend to hide. It was early when we got to Kingfisher Wetlands but it was no longer cool. No kingfishers at Kingfisher Wetlands. Whether it was the heat and the light or something else...nothing. Just a couple of very large metal kingfisher sculptures. 

I'll admit, this was not the best birdwatching trip we've had either on vacation or at home. But we did get a great look at a black-naped oriole and one or maybe two yellow-vented bulbuls. These are not birds we see at home. Curiously the yellow-vented bulbul has about as much yellow as the yellow-rumped warbler here in Virginia, which is to say not a whole lot. Whoever named these species had to have had some color blindness. Or some wishful thinking.

Yellow-vented bulbul. I guess there's some yellow towards the tail area.

I am confident that there are a whole lot more birds available for the spotting in cooler times at GBTB. Maybe next time. We did manage to spy an olive sunbird with its characteristic iridescent feathers and long curved bill, but it was at a significant distance and like other sunbirds, tended not to stay still very long for a good picture. Next time, maybe. Always with the next time.

Supertrees

The stars of Gardens By The Bay, though, are probably the Supertrees. These massive metal structures that are covered in living greenery dominate the views within the Gardens, and each of the three groves of these things is a landmark of sorts within the property. And when I write that they are probably the stars, I don't just mean for us. I mean for everyone. They are without question the symbol of the Gardens. 

There are a total of 18 Supertrees within the confines of the Gardens: 12 in the main grove towards the center of the park and two smaller groves of three each to the east and south of the main grove. At their tallest, they tower about 500 feet above the surface of the paths that connect the parts of GBTB. Some are equipped with solar panels to harvest energy from the sun and all are covered with plants that do not require soil to grow. This last point is not necessarily obvious without a closeup look at the Trees. When you do get one, you may find some of the plants are zip-tied onto the structure along with the irrigation system that supplies the plants with water. 

I guess these things can glom onto trees in the wild but cannot attach themselves to the smooth metal of the Supertrees.

Supertrees: close-up and super, super close-up.

The Supertrees are the focus of two of the Gardens' signature paid admission experiences: the Supertree Observatory and the OCBC Skyway (OCBC is the sponsor of the Skyway). Like the two greenhouses on property, we intended to do both of these things but ran out of time in our five visits. We ended up just doing the Skyway, which is a suspended walkway that takes you between and around a few of the Supertrees in the central grove. 

I always value seeing the world from different perspectives and the very short walk on the Skyway got that for me (after we were called off the Skyway due to a flash lightning storm, that is and had to sort of argue our way back on since we'd been on the Skyway less than five minutes). You get to see the tops of the Supertrees up close, get to look down on a part of the park and its patrons and get an unobscured view of the Marina Bay Sands casino to the north of the Gardens. I'm not saying the Skyway added a ton to our GBTB experience, but I'm glad we did it.

View from the OCBC Skyway.

The best thing that happens with the Supertrees, and likely the main draw to the Gardens at nightfall, is the nightly light and music show centered around the main grove of trees in the center of the property. If there's one thing that is a must, must see at GBTB, it's the nighttime Supertree show. 

I don't know what it is about light shows and fireworks and things like that, but people are suckers for this type of entertainment. And I'm counting myself in here without question. One of the reasons we kept visiting the Gardens was to see the light show. Three of our visits were centered around this attraction, and it's not the same show every night. The lights, the colors, the sequence of illuminations and the music really has to be one of the best free attractions in the city of Singapore. It was absolutely spectacular every time we saw it, although we found it to be best right in the middle of the grove and not on the outskirts. Yes, it's crowded but it's worth it and the crowd disperses fast. We found a lot of people lost focus on the show and left halfway through. 

Pro tip here: the two non-central groves of Supertrees do NOT light up night. We made that mistake the first time we were there and had to hustle to get to the center of the Gardens to catch most of the show. 

The pictures we got from our three Supertree shows are some of the best of the two plus weeks we spent in Southeast Asia. It's appropriate therefore that I am starting and ending this post with two very differently colored shots of these shows. It's also appropriate that I am ending the Singapore focused posts in this blog with a nighttime view of the Supertrees. 

Now I just need to go back to Singapore and try to find something better. I have no doubt that left to our own devices and given enough time and money from this point forward, we will definitely go back to Singapore. Just have to see how fast it gets to the top of the list again. This place is incredible.