This blog has not been updated for some time now. (It has, in fact, just yesterday, which shows how long it has taken me to get this one posted.) I’m not sure whether this is because I have been too busy (I HAVE been busy) or because I have lost some of my former enthusiasm for blogging. I suspect that it is a combination of the two and that the things I have been busy with have supplanted blogging at the forefront of my attention. That, and the fact that this blog is about ‘Life in Phana’ and inevitably my life here has become more routine and less of a novelty to me.
So what have I been busy doing? Well, back in April I had to leave the country to renew my visa. Usually I just go across the border to Laos at Chong Mek, and I’m back home a few hours after I left. But this time I couldn’t do that because there was not enough space in my passport for a Lao visa – it fills a whole page, and then there is the departure stamps from Thailand and Laos, and the new arrival stamp into Thailand. So I decided to go down to Singapore, which I had never visited before. The Air Asia flights to and from Ubon made good connections at Suvannaphumi Airport, so the travelling was all quite straightforward. Except that when we arrived at Singapore there was a fierce storm out of sight below the clouds so we circled round for more than an hour and then ran out of fuel and were diverted to Johor Bahru in Malaysia. There we had to wait while a Singapore Airlines plane on the same errand was refueled ahead of us.
We stayed four nights in Singapore, at the Rider’s Lodge, a friendly and pleasantly calm place to stay away from the city centre. It is set in a nice garden and is part of something called Turf City, which was probably once a race course and is now home to lots of activities like horse-riding, gymnastics and dog-training, all housed in the old stable blocks.
One of the oddities of the Rider’s Lodge is that it is Indian-owned and largely Indian staffed, but one of the selling-points in its brochure is that you can “re-live the colonial experience” while staying there. That seems very generous, but hopefully it does not give mem sahibs the right to be beastly to the staff!
We ate in a nearby Indian restaurant on two nights, a French restaurant one night, and once next to the Singapore River at Siem Reap II, which is part of the Indo-Chine restaurant outside the Asian Cultural Centre. One lunch-time we had some excellent tapas. What we didn’t have is Singapore noodles, my standby when eating Chinese food in England.
Singapore has the reputation of being extremely well-ordered, but this photo I took suggests that not all is as it perhaps should be:
I take it this is not one of them trying to get away.
For a big, modern city, Singapore has plenty of open spaces and we spent some time at Bukit Timah where there are walking trails through the forested hillside
and on another day we visited the McRitchie Reservoir Park:
At both places there are long-tailed macaques, which of course was why we went there. Both places were recommended by Dr Michael Gumert, an associate professor at Nanyang University and an expert on long-tailed macaques. We were lucky enough to spend a very pleasant evening with him over a meal at Picotin, the French bistro in Turf City. The situation regarding these monkeys is very different from here in Phana. The monkeys, though, are much the same:
Back in Phana, time may stand still, but people are always on the move. So my next post, I think, will be about some of the recent comings and goings.
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