Singapore Adventures - Days 2 & 3

On Sunday we came back to the Gardens
by the Bay, via a side trip to see the Merlion, a
neat statue of a lion head with a mermaid tail;
no pictures of that, as I was insanely hot and
a bit cranky by then, and the hoards of Japanese
tourists around it didn't help.  The these are the
Supertrees in the daytime.

The gardens are large, with may different
areas, and tons of little quirky and super cool
sculptures and artistic touches.  This was a
neat chair made of driftwood.

The kids' garden - the metal rods were flowers,
and they rotated spraying water.  SO tempting...

View of the Sands from the Garden by the
Bay.

Another of the garden areas - these massive
stone sculptures reminded me ginger root!

Lots and lots of neat touches everywhere.  This
was a cool rock formation that they highlighted
by putting a circular window into a wall - very cool

This one is hard to see here, but this is an educational
exhibit about the different types of trees in the area.  And,
instead of just pictures, the cube at the center is actually a
cut-out with mirrored sides, with the back showing the
type of tree that's being described - so kind of like a
window display.  Super creative and impressive and neat!

I utterly fell in love with the topiary - especially
this guy's eyelashes!!!  (a ferny red plant)

Another super cool area - this is the mushroom dome -
it's a metal dome with pictures of various underground
bugs on the brown background, and in the center
are these cool glass mosaic mushrooms that reach up
to about your knees;  there are cool acoustics under the
dome, and you really get the sense of "being underground"
somehow.

One of the huge highlights was the cloud forest.
Inside one of  two massive glass enclosures, it's
a multi-story waterfall.  You take the elevator to the
top after walking a full circle on the ground level, and then
walk down these precarious-looking walkways through
the stunning space.  Super unique and breath-taking!

Throughout this area, too, there are all sorts of
neat sculptures.  This dragon was particularly
fetching!

And very well situated in his environment.

Though inside the enclosure it is quite cool,
since we had first walked around the outdoor
space, I had by then sweated buckets and was
all hot... but happy.

A baby dragon on the right.... and if you look super
carefully you may (or may not) see a real live gecko
hanging out on the left top horizontal part of the
cool driftwood piece, just under the tree

Cool fiddlehead sculpture

The walkway alternates between being outside of
the waterfall space, and being behind it;  this is a
view from "inside", or behind the waterfall, through
one of the organically-shaped openings

Again from "inside" the waterfall, a view out through
the glass enclosure, out to the bay and beyond

Sculptural canoes

I really liked these flat-leaved ferny plants

View of the supertrees from inside the
cloud forest!

Vertigo-inducing shot looking down from one of
the high parts of the walkway;  the purple
barriers were in place as crowd control for the
area where you first go up to the top, though we
were lucky and got to bypass them due to only
moderate crowds

Looking forward on the sky path in the cloud forest

There were a bunch of these really cool organic
shapes in the concrete wall structures which had
a view out onto the waterfall or just had all sorts of
flora around them

And yes, you got sprayed a bit in parts by the waterfall :)

Super cool piece of driftwood displayed to
advantage in one of the organically-shaped openings

Lots of these really amazing part-driftwood part-
sculpture pieces throughout

From certain angles you could see where they
were pumping the mist in -  it made for a truly
magical experience of the cloud forest

Cutie stone snails

Wouldn't dream of it! :)

Such a simple but super cool idea: they put up
magnifying glasses in front of part of different
plants so you can see them in close-up - cool!!

Another amazing driftwood artwork;  notice
the spirals in the lion's eyeballs - he must have
smoked smth really good

The aesthetics extended to the benches you could
actually sit on - here, a crocodile head.  Truly - just
amazingly done in every detail, this place!

After a blah - but restful - lunch in one of the cafes,
we headed back into the second of the two glass-
encased buildings, to see the Flower Dome, a
more familiar style of conservatory.  Here, more
super cool driftwood sculptures - this is a goose

We came during their sekura festival, with flowering
cherry trees;  unfortunately this drew huge
crowds, including roaming gangs of dressed-up
anime fans, who brought with them tripods and big
cameras and light reflectors, and they and their
fanatical fans blocked large sections of the public space;
yea, definitely not cool...

A Winnie the Pooh tableau - see Piglet there,
to Pooh's right?  Something else curious to notice here -
that yellow forsythia on the right?  Apparently
it's exotic enough here to make it into a conservatory!
(Shout out to Monika here for teaching me to
recognize forsythia :)

Continuing on that "exotic for here" trend, we saw a
"California garden" display, with citrus...

... and various other items to which my first reaction was: "oh!
this totally just looks like dinner!"  :)  Thyme, leeks, carrots,
parsley, fennel, rosemary, beets, grape vine, chives...  yum. :)
(I guess kind of like in Phipps back home we have a cacao tree)

Cool sculptures here as well

And a whole series of sculptures based on
Alice in Wonderland - really well done and
beautifully integrated in the surrounding gardens:
the smoking caterpillar

A paige

Queen of hearts offing their heads

They also had a number of  baobabs!  These are
the trees we all know about from the Little Prince.
Neat!

The baobabs have funny shapes, really neat.

I'm not a huge fan of cacti, but there were some
really neat ones here that I don't think I'd seen before.
These guys were these weird brain-shaped alien
things... I'm convinced they will one day take
over the world.

These guys were really neat cos each layer unfolds
from the central stalk, and you can see an impression
of the layer above on the leaves below

My parting artsy shot of the baobabs before we headed out.

On the way back from the gardens, I noticed that
even the trees outside have their roots break out
through the bark to get at all that moisture in
the air

The gardens were amazing, but also exhausting.
We probably spent about 6 hours there, and were so
utterly drenched and wiped, that we just took it easy
the rest of the evening.  Here, it's Monday morning
and we're checking out the hotel rooftop infinity pool
before grabbing some brunch and heading back out to the airport

Lovely infinity pool with cool view;  the 2
girls were taking photos of each other for
most of an hour there

pool!

I didn't want to deal with lugging a wet bathing
suit, so opted to just dip in my feet;  Orny took
the full plunge

Made sure to take a pic of pretty Singaporean
money before exchanging it all back to Ringgits 

A yummy Italian lunch at a cute restaurant on the way
back to the airport