Photos from Singapore: Palawan Beach and Sentosa

Here's the set from Palawan Beach, Sentosa Island and Universal Studios, Singapore. These are just the general images--I have already posted the interesting ones in previous posts. The last image is a panorama I created from 3 shots. I have a 360-panorama of the area, but it looks rather complicated and confusing, so instead I put the simpler one.

Singapore apparently does not have any 'natural' beaches, so Palawan beach, like all the other Singaporean beaches, is made from foreign sand. It does not look like that though--50,000 tonnes of sand brought in to fill in the fertile humus to create a beach do their job well. The tiny islands on the right of the picture on the right are all artificial too.

The Sentosa Island has been leased to some resort group(RWS) who are making radical changes to it. Much of the greenery of the island is gone, and has been replaced by huge casinos, hotels and yet-non-functioning Universal Studios. There are not many palm and mangrove trees left, so the ones on the right stand testament to Singapore's natural past, where Lions roamed even until the early sixties.

This human-cable-car was called Omega jump when I did it several years ago, so I am assuming it's still that. This platform connects the main Sentosa Island to one of the smaller islands. One jump was 25 Sin$; if that sounds expensive, consider that the parking fee for a private vehicle in the island is 10 Sin$ (~Rs 600) an hour.

The fun thing about the jump is that even though it looks scary and dangerous, it really is not. You are connected to the rope in two ways: through a handle(not shown in the pictures), and a safety harness. That way, even if you let go your grip, you wont fall down. The extra security is too sissy for some people, so they simply fall down on the harness(as shown in the pictures)

After strolling around the beach, we went to the Tiger Tower(originally Carlsberg Tower; they're sponsored by Beer companies). It is from that vantage point that I took a lot of pictures of the Sentosa Island. The panorama at the end was taken from the top of the Tiger tower.

As I was saying, the Island has changed a lot recently. One of the iconic image of the Island was the building on the right, which housed the trans-Island cable car. The Island was marketed as a natural getaway for Singaporeans tired of the concrete jungle, and the cablecar and opportunity to go all around the Island at once. Since the 'natural' part of the Island is more or less gone, they decided that the cablecar did not make sense any more. now the cablecar station is a curio shop.

Once upon a time, the Merlion in Sentosa was one of the major attractions of Singapore. Everyone who went there would want to take a picture next to the official symbol of the Singaporean republic. As Sentosa was redeveloped, the Merlion began to get sidelined, and now it is only a reminder of what the Island once was. When we did go to the Merlion (after almost forgetting to) we were concerned more about its sorry state than impressed by it.

These Island-wide cars did not exist before the redevelopment. After Resorts Worlds Sentosa (the group behind the redevelopment) changed the 'natural' image of Sentosa to 'yearrh, lets gamble, this is Vegas, baabiee' they needed those cars for the roads.

In the evenings, you would be very lucky to get one of those. The place is terribly crowded, and there are extremely long lines to get on any kind of transportation available. We had to fight really hard to get on the monorail that got us out of Sentosa to the train station, so we could not even dream of getting on one of those in late evenings.

THIS is the dream: at a beachside restaurant with palms and mangroves and banana trees all around, a fountain where little children like to get wet and their mothers come running to scold them after which they try running away, and the entire family has to come to catch the little getaway wimp, and in the end everyone is so tired and hungry they order a huuge meal and have a great time.
I adore this place. Could the ambience get any better? Cool wind blowing, lights bright enough to make everything visible but not so much that they attract insects, and comfortable benches where you can sit for hours doing nothing but staring at the stars and espying on other people...

And the final picture is a panorama of resorts world sentosa. The buildings on the left are the Casino and the 4000-room hotel, the thing on the right is the Universal Studios, which was still  under construction when we were there.