There was no urgent need for us to cover Singapore on foot before the conference. We could have filled the spare day more gently, seen selected places and arrived back with sufficient dignity to enter our room in the usual manner. Instead, something in the prospect of being there drew us out and kept us interested beyond the point where comfort would have suggested we had done quite enough.
The Places We Found and the Things We Never Went Looking For
There is a map of Singapore hanging on the wall in the Man Cave, with the route of a walk highlighted across it. Among the things we have brought home from our travels, it might seem an odd choice to put on display, but I only have to look at that line to feel the backpack against my wet shirt and remember Robyn completing the journey into our motel room on her hands and knees.
The map does not show that last little section in sufficient detail. Cartographers are generally more concerned with roads and intersections than with the precise point at which a woman decides she has provided enough upright support for her husband’s enthusiasm for exploring.
We had arrived in Singapore a day before a conference, which gave us an opportunity we were keen to use. There would be enough time spent indoors once proceedings began, and a city was sitting outside waiting to be investigated. We had a room in the hills adjacent to the city centre, a day available and the perfectly reasonable idea that we could go for a walk.
At that stage, going for a walk was still an innocent expression. It had not yet acquired the distance, the heat or the closing performance at the motel door. We wanted to see Singapore, and setting out on foot seemed the most direct way of doing it, even if our eventual route was to demonstrate a rather generous interpretation of direct.
Our starting point was at the far end of the Orchard Road shopping stretch, away from the gardens we would eventually reach. There is a temptation, remembering a day like this, to tidy it into a purposeful expedition with a clear beginning, a sensible route and carefully spaced opportunities for recovery. The map suggests a degree of organisation, but a highlighted line drawn over a completed journey has the considerable advantage of already knowing where it went.
Orchard Road supplies plenty of reasons for a walk to take longer than its distance suggests. Shopping centres gather along it with an assurance that makes the word shopping seem insufficient for the scale of the undertaking. Tangs, Wisma Atria, Ngee Ann City and Paragon belong to that stretch of Singapore, their names providing landmarks among buildings which seem capable of containing a substantial portion of a small Australian town. There is very little modesty about the enterprise, although when you have devoted that much space to encouraging people to spend money, modesty would probably interfere with the business model.
Then there are the great traders themselves, Prada, Gucci and Givenchy among the names announcing that a considerable amount of the world’s wealth has found somewhere to go shopping. Their shopfronts have a confidence quite independent of whether you can afford anything behind the glass. A handbag can occupy a display with so much space around it that you begin to suspect the vacant area is included in the price, while the restrained presentation somehow suggests that asking what it costs might expose you as someone who needs to know. I can admire the workmanship and the theatre of it all without necessarily wanting the transaction to appear on our next bank statement.
In Singapore’s heat, however, these establishments have an inducement which requires no interest whatsoever in designer labels. Beyond those doors is air conditioning, and after enough time on the footpath, that becomes a luxury whose value I understand completely. The invitation to come inside might officially concern fine leather, elegant clothing and the possibility of improving your standing in the world, but I was quite capable of hearing it as an offer to cool the patch of shirt trapped beneath my backpack. There is nothing like tropical humidity to give a man a sudden appreciation of a fashion house he had previously managed quite comfortably without.
We wandered in and out, enjoying the opportunity to look as well as the relief from the street. That is part of the pleasure of walking somewhere unfamiliar: you can enter a world you have no intention of purchasing and spend a little time seeing how it works. Of course, the people paying for the magnificent premises would prefer your interest to progress beyond an appreciation of their refrigeration. Somewhere between the cool air and the beautifully arranged merchandise lies the hope that you might part with a significant amount of your hard-earned, although I was inclined to think that getting us through the door was already a respectable achievement.
I would not attempt to allocate every doorway we entered to its proper place on the map now. What remains clear is the movement in and out, the shops and malls becoming part of the walk rather than separate destinations. We were investigating a metropolis, and some of the investigation happened to take place in premises where a person could stand without steadily marinating in his own clothing.
There is a particular freedom in looking through shops when buying anything is not the principal reason for being there. You can take an interest in how a place presents itself, what it considers desirable and how much room it is prepared to devote to persuading people they need something. A display can be worth looking at without anything in it needing to make the journey home to Smiths Lake.
The malls also offered a very persuasive argument for remaining indoors. Between their cooled interiors and the street outside lay a boundary which required no signposting whatsoever. You could cross it with your eyes shut and still have a sound understanding of which side you were on.
Outside, the heat and humidity made themselves part of everything we did. They were there between one shop and the next, through the crossings and along the footpaths, steadily adding their contribution to what had begun as an uncomplicated outing. Singapore was giving us plenty to look at, but it was collecting something for the privilege.
My backpack provided an especially effective means of measuring the transaction. Against my back, where air had little opportunity to do anything useful, the sweat accumulated until the contact between pack and shirt became one of the defining sensations of the day. I can forget the order of the shopping centres much more readily than I can forget that patch of wet fabric.
On a map, all this is remarkably easy. Your finger can travel from the shopping district towards the city centre without getting hot, becoming thirsty or discovering that the sensible item you put on your back has developed an intimate relationship with your shirt. Buildings occupy manageable little shapes, streets join neatly and the next place of interest never appears particularly demanding.
On foot, there is always the ground between them. We were covering that ground ourselves, taking in what lay along it, and each excursion indoors interrupted the effort without erasing what we had already spent. Coming out again meant resuming the same day in the same climate, however convincing the brief suggestion of another climate had been.
Yet we kept going, because there was still Singapore ahead of us. That is the part which interests me when I look back, perhaps more than any calculation of how far we walked. Discomfort had become quite clear, but so had our interest in seeing what came next, and for a considerable part of the day the interest retained the deciding vote.
Raffles should have offered a particularly civilised interruption. Some places arrive in your imagination long before you arrive outside them, and Raffles is one of those places. Its name carries an expectation of Singapore which no amount of glass and modern construction elsewhere quite replaces.
There was also the matter of a Singapore Sling. After walking through the heat, the prospect had acquired a merit which went well beyond ticking off something famous. A cold drink at Raffles would have fitted into our exploration beautifully, and I could see no reason why cultural appreciation and a gin-based refreshment should be considered separate activities.
Unfortunately, Raffles was closed for renovations. We had managed to get ourselves to Singapore, arrange an extra day, walk through the shopping district and present ourselves in a condition ideally suited to appreciating its hospitality, only to find that the hospitality was unavailable. There are disappointments in travel which are easier to take philosophically once you have had the drink you were hoping for.
We passed it without our Slings, leaving that particular piece of Singapore for another occasion. The hotel was still part of the experience, although in a less accommodating capacity than I had envisaged. It had given us something to talk about, but I would have preferred it to give us somewhere to sit.
Beyond that disappointment, the walk continued towards the bay and the gardens. The city had already occupied us through its shops and streets, and now there was the prospect of seeing what it had made of a very different sort of space. Our remaining energy might have welcomed a reduction in ambition, but the gardens were part of what we had come out to see.
Gardens by the Bay has a scale which changes the way you look at the city around it. Singapore has already demonstrated that it knows how to build upwards, and here even the idea of a tree has been given an extraordinary extension. The Supertrees, with planting climbing their structures and their broad canopies raised overhead, belong to a landscape in which gardening and engineering have entered into a very confident arrangement.
What appeals to me is the willingness to make something like that in the first place. There are practical considerations behind any great public space, and no doubt a succession of meetings, budgets and arguments which visitors are mercifully spared. Standing before the result, however, you are looking at a place someone was prepared to imagine beyond the immediate usefulness of the land beneath it.
For us, the gardens gave the day a breadth that a walk confined to shopping centres could never have supplied. We had come through a city busily displaying what it could sell and arrived at a place displaying what it could grow and create. Both belonged to Singapore, and having the two within the same day made the experience richer.
I would like to say the magnificence of the gardens caused us to forget the heat altogether, but my backpack would be entitled to dispute the evidence. Enjoyment did not dry my shirt or return the energy already used getting there. We were able to appreciate what we had reached while remaining thoroughly aware that we had reached it under our own steam.
Perhaps that helps explain why the day has stayed with me. The effort and the enjoyment were occurring together, neither waiting for the other to finish. We were tired in a place we were pleased to have seen, which is a perfectly possible condition, even if it is harder to sell than a photograph of two relaxed tourists looking entirely untroubled by their surroundings.
There was still the return journey, and we made it via the markets. I remember them as part of the day’s accumulation rather than as a list of stalls I could now reproduce with any confidence. After the scale and presentation of the malls, there was pleasure in a different concentration of shops and things to look at, another part of Singapore which would have remained elsewhere had we taken ourselves straight back.
The trouble with having an interest in a place is that it keeps supplying reasons to delay your arrival at somewhere comfortable. We had already done enough walking to justify going home, yet the markets were there and we were there, and those two facts have persuaded us into quite a few additions to journeys over the years. The room would still be waiting when we got back to it.
Our accommodation’s position in the hills had also remained unchanged during our absence. Whatever advantages that position offered, it could not arrange for the return to be downhill simply because we had had a substantial day. By then, the geographical details which had seemed incidental when we left were making a much more personal contribution to the outing.
We did get back, which is worth establishing before describing the manner of our arrival. Robyn reached the door of our room and, with the destination finally secured, lowered the terms on which she was prepared to complete the journey. She pulled herself inside on her hands and knees, bringing our exploration of Singapore to a finish no conference organiser would have thought to include in the programme.
That is the image which comes back whenever I look at the map. There is affection in the recollection, and humour, but the humour should not disguise how much the day had taken out of her. We had gone out to explore a city and returned having used a great deal more of ourselves than the original expression “go for a walk” had disclosed.
I had my own evidence of the effort in the state of my shirt and the place where the backpack had spent the day. Robyn’s arrival was more memorable, but we had both walked the route. It would be a very selective account if I stood comfortably outside her exhaustion as though I had conducted the whole exercise from an air-conditioned support vehicle.
Would we do it again? In a heartbeat, although I suspect we would be entitled to let that heartbeat settle down before setting off. Nothing about the ending has persuaded me that the day was a mistake.
We did what we set out to do. We explored, wandered into places, took in the city and gave ourselves the opportunity to discover how it felt to be there. The fact that our reserves were looking distinctly second-hand by the end does not remove any of that, and neither does it mean exhaustion was the purpose of the exercise.
I have no desire to turn Robyn’s progress across the threshold into an argument that a day only counts if it nearly finishes you. We could have covered less ground and still enjoyed ourselves, and a functioning Raffles might have improved matters considerably. What I cannot do is take the discomfort out of the memory without also taking away something of the particular day we had together.
We tried exploring on foot in Hong Kong as well, but it was a different experience. For me, it did not produce the same awe that Singapore did, although someone else could quite reasonably reverse that judgement. A willingness to walk does not guarantee that every city will reach you in the same way, and perhaps that uncertainty is another reason for going out to find out.
There was no urgent need for us to cover Singapore on foot before the conference. We could have filled the spare day more gently, seen selected places and arrived back with sufficient dignity to enter our room in the usual manner. Instead, something in the prospect of being there drew us out and kept us interested beyond the point where comfort would have suggested we had done quite enough.
I am still not sure what to call that something. Curiosity covers part of it, but it does not quite explain why a place can keep your attention when your body has begun submitting quite reasonable objections. There is a desire to give yourself to the occasion while you have it, perhaps because you know how easily a day somewhere unfamiliar can pass with very little of the place finding its way into you.
That does not mean we were pursuing some great revelation along Orchard Road. We were looking in shops, getting hot, hoping for a drink, enjoying gardens and making our way back through markets. Whatever larger meaning I might now find in it had to travel with those ordinary activities, wearing the same damp shirt.
The map hangs in the Man Cave because that ordinary day deserves its place there. I can follow the highlighted route and remember how much we managed to put into the space between leaving our room and finally getting back inside it. The line is perfectly still now, with no suggestion of what it took to draw it with our feet.
Somewhere near its end is Robyn, down on her hands and knees, hauling herself over the finish. Somewhere near its beginning are the two of us with a spare day and an eagerness to see Singapore, quite unaware of how we would eventually come through that door. I can look at the whole journey from the comfort of home, and still find myself siding with the two who set out.
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