Journey to Oz – Day two, part two – Singapore Stopover a.m. – the BIG BIG mistake.

In my previous blog post I mentioned a terrible mistake I was going to make today. And I’m going to describe this hideous, terrible mistake in such vivid detail later that you will not make the same mistake should you ever get the opportunity to visit Singapore. At least not if you have even one functioning brain cell.

The day began beautifully well, as you will no doubt remember, with us enjoying a delicious traditional breakfast before we ventured out of the airport and into the scorching, sweaty heat of central Singapore.

The untimely death of Tony, (an old family friend who lived in Singapore and had planned to meet us and give us a tour), had left us with only a day to research and plan an alternative Tony-free itinerary on our own. I wasn’t scared about exploring an Asian city without a guide. Afterall, I’d visited Hong Kong as a single mum about ten years ago and found it incredibly easy to navigate and the people very friendly and helpful. Singapore, being a major international business hub and holiday destination, has a reputation for being very tourist-friendly with English spoken widely and street signs in multiple languages to make things simple.

Without Tony’s local knowledge to guide us, I’d thrown myself at the last minute mercy of the Tripadvisor website, and in particular the forums where you can ask fellow experienced travellers for their recommended itineraries. This is extremely useful if you only have a few hours in a city and want to get a taste of the best it has to offer, or find affordable places to eat in what is otherwise (especially in Singapore) more suited to those on a bigger budget than we were. I’d jotted down a few possible place names and tourist attractions from the posts I’d speed-read whilst packing at the last minute and tried and failed to get André into any meaningful discussion of anywhere we would go, much like the rest of our trip which he’d rather naively left all to me to organise.

So, he trusted me to lead him around the hubbub of Singapore and I trusted the people on Tripadvisor who had either lived here or visited here multiple times. I had no reason to doubt them, and André, knowing me to be a relatively smart cookie (apart from that time I set fire to my hair), had no reason to doubt me. So he willingly followed my suggestions to get a daily metro pass and hotfoot it into China Town, to look at some of the local Hindu and Buddist temples.

The metro was clean and efficient – much like every other underground train station I’ve ever been on anywhere in the world apart from our home country of England where you’re lucky to get a seat at all let alone one that doesn’t have dried chewing gum wodged into the fabric and some racist graffiti scratched into the walls. The seats here were spotless but were hard and uncomfortable (I guess most wipe clean things are), and we shuffled our bums around on the tough green plastic seats for a few stops. In the searing morning heat, I reached through my backpack for a bottle of water and stopped myself just before I took a sip when I spotted a sign above the windows in front of me that banned drinking or eating on the tube trains.

‘Oops!’ I exclaimed, nudging André. ‘I’d better wait. I’ve heard they are very strict about local laws like this here. I don’t want to get in trouble.’ And I clocked a few people giving me judging sideways glances as I hid the bottle back in my bag swiftly and carried on reading the sign which also banned flammable materials, smoking, pets on the trains and a strange looking, large prickly fruit called a Durian.

‘I’ve heard of those!’ I said to André, as I pointed up at the sign. ‘A local delicacy. They’re supposed to be a bit whiffy, which is probably why they are banned on trains, but everyone on Tripadvisor said we should try one if we are here and that they’re actually pretty delicious.’

We arrived at our stop and took the escalators out into the daylight, where we were hit by a scene of vibrant sounds and colours that seemed somehow bleached in the streaming sun into muted ice cream shades of pistachio, sky blue, and bubblegum pink – as if the locals had somehow borrowed their colour palette from a 1950s movie set by the sea. The streets bustled with life, trade, flashy shop signs, strings of overhead coloured flags and paper lanterns fluttering in the breeze – very reminiscent of Hong Kong but perhaps with a hint of a European flare in there somewhere. With Google Maps as our guide, we perambulated along this humming avenue, admiring the street tat of the market stalls, reminding ourselves that anything we bought we’d have to carry and somehow shoehorn into our already overstuffed backpacks.

A trader in a dapper suit called out to me. ‘I can make you a pair of trousers that actually fit!’, gesturing to his bespoke tailoring shop, with a cheeky smile on him that made me laugh out loud.

‘Bloomin cheek.’ I said, as I walked past him, nervously pulling down the ankles on my slightly too short harem pants that had ridden up my backside, revealing my unsexy socks below.

Our first stop on the Tripadvisor itinerary was the Sri Mariamman Temple – the oldest Hindu temple in the whole of Singapore. Free and welcoming for anyone to enter, you must first slip off your shoes and leave them outside on one of the street racks. André was concerned someone might nick our sweaty trainers, but I assured him that both the sanctity of the location and the security cameras would put anyone off pinching our minging footwear.

The entrance of the temple is marked by a huge multi-level tower of hundreds of sculpted deities, each hand-painted in that same 1950s muted beach hut palette. Something about the bright cartoon-like eyes on the statues is a little unnerving to an outsider, but the overall spectacle of the place is truly sweeties for the eyes and so we glide in, moist socks slipping against the cool stone slabs, feasting our eyes on the rich banquet of colours.

Gods, dancers, fruit, flowers and giant cows are stacked one upon the other, all around. Painted frescoes adorn ceilings and walls, mandalas laid out on floors and painted under roof canopes. An old lady is singing her heart out at one of the alters, where she and others have placed offerings of fruit. Her song is unrehearsed, un-selfconscious and from the heart. I feel instrusive in her holy space, but intrude further still, knowing this is my one chance to see, but hoping not to offend.

Further into the temple courtyard is a little stone house – a house within a house, as it were. The door is partially ajar but there is a sign that says I may not enter. I cannot help but peek in to this secret space and instantly wish I hadn’t when I see that the entire house is filled from top to bottom with a giant head staring back at me like the Face of Bo from Doctor Who!

The lady coming after me offers a little bow and some chanted words to the giant face glaring from behind the door. To her, this enormous head is comforting and important. To me, the ignorant tourist, behaving in all the usually clumsy ways that ignorant tourists do, it is the stuff of nightmares with its enormous eyes and sharp fangs and giant fluffy Stalin moustache.

It turns out this is the great warrior Sri Aravan, who in Hindu folk legends was married to Krishna (who took female form to be joined with him before Aravan died), thus symbolically ‘giving birth’ to all the transgender or ‘third gender’ people in the world. His legend, whilst ultimately a sad and complicated one of personal sacrifice in war, is still fairly positive and jolly compared to the stories that explain many of the other deities here such as one goddess, normally worshipped for her protection of children who appears to be ripping someone’s baby away from their womb.

But I recognise that a whirlwind tour of such a site in a few short minutes is never going to scratch the surface of understanding such a complex and ancient religion. So I resign myself to simply enjoying the sensual delights of this visually startling display, acknowledging its great history and significance to the Hindu people, and in particular the refugees it has traditionally welcomed, fed, sheltered and given work to until they found other ways to settle in Singapore.

Knowing we only have a few short hours to explore the city, we reclaim our footwear (not stolen, but crisply dried out in the searing heat), and wander further into the streets on foot.

We are halfway up the next street when I start to get a whiff of sewage. I begin to glance judgily towards grills in the gutter, recognising the familiar smell of human excrement in heat that you often get emanating from drains in foreign countries.

André, with his anosmia (no sense of smell) is spared this holiday delight wherever we go and just has to take my word for it when we need to avoid a particularly stinky place or, on occasion, stinky person. He has noticed me wrinkling up my nose as the sewage smell gets stronger. Then as we get to the end of the street I see the real source of the smell.

Before us is a café and shop selling Durian, the large prickly fruit that are banned on public transport here and yet Tripadvisor moguls suggest everyone is brave enough to try while visiting Singapore.

‘Ugh!’ I declare. ‘That’s what they mean about the smell being bad. I thought it was the drains!’, I tell Andre.

‘But we’ve got to try it. Apparently it’s quite nice if you can get past the smell. Which obviously doesn’t apply to you, but believe me, it smells of dung. It really stinks of poo. But apparently we’ve got to try this.’

And so bravely, foolishly, we ask for a packet of freshly prepared Durian from the display of ready prepped fruits in little polystyrene cartons and fresh whole fruits piled one upon the other like giant yellow lichees.

We are shown into a little room at the back of the fruit stand, garishly lit by gently flickering flourescent lights where a family sits at a table, seemingly enjoying their fruit.

We stare at the polystyrene platter, ten dollars worth, sealed with clingfilm as we sit at a plastic covered table where there is a box of disposable plastic gloves for our use.

‘It must be messy to eat,’ We mutter, as we cautiously unwrap our prepared Durian. The pale yellow fleshy lumps look like the peeled decomposing testicles of a camel. The smell….unbelievably so much worse close up than from half a street away where I could begin to smell it from. I tried to place the familiarity of that smell, and then it came to me – it was the smell that comes from our food scraps bin after we’ve left decomposing dog food meat in it for several days in the summer. It is the smell of rotting flesh. I want to gag. But I’m doing this thing. It simply has to taste much better than it smells or no one, NO ONE would touch this with a barge pole.

But no. No it did not taste better than it smelled. I have it in my mouth and it is the texture of dog poop on my tongue and between my teeth and sticking to the roof of my mouth. My taste buds are searching in desperate ernest for anything remotely pleasant – PLEASE let there be something pleasant soon, even an aftertaste of something that resembles ANYTHING I should have put in my mouth. But NO…NO NO…it just keeps getting worse. I can’t believe I fell for this Tripadvisor arsehole’s recommendation that every tourist HAS to try this rancid piece of shit that I still cannot believe I am eating, still hoping and praying that any second now…any moment now PLEASE DEAR GOD it will start to taste like food. But no…the smell is getting worse, like an old rotting used condom that has been discarded into a bin but flew past it by mistake, sticking instead to a nearby floor where it stays, stuck and decomposing until the horrendous rancid smell alerts you to its continued unwelcome presence in the room. And I have put this in my mouth!!! The taste…like rotting flesh…like I have somehow been tricked into eating the corpse of my dead grandmother, but it’s not even as nice as the rotting corpse of someone I love as much as my grandmother. I genuinely feel like I have been made to eat the undead – I’m UNCLEAN! I’M UNCLEAN! I feel utterly poisoned…beyond poisoned…contaminated…like I’ve contracted something that’s going to make me decompose from the inside too. I’ll become one of the Walking Dead within a few hours. I feel physically sick, but I know there’s no point trying to sick it back up. It’s got me. I’ve been turned. The evil dead are in my cells now, spreading their hideousness and no matter how much I try to wash away the taste of someone’s undead grandma and that old used condom with the aftertaste of dog meat/dog poo….it’s too late. I’ve spent TEN FUCKING DOLLARS on this cruel cruel tourist trap of a so called FRUIT and I’m livid.

André can’t even smell it and even he is wretching. He keeps eating, keeps trying to find the good bits. He can taste a sweetness, a congealed custardyness which he makes sound almost nice if you were prepared to cut your own nose off with a knife and fill the hole with Polyfilla just to stomach eating this FRUIT OF THE SHITTING DEVIL but even he is gagging as he tries to swallow. I watch him in disgust for a minute, but I cannot stay there any longer. If I do not get away from the smell I will be sick everywhere. I know now why they provide gloves (or your hands would smell like you’d run them through a river of diarrohea before kneading some hot rotting meatloaf for an hour). I know now why they ban it on public transport here (because you would want to kill the person next to you if they had one on them…brutally…for the protection of all society and all that is holy). And talking of people I want to kill. Those people on Tripadvisor who said this is something every tourist needs to try….I WILL find you and I WILL kill you.

I know now that this has been a terrible, TERRIBLE mistake and I have to run far away and get something…anything to take the taste away. I’d honestly rather eat my own honey glazed arsehole than ever EVER go near one of those evil fruits again. Let my suffering be a warning to you all. Let my sacrifice not be for nothing. I have tasted Evil in its purest form so that you don’t have to. Please spread this warning far and wide to spare any innocents falling prey to the same fate I did. And when I die, burn my corpse to prevent the contamination spreading.

Durian. It has spikes for a reason.

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