Day 19, Year 4: Last Day in Singapore
Date: Monday, November 10, 2008
Weather: Rain All Day
Location: One 15 Marina, Sentosa Island, Singapore
It rained ALL day today and as I walked around with my new umbrella, a “gift” from the grocery store on Orchard Road for spending so much money there using our Mastercard, I knew for sure that it was time to leave here. When your umbrella is advertising Mastercard, you know you have spent more money than you should have. So tomorrow morning we will be moving on unless the weather is just too terrible. It would have been no fun at all to head into the Singapore Straits today with pouring rain and low visibility. If it is that way in the morning, we will possibly stay put, but since that means going through the check-our procedure a second time, it will have to be pretty bad to keep us here.
Mark spent his morning going to the “One Stop Shop” to get us checked out of Singapore. I have no idea why they call it that because you still have to go out to the anchorage area and get your final clearance there. After braving the pouring rains to get that done, Mark then headed to the Sim Lin “technology” Tower to buy a battery charger. Between the Sim Lin Tower and Sim Lin Square you can buy almost anything electronic that you can think of, and he was successful in getting the battery charger for us. Since we have not been able to get a converter to work with our inverter, we have no real way to keep our freezer and other electronics going without running our engine. That will be impossible when we get to Langkawi and have the boat out of the water to paint the bottom. So yesterday when Mark visited another boat that uses a battery charger without going through the inverter, he decided that this is what we should do. The case was made even stronger when we found out that the battery charger will be more expensive in Malaysia, so now we are the proud owners of three-stage battery charger. While Mark was doing all of this, I was here cleaning the outside of the boat in the pouring rain. Rain in Singapore comes down bringing all the pollution of a big city with it, and everything white on the boat has turned an ugly shade of gray. While I was at it, I took down all of the sun screens and scrubbed those. Once Mark returned, we headed back into the Vivo Center to do that last bit of grocery shopping and then came back in time to check-out with the marina. We paid $525 Singapore for twenty nights here, including electricity and water, which is less than $18 US per day. Not bad for the type of accommodations and free transportation in and out of the city. You can’t stay in a backpacker here for much less than that, and One Fifteen is hardly a backpacker. We actually sprung for dinner here at the club tonight. Tina and Robert of Shirena joined us. The food and the company were both great.
During dinner we talked about our future plans. Shirena will be spending another year here in Southeast Asia before moving on to the Mediterranean. Robert was giving us a sales pitch for going through the Med rather than going around South Africa. Being from Poland, he has traveled extensively throughout Europe. As has Tina and most other cruisers we have met from around the world. In our experience, it is only the US cruisers who have very little travel experience out of the country. Most Australians and Europeans have backpacked through part of Europe at some point just after college while Americans are more concerned with just getting a job. This led to a discussion of why that is the case. Is it finances that keeps young Americans from doing this, or is it just attitude.
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| 081110 Day 19 Singapore–One15 Marina |
