Day -4 - Saturday, February 10, 2018

Upon arrival in Singapore's Changi Airport at 6:35am, we made our way to immigration where we waited in line for about 1/2 hour to clear immigration. We then collected our luggage and made our way to find the ground transportation to our hotel, the Ibis on Bencoolen. It was a little after 8am that our shuttle van showed up and we were on our way into the city to our hotel. It's about a 45 minute drive and the city was looking to be in nice shape.

At the Ibis, we didn't know if we could check in this early, but it was no problem. So we were able to take showers and prepare for our first day. We decided that we would ride the Hop On Hop Off bus which is now called the HIPPO. The bus stops right in front of the hotel which was really convenient. We purchased a 72 hour pass which would be good through 10:32am on Tuesday. The 7 routes are color coded and we ended up riding the blue, brown, red, and yellow lines. All of the lines come together at the Suntec Shopping Center and Exhibition Hall. Around lunch time, we enjoyed some great noodle soup at a vender in the food court in the basement of the mall. 

We then used the RED line to get us back to our hotel which turned out to be in a terrific location. It's only a 20 minute walk to Suntec and next to the hotel is a major open air market and two temples and a multi-story electronic mall wilth all kinds of gadgets and pieces and parts and repair services. Many of the repair vendors have piles of old cracked screens. It appears to be a big business! In the basement of the electronic mall was another food court which was a big lower in class than the Suntec one. But the Lasak soup was excellent. Oh, and I did find a tool to try to fix a broken handle on my rollon luggage. Plus I got to 'geek out' looking in the various shops.

Travel fatigue was starting to affect us, so we wandered back to our hotel room and we were asleep by 9pm. We had a round the island tour scheduled for the next day starting at 8:30am with 2 other couples who are also on the cruise for the first 14 days, Ursula and Doug were staying at our hotel, but Carol and John were elsewhere.

More tomorrow. Stay tuned.