Mum and Lovey go to the Gardens (and then go home)

This might be the last real touristy post for a while (depending on how busy our weekends get), and it pretty overdue. The last few days with Mum and Lovey, we headed to the National Museum of Singapore. Saw a few good exhibits - their permanent exhibition on the history of Singapore is quite good and well put together, but really requires several hours, and we were hungry so we did a quick 1 hour guided tour - highly recommended to get a quick sketch of Singapore's origins. We ate at the cafe in the museum - also a really nice bright comfortable spot. There are a few changing galleries, some "living Singapore" small galleries that tell you a bit about the culture of Singapore and how it's developed, and we saw an awesome exhibition of wildlife, human and landscape photos called Genesis by Sebastião Salgado, which made me realise how much of the world I still have to see. 

The roof in Singapore National Museum.

Lovey's best monkey impression

With their last weekend, we went to one of Singapore's most famous tourist attractions - Gardens by the Bay. Construction of the gardens here started on reclaimed swamp land in 2007 and was opened in 2011. There are some really cool bits to it, and it's not at all like the more traditional botanic gardens. There are a few (air conditioned) indoor gardens to keep us sweaty Westerners happy, and they've put a lot of effort into making as much of what they do (or at least what they talk about) sustainable. The Supertree grove is the best example of this, where each of the giant fake trees is a vertical garden, creates solar energy, is involved in the cooling, nitrogen ad carbon recycling activities they use to reduce their CO2 emissions and recycle their biomass into useful products and also look damn cool.

Anyway, it's a LONG way around the gardens, so we jumped on one of the bus tour groups that circels around to give us an overview, then decided which parts we wanted to see up closer.

Western-sized people on Asian-sized seats on the bus tour

All gardens should have giant floating babies.

Marina Bay Sands from the other side!

Supertrees!

The Flower Dome with the Singapore Flyer in the distance (pretty much the reverse view of this shot from this post)

Martini glass supertrees

Three generations of pink and sweaty :)

Walkway over the Supertree Grove. Wheeee!

I got them both smiling in one photo!

Trees of the future (as long as you don't mind spending millions of dollars on building and millions more on upkeep of your trees...)

Inside the FLOWERDOME.

Paris.... NOPE, fooled you, its the French Exhibition in the Flowerdome. 

Fat trees - Singaporeans do not approve.

Beyond the Flowerdome (he he he)

Watching the Garden Rhapsody, the Supertree Grove lighting up at night. Really awesome to watch, but I'm pretty sure it takes more electricity to put on the impressive light show than those things harvest through the day. 

The indoor waterfall in the Cloud Forest - we had it almost to ourselves at night

The fake mountain in the Cloud Forest.

Waterfall from above

After this trip, it was just about time for Mum and Lovey to head home. There are a few teary farewell photos, but I'll spare us all the embarrassment and keep them contained in my iPhoto library. It was so nice to have visitors to explore with, and now we know a few more interesting places to go (or avoid). The week after they left, I started work, so the timing was great. Most importantly, I got to eat cake every day for about 10 days. I put on 4 kg over their visit (truly!), so it also gave me something to do over the next few months to work it all off.