I’m planning to return to Singapore in October, connecting with friends.
NIGHT is the very best time to be out and about in this hot and humid city close to the equator.
Most low budget travellers stay in Little India. Shop at the Mustafa mall.
Indian food was a welcome change after a month of mostly rice and noodles.
Here’s a gallery of some of my favourite pics from September. Click to move through the 18 photos.
Clean, efficient, safe. An ideal tourist destination for me after chaotic Indonesia.
Almost everyone speaks English. They are very welcoming of visitors.
Yes, some things are very expensive. But you can have a great time spending very little money.
For example, Shimano Cycling World will rent you a high end road bike for $150. Or you can take one of their mountain bikes for free. Nice.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. Drone footage I shot of myself was done in one of the parks dedicated to drone pilots. Singapore thinks of everything. 😀
Changi Airport (always ranked #1 in the world) provides free city tours if you have a layover of enough hours at the right time of day.
Singapore’s diversity of cuisine is touted as a reason to visit the country, due to its combination of convenience, variety, quality, and price.
I find it a very green city.
Singapore is an economic success story. This tiny island nation has the highest PPP-adjusted GDP per capita in the world.
Singapore ranks highly in key social indicators: education, healthcare, quality of life, personal safety, infrastructure, and housing, with a home-ownership rate of 88 percent.
Singaporeans enjoy one of the longest life expectancies, fastest Internet connection speeds, lowest infant mortality rates, and lowest levels of corruption in the world.
This is the kind of nation fiscal conservatives should study.
Personally, it’s not democratic enough for me.
The laws too strict. Singapore still has the death penalty.
Male homosexual relations were not decriminalized until 2022.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Cold Storage is a 2019 science fiction novel written by one of the top screen writers of all time.
After decades underground in a forgotten sub-basement, a highly mutative organism – capable of extinction-level destruction – has found its way out.
Only Pentagon bioterror operative Roberto Diaz can stop it. With the help of two unwitting security guards, he has one night to quarantine this horror, before it destroys all of humanity.
Loser Teacake is hilarious.
It’s one of those end-of-the-world thrillers. Not too believable — but would make a good Hollywood film.
I did enjoy the humour. Some of the dialogue could be kept for the movie.
In fact, a film version is planned for 2026. Starring Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, and Liam Neeson.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Dennis hosted dinner for myself, Cliff Parks, and friends at the Greenwood Fish Market in Sentosa.
He ordered a Seafood Tower for the table.
. … I’d never seen anything like it.
Fantastic.
The highlight for Cliff was his 1st raw oyster. A BIG one.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
One of the amazing tourist destinations in Singapore is the Mustafa Centre.
Unlike the many modern shopping malls, Mustafa caters mainly to the budget market.
75,000 square feet with a 130-room hotel.
It’s crammed with almost any product you can imagine. Over 300,000 products.
Open 24 hours. Packed at all hours of the day and night. An experience.
11 stories. Near impossible to find the nearest exit as they don’t want you to leave.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I’m one of millions who enjoyed all the Dan Brown books.
The Secret of Secrets (2025) is his latest.
If you liked the rest, you’ll probably like this one.
I do enjoy the many little scientific nuggets included.
But Brown is an infamously terrible writer:
At this stage, everything that needs to be said about Brown’s sentence-by-sentence ineptitude as a prose writer has been said.
Fear not: he’s still hopeless. It may be counted as a metafictional joke that in a novel where a favoured adjective like “elegant” can appear in two consecutive sentences, where bells are said to “blare” …
This is, in other words, a Dan Brown novel. It’s weapons-grade bollocks from beginning to end, none of it makes a lick of sense, and you’ll roar through it with entire enjoyment if you like this sort of thing. …
The Secret of Secrets (2025) by American author Dan Brown is the 6th instalment in the Robert Langdon series.
The Associated Press review described the novel as a 650-page thriller featuring Langdon on a dangerous quest through Prague, where he is caught up in an international race to unlock the mystery of what happens after death.
Brown once again blends suspense, philosophical themes, travelogues, codes, puzzles, and secret societies …
Too long. Tom Hanks must be exhausted.
Killers stop to join in long, philosophical discussions.
No doubt the movie will be better than the book.
I was outraged to see my favourite beach — Rathtrevor on Vancouver Island, — ranked only #3 in the FAKE NEWS posted by Spin Casino / TripAdvisor. 😀
Check my video. It’s OBVIOUS that Rathtrevor is #1.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I just travelled Indonesia for a month. Most of the popular attractions.
It’s not a good fit for this old backpacker.
Aside from major city train / bus service, tourists end up taking a lot of personal vehicles. Bad for the environment. Terrible for traffic jams.
Ride sharing apps like Grab and GoJek are essential as there are no alternatives in much of the nation.
Indonesia is ideal for young invincible backpackers who love to ride scooters through dangerous traffic. While chain smoking. Adrenaline junkies.
Instead of touring, I’d recommend picking one spot you like. Rent a place for a month. Concentrate on a few things: scuba, snorkelling, health & fitness, yoga, surfing, writing, reading, partying, …. Whatever you’ve always want more time for.
Don’t travel very far.
I’d like a month in the Gili Islands, for example.
The culture tourists face is (mostly) men, (mostly) chain smoking.
Every young guy in Indonesia dreams of getting a scooter. And then enough money for fuel and cigarettes.
While it’s easy and quick to move between Bali, Lombok and the Gilis, island-hopping elsewhere often involves a flight, bad bus, or lengthy boat journey.
To be fair, there ARE a number of island chains where you can jump between islands on a short speedboat or long-tail-boat ride. The Banda Islands and Kei Islands in southern Maluku are compact and a breeze to travel among, while it’s also easy to move around the Karimunjawa Islands off Java, the Togean Islands off Sulawesi, the Banyak Islands off Sumatra and Raja Ampat off Papua.
That said — I’ll be returning to Jakarta soon for the World Gymnastics Championships.
Jesse Q. Sutanto is the Chinese-Indonesian author of Four Aunties and a Wedding (2022).
She currently lives in Jakarta with her husband, who is English, and their two daughters.
In 2021, Sutanto published her hit novel, Dial A for Aunties. I enjoyed it.
Wedding is the 2nd book in the series.
Quit somewhere in the middle where nothing actually seems to be happening. This book didn’t work for me.
It’s supposed to be a cozy murder mystery — but I’d call it more of a light comedy.
Our heroine, Meddy Chan, is getting married.
… she can’t wait to marry her college sweetheart, Nathan. Instead of having Ma and the aunts cater to her wedding, Meddy wants them to enjoy the day as guests.
As a compromise, they find the perfect wedding vendors: a Chinese-Indonesian family-run company just like theirs. …
… family aren’t just like her own, they are The Family—actual mafia, and they’re using Meddy’s wedding as a chance to conduct shady business.
Her aunties and mother won’t let Meddy’s wedding ceremony become a murder scene—over their dead bodies—and will do whatever it takes to save her special day, even if it means taking on the mafia.
It makes no sense.
Oddly, the wedding is in Oxford, England.
Kopi Dulu (2022) is an amazing account by Mark Eveleigh over many trips, many years.
He’s an adventure travel badass.
15,000 kilometers – by rail, road, on foot and under sail – through 50 Indonesian islands.
From tracking tigers (and the mythical ‘short man’) in the Sumatra jungle to the mystical Dayak tribe that lives near the geographical center of Borneo, this book touches on some of Indonesia’s most intriguing secrets.
The author meets Tana Toraja’s ‘living dead’, the Bugis people (once known as the Bogeymen) who build and sail the spectacular Sulawesi schooners and the villagers who are literally besieged by dragons in the Komodo archipelago.
He surfs the legendary reefs of G-Land, Nias and Occy’s Left (and pioneers a previously un-surfed wave in the remote Alor Archipelago).
He road-trips across Sulawesi and Flores and sails in the wake of Alfred Russel Wallace around Spice Islands that have remained largely unchanged for centuries.
“. . . a soldier of fortune or Legionnaire of the travel writing business!”—Korean Airlines magazine
Rick McCharles 