Night Safari

Phew, excuse my sweat! Just got back from a trip to the supermarket. Have only found one so far kinda like a Safeway and it's a half hour walk. Needed to pick Tari up some dried fruit and nuts so she can still snack healthy at the conference and while I was there I saw they had root beer too.

To cut a long story short (unlike the walk, which stubbornly stays the same distance) half hour walk there, then half hour back with 8kg of stuff. Good exercise anyhow =) Quite overcast today, but still the same temperature and as humid as ever, takes a good 10 mins just to regulate your breathing to cope, but after that it's not so bad...

...until the sun comes out! Wow, just when you thought you were already hot and bothered, direct sunlight is like pressing an instant all-over-body-sweat button.

Last night we went on the famous night safari. Tari got back from work a little after 6pm and we had to be on the bus by 7, so it was a quick stroll down the road to the place I talked about before. We had korean food last night, very tasty.

The safari place is about a 45 min drive, so we all climbed aboard the bus and enjoyed the air-con for a while. Jumping ahead a little, at about 9:30pm we saw a thermometer - 31 degrees. It stays pretty warm all the time!

What a great time we had! I took lots of pictures, but most of them looked like a big black rectangle with some really dark grey blotches if I was lucky. The only one that I managed to get an image from (thank you photoshop!) was of this elephant:

All I could think about was how pleasant it would be to recline upon the elephant. I hear that's frowned upon though. You're not meant to leave the tram (especially near the tiger and lion enclosures) or use flash photography. As you can see from my efforts, flash photography has never been my style, I tend to go for "adequate photography" at best.

It's been harder for operations like this, because even without people using bright light flashes, the screens on the back of digital cameras, when you get 20-30 of them together, make quite a lot of light themselves.

I think my favorite animal was the giant anteater. There are walking tracks, but we opted for the lazier tourist option of the tram ride. Although it was warm still, the tram drove at enough speed to keep a bit of a breeze going. So very, very nice to sit in the breeze in the dark and see (after eyes adjusted) all sorts of weird animals.

http://www.nightsafari.com.sg/index.html

The tour guide was hilarious, she was a total classic. We were trying to work out how to best describe her. You know the old guy who does movie ads (Clayton knows the guy I mean from that youtube clip). Deep melodramatic voice with important pauses between words "In a place... far from here... a boy... becomes... a... MAN" you know the guy?

Well, imagine a female version of that with an accent.

"They are tall... dangerous... and, yes... sexy!" talking about animals that we can barely see in the dark.

Had us in stitches and we weren't sure if it was meant to or not!

She also gave us a nice educatorial lesson about why it was bad to cut down rainforests, the unfairness of lion prides, the huge size of some buffalo...

To highlight the danger, they take a picture of the back row of the tram before we leave. Some say it's for selling the photo back to you later. My personal opinion is that it's to help identify who was eaten in the event of a Jurassic Park like event. Nobody seemed to appreciate my personal opinion. In any case, the worst that happened was one of Tari's friends being swooped by a flying fox type critter. Probably won't make that into a movie.

On the way out we had a gelati from Ben and Jerry's, watched the fire dancing guys:

That was what the place needed, fire breathers to up the temperature up a little =)

And for the adventurous, who had feet in need of cleaning, why use a foot spa, pumice or massage when you can let fish nibble...

Three different types of fish, all excellent dead skin eaters apparently. $10 for 5 mins of foot cleaning fishy fun.

Well Tari had a wonderful 7:30 meeting so it was a bit early today, hopefully she's going to be home early tonight though, 5ish I think. Didn't get home from the safari until 11ish so I think tonight will be dinner, then TV while TJ tries to stay awake but falls asleep =)

Well, it's time for lunch for me. Off to decide on the eternal dilemma: noodles or rice.