Go Singapore:It might be smaller than Co Louth, but Singapore likes to think big, and it is a must-visit for food lovers and shopaholics, writes Michael Dervan
TAKE THE entire population of the Republic of Ireland and house it in Co Louth. Then detach that county, float it as an island just north of the equator and you've got something resembling Singapore. You'd have to make a few modifications - shrink the size a little, add some more people, and introduce new elements of racial, linguistic and culinary complexity to create the melting pot that is modern-day Singapore. And you'd have to add an awful lot of shops.
Singaporeans not only love what they declare to be their favourite activities - shopping and eating - but they love talking about them, too. No Singaporean seems to want any foreigner to set foot on the bustling island city state without making a pilgrimage to Orchard Road, a 1,500m stretch that's lined not with shop after shop but with shopping mall after shopping mall, any one of which would make most Irish malls seem minnow-like.
Here you can encounter everything from leading designer boutiques to market stalls. You can find yourself accosted by tailors trying to usher you in off the street to tempt you with quick-turnaround, made-to-measure outfits at scarcely believable prices. I walked around Singapore wearing linen shirts, and the linen seemed to act like a magic tailor magnet. They were getting ready the moment I hove into view, and one of them even inveigled me into his shop to show me the business cards he had collected from satisfied customers. They were all carefully filed in an album, laid out by nationality, and, yes, there was actually an Irish section, to which he was hoping to add.
In the malls you can tread the aisles of supermarkets haunted by the smell of durians, large, heavy fruit with a complexity of taste and texture that's almost indescribable and that are so smelly they're banned from buses, trains and air-conditioned buildings. And for the two summer months of the Great Singapore Sale, late May to late July, the shopping temperature rises even further, with mid- afternoon queues outside teeming shops, as people wait patiently at the door until it's their turn to get inside and grab the 70 per cent discounts on brands such as Louis Vuitton.
The shopping is truly international. There are branches of Marks & Spencer, the French hypermarket Carrefour and the Japanese department store Takashimaya, which has its own mini-branches of Harrods and Fauchon. There are basements filled with the latest digital and electronic equipment, and stalls selling jewellery, trinkets and gewgaws of all kinds.
The opportunities for eating are equally prolific. It's so cheap to eat out in Singapore that the locals often forgo cooking at home and head off to hawker centres or food courts. Hawker centres are essentially well- organised markets for street food, and food courts are the slightly more upmarket, indoor, air-conditioned version. The hawker centres were created after the government decided to regulate street food, and every hawker stall is obliged to display an official hygiene rating from A (best) to C (average). The cooking, like the population itself, is here mostly Chinese, and you can feed a family for less than the cost of fish and chips in Ireland. And there's plenty of choice at the other end of the market, too.
The shopping obsession is fuelled by a thriving economy. The city centre on the south of the island is crowded with modern skyscrapers, which tower over the colonial architectural legacy of Raffles Hotel, the mid-19th-century St Andrew's Cathedral, built by Indian convict labour in Gothic Revival style, and the cloistered entertainment and shopping complex Chijmes, another Gothic Revival building, formerly the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus.
The Long Bar at Raffles Hotel, where the custom of throwing peanut shells on the floor is still religiously observed, is a mandatory stop for a pink and fruity Singapore Sling, a cocktail invented in the hotel in the early years of the 20th century. The bar has a peculiarly colonial atmosphere, which is at least partly explained by the fact that it usually upends the normal Singaporean racial balance, with people of European extraction outnumbering Asians.
You can view the panorama of Singapore's skyline - a dense network of office and apartment blocks with carefully preserved green belts - from the air-conditioned capsules of the Singapore Flyer, an observation wheel that began operation earlier this year. It's 42 stories high, 30m taller than the London Eye, and on a good day offers views of the Indonesian islands of Batam and Bintan, to the south, and Malaysia, to the north.
A less likely spectacle is the racetrack for the world's first night-time Formula 1 race, which snakes its way around the base of the three-storey terminal (read shopping centre) over which the wheel was constructed. But the traffic that really impresses is the shipping, which seems almost impossibly dense, as it clocks up the journeys and the tonnage that enable Singapore to vie for the title of world's busiest port. More adventurous travellers can sample the same kind of view from the same kind of height in a hot-air balloon, just around the corner from Raffles Hotel. If you want to do it as a quickie, there are a number of 40ish-storey hotels with lifts on the outside.
Singapore may be tiny, but it thinks big, and at the moment one of the main sights from the Singapore Flyer is a prime view of a vast building site, the Marina Bay Sands project, with a three-tower, 2,600-room hotel, a huge convention centre (200 meetings rooms, capacity for more than 45,000 delegates) and, most controversially, the country's first casino. The project is intended to help the country reach its official tourist visitor target of 17 million, and it will also claw back some of the estimated 700 million Singapore dollars (€367 million) that Singaporeans currently manage to spend in casinos away from home.
Most of those visitors are travellers who stop off (for an average of just over three days) to break long air journeys. If hearsay is to be believed, many of them never get beyond the shopping and the eating.
If that's true, they actually miss a lot. Singapore's mixed racial history is reflected in the preservation of the historic areas of Little India, Chinatown and the Arab Quarter, each like a separate world in terms of street atmosphere. It's not just a matter of appearance, colour and smell, or commercial activity. Even the ways in which people simply hang around are strikingly different. Check out, too, the golden-domed Sultan Mosque on Muscat Street in Kampong Glam, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and the Sri Mariamman Temple, these last two a stone's throw from each other on South Bridge Road in Chinatown. The island's cultural diversity is also celebrated in a range of ethnic festivals spread throughout the year.
Singapore's zoo and its associated Night Safari are set in real rainforest. The Night Safari snakes its visitors along in a miniature train, with stop-offs for walks, including enclosures for airborne creatures, both winged (bats) and not quite winged (flying squirrels).
Culture vultures will relish the choice of museums, many with particular ethnic slants. The one that made the strongest impression on me was the small Chinatown Heritage Centre, which, with simple documentary means rather than high-tech razzmatazz, conveys the harsh reality of Singapore's colonial past.
Singapore is one of the cleanest and safest places in the world, save for those who flout certain laws - there is a mandatory death sentence for drug possession, and flogging is still part of the sentencing regime.
The weather is hot and humid, with cleansing outbursts of torrential rain. Public transport is plentiful, from taxis to the rapidly expanding Mass Rapid Transit train system (currently three lines, 64 stations), which links up with the network of more than 200 bus services. Ease of transport is not the only thing that will remind you you're not actually in Co Louth. If you're heavy or tall, you may not fit into the clothes and shoe sizes available in the shops.
And you might find yourself taken aback by an advertisement in a train offering, I kid you not, a "free" $20 shopping voucher for every $20,000 investment in a new bond, speculating on a rise in food prices. It's hard to see anything like that catching on in Drogheda or Dundalk.
• Michael Dervan's accommodation was courtesy of the Pan Pacific Hotel
Go there: There are no direct flights from Dublin, but plenty of connections with a multitude of airlines through major hubs. Singapore Airlines (www.singaporeair.com) lives up to its excellent reputation, and some of its flights from London use the world's largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380, on which you can marvel at the smoothness and quietness.