This cooling breeze, these strips of bitter gourd filled with fish paste, this ice-cold soy milk - they are real all right. This has got to be the best restaurant in the world.I must say that if Singapore is a stunt, it is turning out a pretty clever one. When we climb into a taxi, I notice our driver drinking tea out of a plastic bag, hung from the ceiling of his car "That's great!" I say. In all directions, real Singaporeans are slurping, sucking and chewing on fish balls, duck rice, dim sum, curry and sushi Most meals cost a pound or two.
The lovely canopies of rain-trees embracing the highways will be replaced by hoardings of naked women. The quiet couples slurping noodles after dark on verandas will become rioting, spitting, drug-taking delinquents. The very history of this island state will be unwritten.Either that or I'm envious My analyst would suggest the latter. Perhaps, deep down, I just can't bear to accept that the old patriarch Lee Kuan Yew had the foresight decades ago to train his people in civic virtues, and to plant all these trees, and to place conservation orders on the quaintest areas of local housing.Anyway, this is what my mission boils down to: has Singapore been designed as a pleasure park for tourists? Or is it a real country, with needs and interests of its own?I'm starting my investigation with breakfast in a place called the Lau Pa Sat Hawker Centre, which is an outdoor market sheltered by a 100-year-old roof constructed of iron lacework from Glasgow.How can there possibly be anything fake about this? I see vast numbers of food stalls and communal seating for everyone Hundreds of fans are swishing overhead. The charming fa?es of those "heritage" quarters will be removed to reveal ugly concrete blocks and piles of garbage. I'm in Singapore to find out if the whole country isn't one big PR stunt, something dreamt up by the ministry of tourism. Amsterdammers in woolly hats and thick coats taunted us with their cosiness.
Even the hippest restaurants seemed truly grim as we sat there in our linen trousers. And eating a hotel breakfast of porridge, at the very moment we should have been stepping off the plane in South Africa, was not a happy experience Three years later and none of us has been back there We shall never wear clogs again Stopping there is truly over.. Stranded at Amsterdam's Schipol airport after a KLM connecting flight from London had failed to connect with our KLM flight to Cape Town, two friends and I had no choice but to spend 24 hours in the city. Fine, but we had no access to our luggage and were dressed for a South African summer Never has a city looked more unappealing. If you know where you're going, why delay the experience? But my suspicion is that stopover fans are not really after the experience anyway and are actually genetically linked with trainspotters. So they like to think that by spending a day in Bangkok, Singapore or Delhi, they can put a tick against the whole country in their mental list of "nations I have visited".But sometimes you get no choice in the matter.