Singapore 110 - Gardens by the Bay • Sassy Urbanite's Diary

Gardens by the Bay (滨海湾花园) is a park spanning 101 hectares (1,010,000 m2) of reclaimed land in central Singapore and the pride of Singapore for trying to emulate New York’s Central Park.

We took the MRT and got off the Bayfront station in order to get to the gardens. It was quite a walk but the beautiful scenery of the gardens and the Marina Bay Sands are more than enough to make up for it. The Supertrees Grove is the stand out of gardens with tree-like structures called Supertrees that dominate the Gardens’ landscape with heights that range between 25 metres (82 ft) and 50 metres (160 ft). The Supertrees are beautiful especially when they light up in the night.

Since we got there quite late in the evening, we only managed to visit 1 garden so we picked the Cloud Forest since reviews seems to be more favourable than the Flower Dome. The ticket was S$16 for non-Singapore residents which I thought it was quite expensive. The main attraction of this garden is the 35-metre (115 ft) man made waterfall. We spent a lot of time taking pictures in front of the waterfall but as for the rest of the forest they were kinda bland with mainly tropical plants found all over the earth. Nonetheless, the garden was very well designed with interesting pathways all the way up from the top to different levels of the “forest”. The last part of garden before exiting was “5 degrees” featuring an video show on what will and might happen if the temperate of the planet rises with an average of 5 degrees Celsius due to global warming, which I found it interesting since environmental issues are always quite close to my heart.

Overall, Cloud Forest was a cool place to visit, literally cool because of the waterfall which provides cool air all over. Too bad they won’t allow picnic inside else the man made waterfall would be picture perfect as backdrop. Well, perhaps the real natural waterfall in Malaysia could provide better feel of a forest then…