The Next Day

The next day was visa day. I got a taxi from the hotel around nine. The streets were busy as the Formula 1 was looming. The supposedly short journey cost about the same amount as going to the airport. When we reached the address I went to the 10th floor of this tall building where I would find an unexpectedly tiny office for a visa office with a desk and lots of piles of paperwork dotted around. I gave the required documents to the jolly fellow at the desk and he told me to come back after 4.30pm.

 So what to do with my day? Go to the S.E.A aquarium, the biggest aquarium in South East Asia obviously! Boasting the biggest perspex viewing pane in the world. Goodo. The aquarium is on Sentosa Island, where I had been with Joyce a year before to go to Universal Studios. The aquarium was fantastic, you should definitely go there! At first it doesn't look like an aquarium as there are lots of displays of shipping history through the ages, and how main ports have changes location over the years. And one of these displays was on Palembang, my soon to be home for the year. Spooky! After this display of information you take an escalator down into the basement where they keep the fish. There is so much to see there, including sharks, dolphins, and an animal I've been wanting to see for a long time. The manta ray! They can reach about 2 metres in length and are really cool. They had loads of other nice rays too. And eels. It was really amazing to see dolphins that close up too, I think I like them a bit more now.

After the awesome-ness of the aquarium I decided to go and find the beach, which you get to by passing a giant purpose built merlion and then carry on in a straight line to the other side of the island. Once there I had a little paddle and sat down. A girl came over to ask me a question and we got talking, turns out she's from Kingston. How crazy seeing someone from your home town half way across the world! Opposite us there was a little island reachable by a rope bridge. We decided to go and take a look. There were some viewing platforms you could climb up so this we did. The view was pretty cool. I later found out we were standing on the southernmost point of continental South East Asia. Cool!

After collecting my visa I went for a coffee and then on a search for some dinner. Now I am all set for Indonesia!!