A Day in Singapore: Orchard Road to Night Safari

Asia · Solo Travel

Solo traveller · 13 min read

Orchard Road in the morning is basically a wall of malls. Takashimaya and Ngee Ann City on one side, Paragon right behind you, and somewhere around twenty-two malls packed onto this one stretch of Singapore. Across the whole country there are something like 150 to 175 malls, which tells you a lot about how the city spends its free time. My hotel, a Holiday Inn Express a short walk off the main road, came out to roughly ₹21,000 a night with breakfast included, and as far as I could tell from my own research, that was the cheapest option in the entire area. First time I’ve ever paid that much for one night anywhere.

ION Orchard alone could eat an entire day if shopping is genuinely your thing, every luxury brand you can think of sits inside it, and several of the malls connect directly to each other so you can cross from one to the next without ever stepping back outside. I went up to ION Sky on the 55th floor instead, a lounge that opens at noon. I’d pictured an open-air deck, but it’s viewed entirely through glass, looking down at buildings that are mostly at your level or below. Worth five minutes for the view of the traffic moving below, not much longer than that unless you plan on sitting in the lounge itself.

This was the day I finally figured out Singapore’s MRT properly, three stops on the brown line to Outram Park, where three lines intersect, then nine stops out on the green line to reach the Chinese Garden. The colour-coded system makes it genuinely easy once you’ve done it once, and the Citymapper app fills in anything the station charts don’t make obvious.

The Chinese Garden centres on the Cloud Pagoda, a seven-storey building in red and white that I’d wanted to climb for a view over Jurong Lake, except the stairwell to the top floor was closed that day. Around the base sit stone figures of all twelve Chinese zodiac animals, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, the full set. A short walk over is the Japanese Garden, well-kept, with a Water Lily Garden that’s genuinely pretty in person, and a Sunken Garden that’s become something of an Instagram spot, shaded enough that it photographs well any time of day, good for a short video clip if that’s your kind of thing, though there’s no real sunlight reaching it.

One honest note on pacing: exploring Singapore properly means walking a lot, I was averaging 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day on this stretch of the trip. The best rhythm I found was sightseeing before 11am and after 4pm, and spending the scorching middle of the day, roughly 24 to 32 degrees pretty much year-round, inside a mall instead of fighting the heat outdoors.

The same transit card works on both the bus and the MRT, which made the hop over to IMM Building in Jurong East simple. Inside is a genuinely massive Giant supermarket, and I went in with one clear goal, a purse for my wife. Somewhere in the middle of all that walking I ordered an iced Americano with skimmed milk and asked for very little ice, which they mostly ignored, this is a country that clearly prefers its cold drinks properly cold. It cost $5.80 and was fine, nothing more.

IMM’s real draw is year-round discounts on branded goods, which is why tourists specifically come here to compare prices. One detail worth knowing if you’re shopping seriously: spend over $100 at a single store and you can claim back roughly 9% GST at the airport through the Tourist Refund Scheme, that’s Singapore’s current GST rate, and after handling fees the refund typically nets out closer to 7 to 7.5% of what you actually paid.

Google Maps’ indoor walking directions genuinely surprised me here, I dropped a pin on a Michael Kors store, set it to walking mode, and it gave me turn-by-turn arrows through the mall itself, down to “take the escalator to the first floor.” A $600 purse was on 50% off, which brought it to $300, and at Charles & Keith I picked up a bag priced at $85.90 that came down to about $77 with a 10% membership discount verified through nothing more than an email address. For comparison, the same purse would run somewhere around ₹9,000 to ₹10,000 back in India.

I remember using a photo I took in Bali, in Bali Lane, as the thumbnail for a completely different video once. Small world, same name.

Grab quoted $20.90 and 46 minutes for the 13-kilometre ride to Arab Street, against $3 and 29 minutes by bus. I took the bus, purely because I was starving and hadn’t eaten lunch yet by 4pm. Al Tasneem Restaurant became lunch, Murtabak with a side of chicken curry, and it was the first time I’d ever had Murtabak, egg and shredded chicken shallow-fried into a refined-flour base, mild in itself but built specifically to be eaten with the curry rather than on its own. Eaten dry, I don’t think I’d have liked it much, but paired properly, it’s a genuinely good combination, the kind of thing that would work just as well with plain paratha or rice. The staff’s t-shirts mentioned 24 hours, and sure enough, the place runs around the clock.

Arab Street itself is packed tight with restaurants, something like 85 to 90 percent of the storefronts are food joints, and the building colours and designs are genuinely striking, similar to what I’d later notice in Chinatown too. A mosque sits right at the corner, with Baghdad Street on one side and Arab Street on the other, and every car was parked with a precision that made sense once I learned how instantly fines get issued here for breaking the rules. Haji Lane, just next to it, is narrower and almost entirely food on one stretch, tables and chairs get laid out as the evening goes on and the street market runs until 2am. Bali Lane sits beside it, wider and a little noisier from passing traffic, and a good spot to just sit for a while in the evening.

With evening coming on, I only had time for one conservatory and picked Cloud Forest over Flower Dome, paying $38 at the time for the combined ticket. Current combo pricing for both domes runs closer to SGD 46 to 48 for adults, and Cloud Forest itself now hosts a Jurassic World exhibit with life-sized animatronic dinosaurs woven into the misty setting, a genuinely different experience from what I walked through.

The entrance alone is dramatic, a wall of cool air and a huge waterfall the second you step in. I took the lift straight to Level 6 and looked back down over an entire indoor mountain, plants and shrubs from all over the world growing across it, extinct-animal sounds and birdsong playing in the background to fill out the atmosphere. I spotted a Pitcher Plant inside, the same species I’d seen growing wild in Meghalaya and made a whole separate video about, oddly satisfying to run into it again here, cultivated indoors on the other side of the world. From the ramp descending back down, you get Marina Bay Sands on one side, the Marina Barrage and reservoir on the other, and the Singapore Flyer somewhere in the skyline too.

I came out of Cloud Forest around 7:30pm and walked toward Supertree Grove just as the light show was gearing up, people already gathering ahead of the 7:45pm slot, with a second, more elaborate show at 8pm using a distinctive colour palette that genuinely looked like clouds shifting through different hues. Free to watch from ground level, you only pay extra if you want to view it from up on the Supertrees themselves.

Twenty-eight to thirty kilometres from Gardens by the Bay, I made it to Mandai for Night Safari at 10pm, cutting it close since the last tram-adjacent activity runs at 9:30pm. I went anyway, mostly because Sentosa was the plan for the next day and this was my one shot at it. My ticket, booked an hour earlier through Klook, cost roughly ₹4,150.

The 30-minute tram ride opens with flamingos, then pelicans, then a hyena, moving at a steady 10 to 15 km/h the entire way, not stopping for anything unless the guides specifically call it out. You get maybe 10 to 12 seconds per animal as it passes. They did stop briefly for a Royal Bengal White Tiger, five to seven seconds at most, and I saw a Malayan Tapir I genuinely knew nothing about beforehand, though the low light meant I couldn’t get a usable shot of it. Sambar deer, Barasingha, and a few others they mentioned but that were already asleep by the time we passed. I’d call the tram itself a below-average experience, and I’m not saying that by comparing it to any other safari I’ve done, just on its own terms, it simply didn’t leave room to actually stop and look at anything.

The walking trails redeemed it somewhat. A Leopard Cat came through clearly enough to get a good look, a Clouded Leopard sat up in a tree, apparently the males run about twice the weight of the females, and in Malaysia this same animal goes by the name Tree Tiger. Three Spotted Hyenas walked past together at one point, genuinely one of the better moments of the night. I covered about 70% of the Tasmanian Devil Trail and caught a Wallaby in low visibility before the trail ended. By 12:15am I called it, the park was down to five or six other visitors by then, and I booked a Grab back for $36.

Getting around	Single transit card works on both MRT and bus; Citymapper fills in the gaps
GST tourist refund	9% GST, refundable on spends over SGD 100 per receipt, nets out to roughly 7–7.5% after fees
Gardens by the Bay	~SGD 46–48 for the Flower Dome + Cloud Forest combo
Night Safari	Roughly SGD 45–58 for tourist adult admission; walking trails matter more than the tram

This was the last full day before heading to Sentosa, and by the end of it I was running on very little sleep and even less patience for one more MRT transfer. If you want to see how that next day actually went, from the S.E.A. Aquarium (now the rebuilt Singapore Oceanarium) to a full day at Universal Studios Singapore, I’ve written that one up separately: Sentosa Island and Universal Studios Singapore: An Honest Day-by-Day Guide.