September 9, 2005

Passage to Singapore
by Lois Joy


Part 1: Birthdays at Sea

Part 2: Pirates and Pennzoil

Part 3: Crossing the Equator

Part 4: The Singapore Straits

Part 5: Welcome to Raffles!


Part 5: Welcome to Singapore!
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Raffles Marina, Singapore
01º12.09’ 103º55.89’

 

We arrived at Raffles Marina in Singapore at 5 PM Thursday. It had been a 1050-mile
voyage, straight through from Bali, no stops. It had taken us exactly one week and four hours at an average boat speed of 5.8 knots.

Finally, we are in a superb first-world country where things work, people know what they are doing, work fast, and understand what service is all about. All it takes is money to get things moving. We had power and water within ten minutes of docking here, and that included a worker changing the plug at the end of our electrical cabling. Within the first hour, we were checked into the marina and within two hours we were checked into the country. The immigration officials had been on board Pacific Bliss, checked us in and allowed us to take down the quarantine flag. Within three hours, the crews of Pacific Bliss and Simpatica were being led around the marina facilities by a service representative of Raffles.

The marina complex includes an Indian and Chinese restaurant, a bistro with ice cream—a sailor’s dream at sea—a pub with live music every night, hotel rooms, a huge swimming pool with a swim up bar/deli, a Jacuzzi, and a separate children’s playing pool with slides and a tugboat they can climb on. And there is even a bowling alley, pool and ping pong tables, a tennis court, an exercise room, and a free shuttle to the mall. We were numb. We duly followed our guide around in a daze, since we had been up most of the prior night identifying ship's lights, and never once had the opportunity to rest during the entire adrenalin-filled day of sailing the straits. In my fatigued state, I wondered whether I had died and gone to heaven! The transformation from ship at sea to wonderland was surreal.

Pacific Bliss and Simpatica were the first Rally yachts to arrive at Raffles. Layaleeta, an Aussie yacht with two grade-school-age children on board, came the next day, followed by Ichi, with an older couple on board. More of the Rally yachts will arrive on Monday and throughout the week. They will find it amazing here. One can get lost in the shower/locker rooms! Those facilities are a welcome change from anywhere we have been since the Rally began back in Darwin. The marina at Cairns, Australia had the last good shower and laundry facility we had used—and that one had seen better days. And the last resort/marina we docked at was Hamilton Island in the Whitsundays, back last May.

We are ready for a sea change. It has been a tough sailing season—thousands of miles, mostly in remote anchorages and villages. After R&R at this facility, I fear that none of us will want to leave here and go cruising again! Most of the cruisers admit to being quite tired out by now, especially those with children or the 'oldies' like us!

The first two nights here, though exhausted, we still could barely sleep, and woke up when it was time for our respective 'night watches'. Last night, we managed to sleep through. On Friday, we took the shuttle to the mall to run errands long overdue. Things went like clockwork—an experience we are simply not used to anymore. Welcome to Singapore! Welcome to the western world! Everything was there. We found a new battery for my sailing watch; the adaptor we needed to hook up to the wireless (WIFI) Internet on board Pacific Bliss—what a luxury; a new Singapore SIM card for our cellular phone; fresh food of all kinds instead of take-what-you-can-find at a local market; and a number of electrical items for the boat. We enjoyed our first cappuccino in ages, followed by a food court lunch—noodles of course, for Gunter. In the afternoon, we hit the pools.

The Captain is one happy man. He is already to #8 on his TO DO list of 18 and has found the service people are prompt and knowledgeable. (You might have read by now his Messing with Boats, Part Six, written in Bali. It amazes me that he still has much to do.) His TO DO list here is partly due to the need to right the jury-rigged fixes done after the voltage spikes in Bali damaged our electrical, but there are new items as well.

My list is the typical laundry, cleaning, restocking and provisioning that one has to do at each new port. But here in Singapore, I will be purchasing the charts needed from here to Thailand, and of course, planning the navigation for our next leg. And then there's the Creative that I never seem to find time to do: downloading zillions of photos, putting them into slide shows, writing
web stories and updating this site. We are still on a tight schedule, believe it or not. We have until Friday to get all in order before our friends Toni and Ingrid arrive for our sail up the
Malacca Strait to Langkawi, Malaysia, where we will store Pacific Bliss. R&R? We’ll squeeze it in by those pools!

Singapore is a very much a successful, multi-cultural community. I find conversations with the yachties who live on board here very interesting. We and two other couples were invited last night to a BBQ on board a motor yacht. Politics here is a major topic; that is, the lack of it, since the same party gets voted in all the time and opposition is scarce. There appear to be few issues. The citizens complain that freedom of the press is lacking. And there is a tendency not to speak up in public. But there is little to complain about: the economy is good, everyone is well-to-do, and the social services are excellent. Our Chinese hostess, head of a hospital here, had spent five years volunteering as a parliament member and is now a member of a women's awareness & action organization. They want to get more women involved and say that it is time for the government to 'loosen up' now; to allow media that is not government controlled, to allow open criticism, etc.

Singapore may deserve its ‘sterile’ reputation, but to us, it is a welcome change from Indonesia—where almost anyone in government or officialdom is corrupt and demands bribes as a matter of course, where most of the people live in abject poverty, where the only signs of wealth are buildings on government property or belonging to those who work for the government.

There is diesel rationing now in Indonesia, even though the country has an abundance of crude oil. We saw oil rigs all over the place. But the country lacks refineries, so they ship the
crude out to be refined, then buy it back in at an expensive rate, and then the government subsidizes it. The government has totally misjudged the current rise in world oil prices, and is now going broke because of paying the subsidies. So it will have to raise prices considerably, which will not be a popular move. And why can't Indonesia refine oil? Why can’t she manufacture the products she needs, rather than importing? Why can't she enter the western world economy like Singapore, right across the Straits? No company would want to invest there because of the widespread corruption—at all levels. It is a vicious, sorry circle.

Yet, we saw Indonesia as a beautiful land, rich in natural resources and culture. We are glad that we experienced that beauty first-hand for almost two months; on the other hand, we are very relieved to be out of there! We found Indonesia to be among the most difficult cruising and traveling of our entire circumnavigation to date.

Well, it's time to play our Sunday CDs and to prepare our Sunday morning breakfast. While I’m on the internet writing this, Gunter is reading the Sunday Straits Times, delivered right to our yacht each morning. This country believes in service! Singapore does not have any more
natural resources, being a city-state that has run out of land, except for what it is reclaiming from the sea. But she does have service-oriented people with plenty of smarts. And they are what make Singapore hum. I look forward to seeing more of this wonderful place.

Go to Photo Gallery on Part Five


 

 

 

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