Singapore in February: hawker centres, a forest in a glasshouse, and a city that simply works

Singapore is the easiest city I have ever travelled alone. I say that as praise and also as a warning, because if you want to feel lost, go somewhere else. The train from the airport took me to a budget hotel a few stops from the centre, the card I bought at the station worked on every train and bus for nine days, the pavements were clean, the signs were in four languages, and the humidity hit me at the door of the terminal like a warm wet towel and never left. February is the driest month. It rained four afternoons. I counted.

Eating

The hawker centres are the reason to come, and the first tour I did was a food walk with nine tastings that I have never fully recovered from. Chicken rice, which sounds like nothing and is the national dish for a reason, the rice cooked in the chicken fat, the chilli sauce sharp. Laksa, coconut and prawn and noodles cut short so you eat it with a spoon. Carrot cake, which has no carrot in it and is fried radish cake with egg, and is the thing I now dream about. Chilli crab, with a plastic bib and a mallet. Satay off a grill the length of a bus. Kaya toast for breakfast, bread with coconut jam and a slab of cold butter, with a soft-boiled egg you crack into a saucer with soy and pepper, and kopi, the local coffee, thick and sweet. Every stall has a queue and the queue is the review. I followed the longest one every time and was never wrong.

Little India, the first full day, was the colour: garlands of marigold and jasmine strung outside the temples, gold shops, the smell of ghee and incense, the Tekka market where I ate a dosa the size of a tray. Chinatown still had its New Year lanterns up, red and gold across the whole of the main street, and a queue for pineapple tarts that I joined without knowing what it was for. The Long Bar at Raffles was the one tourist thing I did without irony: a Singapore Sling, too sweet and pink, and the custom of dropping your peanut shells on the floor, which the whole room was doing with the particular joy of people who are not allowed to drop anything anywhere else in the country.

Green

The Botanic Gardens are free, old, enormous, and the orchid garden inside them is the best thing in Singapore that costs almost nothing: thousands of orchids, a cool house for the mountain ones, and a section of hybrids named after visiting heads of state. I counted eleven I had heard of. Gardens by the Bay is the modern answer: the Supertrees, steel towers covered in climbing plants, with a light show twice a night, free, that I watched both times lying on the grass with two hundred other people. Inside the Cloud Forest dome a mountain rises in the middle with a waterfall falling thirty-five metres from the top, and you walk a path round it in air so cool that I was briefly cold for the only time in nine days.

The zoo and the Night Safari are the other green day: the orangutans at the zoo move freely over your head on ropes between the trees, and the Night Safari is the same park after dark, a tram through enclosures lit like moonlight, a tapir, a herd of deer, something with eyes. The river cruise on an old bumboat gave me the skyline from the water, the three towers of Marina Bay Sands with the ship on top, which I went up the next day, a deck fifty-seven floors up and the whole city laid out: port, towers, the green, the strait with two hundred ships waiting in it. I counted forty before I gave up.

The rest

The National Gallery is the old Supreme Court and City Hall knocked together under a glass roof, the courtrooms still there with their wood, and the art of South-East Asia in them, which I knew nothing about and left wanting to know more. Universal Studios on Sentosa was my concession to being nine years old; I did every ride with a queue under twenty minutes and ate a hot dog. The aquarium next door has a viewing panel so wide that the manta rays go past like aircraft. Jewel, at the airport, is a shopping mall with a forty-metre waterfall falling through the middle of it from the roof, and I went out to see it on a Tuesday, which tells you something about Singapore and something about me.

The karaoke was the last night: a small room, a screen, a microphone, a jug of lime juice, alone, for an hour, and nobody will ever know what I sang.

What I know now

Follow the queue. Carry a small towel and a bottle, and plan the afternoons indoors. Take the free light show over the paid deck if you only have one evening. Go to the orchids. Eat the carrot cake that is not carrot cake. And if you are travelling alone and tired of being brave, come here, because the city will do the bravery for you.