14th March 2010
Sentosa is a popular island resort in Singapore, just a short journey from the city centre and visited by some five million people a year. Attractions include a two-kilometre long sheltered beach, Fort Siloso, two golf courses and two five-star hotels, not forgetting the Resorts World Sentosa, featuring the new theme park Universal Studios Singapore.
We took the MRT down to the Harbourfront where we got off at the Vivo Shopping Centre. With it being Sunday there were loads of people milling about the mall and also wanting to go across to Sentosa. We then caught the monorail across to Sentosa. There is also a cable car which goes from Mount Faber across, but this is currently closed for renovation work.
From the monorail we were able to get a good look at the new Universal Studios theme park currently being built on Sentosa.
We got off the monorail at the beach stop, although nothing is very far away from anything else here. At the moment there is an exhibition taking place on Palawan beach called ‘Shifting Sands’. This features award-winning life-size sand sculptures by the acclaimed international artist, Tan Joo Heng. It was certainly a breath-taking display of sandy art.
Then we made our way along the beach watching the many ships out at sea and the oil refinery on the horizon in the distance.
We crossed the very narrow, but quite impressive swing bridge to a small islet which is the southernmost tip of the Asian continent. This piece of land has two towers on it which give great views of the beach and out to sea.
Besides the beaches, Sentosa has a host of attractions with admission fees to entertain. We took the chairlift from the beach to the Imbiah Lookout. This actually went quite high and we had some great views over Sentosa Island and the city of Singapore. At the top we were able to get a look at the Tiger Tower which is a revolving tower where the top part actually acts as the lift to go up and down.
We headed back into the city to try and check out the IT show at Suntec Convention Centre which we had kept missing over the last couple of days. However, when we got off the (very crowded) train, trying to get to the convention centre itself was impossible just through the sheer number of people. We abandoned that idea pretty quickly and instead headed to our local foodmall for some food before returning to the hotel for some down time and washing.
We spent a quiet evening getting up to date with communications and packing ready for our trip to Malaysia tomorrow morning.