Singapore fling

Even when Singapore is at its most modern, the ghost of writer Somerset Maugham still walks, says BRENDA WARD



In the last line of one of his wrily ironic short stories, writer W. Somerset Maugham has a character exclaim bitterly: "Women are absolutely bloody!"

So, sorry Somerset Maugham. You would probably laugh (in Singlish: "Hee-haw, hee-haw") in your infuriating English way at the thought of a bloody woman visiting Singapore simply to glimpse the tales of the exotic East that lured you there.

Your arrival in Singapore, you told us, was into crowded, noisy and colourful streets. "A stream of motors, lorries and buses, private cars and hirelings sped up and down the crowded thoroughfare, and every chauffeur blew his horn; rickshaws threaded their nimble path among the throng, and the panting coolies found breath to yell at one another."

Fast forward. I fly into Changi Airport, air-conditioned, quiet, efficiently calm. No one shouts. Barely a person speaks. I never see a Customs officer.

A minibus insulates me as we drive along modern motorways to the pump of the city's commercial heart, past carefully manicured junglescapes of palm and lush green leaves.

The Shangri La Hotel's Valley Wing opens into an oasis of cultured luxury set in hectares of tropical jungle, all wing chairs and marble, like the private gentleman's club of a bygone colonial era.

In a city where water use is carefully monitored and locals always shower, there's a television facing the deep bath and, outside, a swimming pool like a lagoon. I have a butler for my personal use.

Somerset Maugham would have approved. He once said: "I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me."

I stride out from the hotel to feel the real Singapore, along roads smelling of loamy soil and thickly perfumed flowers I do not recognise, where raindrops fall from plate-sized leaves on to my shoulders as I pass.

These are the smells Somerset Maugham would recognise, overlaid with spicy food odours, like those in Bugis Village, where the fish head soup is a favourite, washed down with the icy local Tiger beer.

Or in Chinatown, a suburb where the facades of many dilapidated shuttered houses have been restored to colonial charm, with concrete floors hidden under replacing bowed timber floors.

Here I am scheduled for a traditional Chinese massage at the Red Peach Spa, showering in a stone-walled booth and then reclining on a woven matted massage bed to be kneaded and probed, stroked and tugged.

I feel I am taken apart and then gently put together again, Lego Woman.

As Somerset Maugham wrote: "Singapore is the meeting-place of a hundred peoples; and men of all colours, black Tamils, yellow Chinks, brown Malays, Armenians, Jews and Bengalis, called to one another in raucous tones."

Here too is the meeting-place of a hundred diners. At Indochine I have a chicken curry, at Saint Julien I have a slab of foie gras the size of a steak (c'est vrai), at Sistina I have risotto and in the Joo Chiat/Katong area I watch the making of my traditional rice dumplings stuffed with pork and dried melon, wrapped in pandanus leaves and steamed. With everything, hot green tea helps cool you down.

And, of course, I have a handful of peanuts at Raffles' Long Bar, reconstructed within the hotel with timber single-bladed fans linked into a machine that would once have been operated by the hired help. The shells are tossed blithely onto the floor, the only place in Singapore where littering doesn't get you fined.

When Somerset Maugham was a resident (all guests are residents), the bar was at the front of the hotel, but a refurbishment returning the national monument to the 1915 facade meant this, his favourite bar, had to be lovingly recreated, beam by beam, from dark native timbers.

Actually, I can sense him more at the outdoor Gazebo bar, where waiters spirit Singapore Slings off to tropical tables. Here, behind a pillar, I can almost smell his Havana cigar wafting past the casuarina tree.

A young, Ralph Laurenly American couple is stepping into a luxury car at the hotel's entrance. His pink polo matches her perfect pastel suit. I can feel a short story coming on and hear a distant mocking English laugh from the foyer.

Of course, Somerset Maugham's own life would have made a fine story. Stammering, shy and withdrawn as a child, he later wrote: "Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother."

In 1917 he took his first trips to the Pacific and the East, and travelled widely after then. When he was in London he was the archetypal witty, rich writer in society.

Although he married, poor Syrie Wellcome could eventually no longer bear his overt affair with American man Gerald Haxton.

In 1927, he left England amid scandal and went to live in France, continuing to visit Raffles for weeks at a time, to write about the rich and the eccentric. He consented to be photographed with his favourite waiter, and the photo - capturing his supercilious face with its drawn lines and beaked nose - sits in the hotel museum.

"Raffles stands for all the fables of the exotic East" is Somerset Maugham's quote the hotel most likes to use.

I look for the types he cast as his characters. There is the loud American woman heading for the jeweller's where a ring for your little finger (it fitted perfectly) would set you back $80,000, the Singapore dollar being similar to ours.

Here is the slim British man heading for the hotel tailor, in suit and tie. He could be Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, the spy. The Cantonese clerk I find in a bank, the Italian widow who ran her own hotel could be serving me my pannacotta.

And then there are the other figures who also haunt Raffles, Ava Gardner - "Such cheekbones," says my guide, with envy - and Charlie Chaplin. The rich, the famous, the clever, and me.

ONE evening government ministers, tourism operators and hoteliers gather for the grand launch of Singapore's rebranding to "Uniquely Singapore". Speeches and Q and As are replaced by colour and spectacle, pop music, traditional and modern dancers, pyrotechnics and a variety show atop the Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay, two spiky glass domes of entertainment, a hotel and shopping mall, modelled on the extraordinary, "stinky" durian fruit.

The men wear smart suits, the women evening dresses. Looking around, here is Somerset Maugham's diversity of culture, layers of nationalities, speaking mainly English (or Singlish), in a maelstrom of accents. That much he would know. What he would make of the architecture or the high-rise cityscape across the bay, I cannot guess.

When the last firework has boomed across the water, a group of Westerners escape to Chinatown in search of the durian that has inspired this multimillion-dollar monument.

In party dress and stilettos, I perch on a tiny tin chair as our guide brings us a durian, hacked in half by a ragged street merchant with a leathery face. It is top quality, D24, but half our party is overwhelmed by the stench, described by some as like sewage.

To me, the wooden, spiky fruit smells faintly of pineapple and bananas and other tropical fruits, just overpoweringly intense. I tentatively taste one creamy segment, listening to gagging sounds from my companions. This can't be right: it tastes almost pleasant. I admit this, to the group's derision. Only one other enjoys his durian, a fellow antipodean.

I doubt Somerset Maugham would have tasted this fruit: they wouldn't let it in the hotel door and taxi drivers refuse to carry it. The odour lingers offensively for hours.

We suck our mints and creep nervously back inside the hotel, hoping our feast goes unnoticed. I detect a faint twitch of a uniformed doorman, but if he smells anything, he's far too well-trained to say.

WHEN you're flying to Europe, often Orchard Rd is all you see, a buzzing strip of glamour facades, punctuated with multilayered shopping booths, selling everything from Yves St Laurent originals to Rolex knock-offs, digital cameras to razor blades.

I am curious to see if you can still bring home a steal, and wander down the strip. Now that many of New Zealand's electronic goods do not carry duty, prices seem on a par to those here.

My mobile phone is cheaper, with trade-in, on Queen St. Singaporeans with teeny-weeny phones around their necks apparently lock themselves into high-priced contracts to afford them.

As a tropical downpour thunders down in the street, I sate myself looking at Jean-Paul Gaultier, Hermes and Armani boutiques, contemplating dresses at $3000 and shoes for $700. I am too big for the dainty but reasonably priced dresses at Zara. Then again, my taxi to the hotel is $2.90, less in New Zealand dollars.

It occurs to me that Singapore is the right place for a beginner to start in Asia - safe, cheap, easy to get around, something for every budget. It's kind of Asia 101.

There has to be a high point. It is the highest point in Singapore, a club on the 70th floor of the city's highest building, Equinox, where seating has been reserved up more stairs, at the club's highest point.

Even those without vertigo gasp at the view, lights laid out below like a neon map or the view from a window seat in a jet.

The smart set are dressed up and sipping cocktails, while a DJ plays pop music and one of my companions clings in pallor to the table.

I have left Somerset Maugham far below. But I hear the echo of his words: "Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of habit." Hee-haw.

* Brenda Ward flew to Singapore courtesy of the Singapore Tourism Board.



GETTING THERE

Singapore Airlines offers daily non-stop services from Auckland, and five times a week non-stop from Christchurch, with fares starting at $1529 return.

Go Holidays is offering a four-night package for $1589 per person, share twin, flying Singapore Airlines and staying at the Pan Pacific, Singapore.

WHAT TO DO

Shop, eat, have a Singapore Sling at Raffles, take the cable car to Sentosa Island resort, see the Skytower revolving viewing platform, Singapore Zoo, Chinatown. More ideas at Visit Singapore.

WHEN TO GO

Singapore is hot and humid all year with temperatures around 30C and humidity around 75 per cent. November, December and January are wetter than other months.

GETTING AROUND

If you stay near Orchard Rd, you can walk to the shops, and further afield if you're fit. Walking is safe for women alone too. The underground MRT is efficient, safe and cheap. There are also buses, but why bother when taxis are so cheap?