Singapore is adventure island

VERNON SMALL and son HARRY try out the family-friendly version of Singapore on offer.

From the swimming pool, where I'm lounging in 33 deg heat, it's just an amble round the corner to Muddy Murphy's Irish bar and the local headquarters of the Manchester United supporters' club. Is this the tropics or some displaced corner of Britain?

Singapore is a bit like that - disorient-ating. Neither Asian enough to be totally exotic nor familiar enough to be home.

The pool is four floors up in the boutique five-star Meritus Negara Hotel, just off the shopping Mecca of Orchard Rd. ("Boutique" for Singapore is 200 bedrooms and all the facilities you could ask for.)

The purpose of the lounging is to cool down after a breakneck tour to see whether Singapore can be family-friendly and not just a stopover for Kiwis to stretch their legs and do some shopping on their way to the brighter lights of Europe.

And it has to be said that Singapore is an ideal entree to Asia for first-time travellers and their parents.

The food is authentic and varied, the nightlife hums, you can drink the water straight from the tap, women alone are as safe as, or safer, than in the average New Zealand town, the city is hyper-clean, the people are friendly, and English is the common language of all the ethnic groups.

But the transition from a cool winter to sticky humidity and temperatures that vary between the high 20s and low 30s can be a trial for sightseers.

Some 80,000 New Zealanders pass through this island state every year, staying a little over two days each on average. Sadly, that is barely enough time to recover from the 10-hour flight, freshen up and sample a meal or six from the bewildering range of cuisine: Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, Western, Thai, Malay ...

The magnificent Changi Airport has already rumbled the problems inherent in the fleeting visit - and made a plus of them by supplying sleep-over facilities and full-service hotel rooms "in transit" to save the tired traveller the inconvenience of passing through customs twice.

Recognising that shopping's appeal is fading in a deregulated global High St (and that regional tourism has been hit by the after-effects of the Asian financial crisis and the low value of neighbouring currencies), the Singapore Tourist Bureau is keen to diversify.

It is testing the ground to see whether we might stay a few more days, or put up with a longer haul than the hop to Australia or Bali or the uncertainties of Fiji.

The guinea pigs are a couple of kids, including my 9-year-old son, Harry. As for me, I am touching down 36 years after my first taste of Singapore, when I was also 9 years old.

Back in 1964 it was landfall after five days on a Dutch cruise-cum-immigrant ship bound for New Zealand via Sri Lanka. Long days of glassy seas under a thirsty sun, with a huge swell that left the Willem Ruys stinking of chips, diesel smoke and vomit.

For Harry it is a journey of limitless hours in Singapore Airlines' Krisworld computer games universe. Bliss.

Even in 1964, with Singapore in transition from colonial outpost to independent state, you could sense the entrepreneurialism that has made it what it is. The driver who cajoled our family into his taxi charged a flat fee and, sounding his horn whenever he could, showed us the limited tourist attractions of the day: Raffles Hotel, the Tiger Balm Gardens, Buddhist temples, the Botanical Gardens (complete with wild monkeys), and then a swing across the causeway to Malaya.

That taxi driver, Ng Kwang Seng, kept up a barrage of good wishes and Christmas cards for eight years - direct marketing taken to the extreme, as this extract from one of his letters shows:

"I was glad to note that you have recommended [me] to your friends who are going to UK by air via Singapore. I shall meet them at the airport and do my best services as I had done to your good selves. When you read your geography about our Malaysia you will get a feeling like you are still in Singapore. There is no wonder in it. Our city is at the heart of South-east Asia. My car horn is working very good condition. All peoples like it."

In modern Singapore horn-blowing is an endangered art, but the same entrepreneurial spirit, guided by the all-pervasive hand of the country's state capitalism, has thrived.

Its 3.7 million people live and work in a forest of high-rises. As they fight to find more space to expand, hills are bulldozed into the sea to accommodate the construction boom and bright new attractions.

Now it truly does sit at the centre of South-east Asia, part-heart, part-leech, pumping the economic lifeblood into the nearby nations and sucking back almost everything it needs to keep its economy moving: water, food, gas, power, cheap labour for the menial tasks its highly educated nationals eschew, and, yes, bargeloads of soil from Indonesia to reclaim more land.

The Botanical Gardens, with their heady orchid displays, are still there but the wild monkeys are rarely seen.The Tiger Balm Gardens live on, although they are a faded attraction.

However, the Government has pumped millions of dollars into new drawcards - and they are spectacular. The cable car to the relative space and peace of the main family tourist site of Sentosa Island, the world-class zoo (where we saw our first Komodo dragon), the Jurong Bird Park - surely the best of its type on the globe, and perhaps best of all, the $75 million Night Safari alongside the zoo.

At the Night Safari you can sample some of the local food (more of that later) and then, as night falls, board a tram to watch nocturnal animals - and we are talking rhinos, elephants, leopards and giraffe here, not barely glimpsed forest-floor beasts. They all roam in something close to their natural environment and are much more active than you will ever see elsewhere in captivity.

At several stops along the route you can take a walk (temperature still in the high 20s) to increase the illusion that you are actually "where the wild things are" as the barriers and fences almost disappear in the artificial "full moonlight."

Eyeballing a bat is not for the squeamish, but for kids who can stay up late enough, the safari is a rare treat.

The cable car to Sentosa is also a must, with its spectacular views across the straits to the islands of Indonesia and back across the city. Pity about the all-pervasive musak in the cable cars.

Sentosa itself is of mixed appeal. Underwater World is worth a visit just to see the strange and endangered dugong grazing like a sort of underwater cow. But we fancied its sharks and stingrays were no match for Kelly Tarlton's in Auckland.

The museum - housed in the hushed, cool stone of the former British hospital - has fine waxwork displays of the British surrender to the Japanese, and the Brits returning the favour in 1945, as well as scenes from Singapore's lesser-known past.

A ride on the monorail lets you take in the small beach resorts and the Second World War British gun emplacements, facing impotently out to sea while the Japanese came in through the back door via the Malayan Peninsula.

On Sentosa is Fantasy Island, with its water slides and rides. It was a late addition to the itinerary, at our request, but it caught us hungry and in the middle of the hottest day of the year, so we didn't linger. It would be a good place to idle away some cooler hours in the day and seemed best suited to older teenagers than our young tourists.

But what to say about Sentosa's surreal Asian Village? It had the air of a near-deserted West Coast replica goldrush town the day we visited.

We liked the displays of unusual fish and the chance for a decent-sized catch in the authentic Malay Kelong - a platform built on wooden stilts in the ocean. But the explanatory video was excruciatingly patronising and the absence of local visitors, even on the fairground rides, doesn't bode well for the village's relaunch. Probably missable on a short visit unless you want to give yourself a real fright on the rickety roller-coaster called the Dragon Ride.

Better to spend some time in the cool breeze at the Sentosa Seafood Restaurant, on a pier near the return ferry to the main island, sampling shark's fin soup, prawns and giant chilli crab - and, if you are heartless enough, you can choose your own.

For a late meal, locals and tourists alike flock to Boat Quay back on the main island. Auckland could learn a lesson from the array of reasonably priced restaurants and bars which line the river there.

On our first full night we watched the boats chug by and ate a succulent Indonesian meal washed down with beer (coconut straight from the shell for the kids). It was topped off with a plate of tropical fruit including the exquisite mangosteen - a white-fleshed fruit without the intense sweetness of lychee.

Even if Singapore is not the shopping nirvana it once was, the computer games I was cajoled into buying turned out to be about 20 per cent cheaper than at home.

Food halls and the outdoor hawker sites provide the best-value eating in Singapore, with a decent-sized dish costing around $5.

* Vernon Small and Harry visited Singapore with the help of Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Tourism Board.