CNY 2020 – Day 6 – Sentosa Island

The 6th day of our holiday was spent on Sentosa Island; a major tourism attraction in Singapore. We booked our tickets for the cable car ride ahead of time, and decided we’d figure out what we wanted to do when we got there.

The view was beautiful from the cable car!
Singapore

Upon arrival, we quickly realized that without tripling our budget for the day, there was no way we’d be able to do it all, so we settled on 2 of the lower prices options (proving you can do Sentosa on a limited budget).

There is a Universal Studios on Sentosa islands and also a Madame Tussauds.

One thing we learned after walking around for a while was that transportation on the island is mostly free. There is a ‘hop on and off” type bus which costs 25 Singaporean dollars per person (the conversion is almost the same as Canadian dollars), but there is also a monorail and shuttles that can help you get around the island as well.

One of the buses we used to get around the Island

Our first stop was the Trick Eye Museum. It was pretty hot out so we figured we should spend the peak of the day indoors, where it was air conditioned.

Now, I’m sure part of my problem with this museum was my understanding of what it was. When I hear ‘trick eye’, I mostly think of optical illusions. I was expecting silly mirrors, maybe some amateur magic or just good old fashion tricks of the eye. But the museum only had 1 or 2 of those types of displays. The rest were all basically the type of thing you can do with phone apps like Beaty Cam and Instagram. Taking photos of myself with bunny ears or in a ballerina outfit isn’t really something I’ll do for free… Let alone paying $25 each to do it.

There were a few cute ones
There was nothing ‘trick’ about this one. I just squeezed between a statue’s arms…
This one was actually pretty good. It was an actual trick Eye display

There were definitely a few good laughs, mostly in the ones that required videos.

Dave told me roughly where they were and I played along
Keep in mind that none of these special effects worked without looking through an app. So we were just goofing around in front of large posters

It didn’t really help that my phone couldn’t even run the app. I have a Oneplus6, so I’m not sure what the problem was. Even Dave’s phone glitched quite a bit. All in all, I wouldn’t visit a museum like this again. It’s too bad too, because there were other things I wanted to do, but after dropping $50 for us to spend 45 minutes there taking selfies… We didn’t have the budget to do other stuff we would have enjoyed more.

There was some weird stuff in that place!

Our second stop was Fort Siloso. We got there only 40 minutes before close so we didn’t get to see much, but it was a nice walk anyway.

It was a British fort during the second world war
Some displays were set up to help create ambience

On our way out of fort Siloso, we stumbled upon an Asian food market, so we decided to walk around.

Delicious, delicious food!

The market wasn’t quite open yet but all the businesses were getting set up. Part of setting up included taking photos of all the food offerings from each shop. That was sort of neat.

Representatives from each food stall came for the photo shoot
They also all said as prayer before getting started

The trip back via cable car was equally beautiful during the sun set.

Pretty Sun set!

All in all, I enjoyed our trip to Sentosa. If we had doubled our budget ($200 instead of $100) we could have done a lot more, but when you go on holiday as much as we do, you’ve gotta give up some things. Singapore is overall quite an expensive country, so I wasn’t super surprised at the costs, but was disappointed in the value in some cases.

I did get to see baby peacocks, so that was pretty awesome!

Check back soon! More posts to come!