Westysclan World Cruise 2023

As we have been sailing we have seen the odd ship every now and again. The evening before we got into Singapore the amount of other ships around us had increased considerably. We got up early to experience sailing into Singapore amongst all the the other ships as Mark remembered it from his Navy days. Unfortunately none of my photos could capture the sheer magnitude of ships in Singapore.

It didn’t take long to get us docked. There was an even larger ship, Genting Sea, due into the same cruise terminal so we wanted to be through immigration before them.

We cleared immigration at about 9:30am and started the walk to Harbourside to catch the cable car. The walk started out interesting but then just got long and hot as we completed the last section walking on a footpath beside a busy highway.

We had prepurchased our tickets as we waited to disembark the ship. Fortunately the waiting time once we got there was not too bad. We headed to Sentosa Island first, but because the walk had taken us longer than expected we decided to stay on and go straight up to Faber Peak – didn’t want to be stuck on the island and miss our ship’s departure.

The cable car experience was okay. After an initial speedy launch out of the stations it moves at a fairly comfortable pace, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you have trouble with heights. At the moment the cars are all decorated as pokeballs with different Pokemon themes inside. The views over the city are not as spectacular as advertised but we did enjoy our walk around Faber Peak.

Not wanting to repeat the return walk we used the SMRT. They are in the process of completing the Golden Circle line which will connect Harbourside directly to the Marina (about 3 stops). But as the circle is not yet finished our choice was to stay on the Golden Circle Line for a 51min return trip or travel so far on this line then swap to the EastWest green line and then finally the brown line. We did the latter.

We went to Gardens on the Bay last time we were here, but we decided that it would be a nice way to spend the afternoon visiting sections that we didn’t see before and to bag a few geocaches. It was also not too far to walk back to the ship. Our all aboard time was 5:30pm but we had given ourselves a return deadline of 4:30pm because we did not know how long it would take to get back through immigration and on to the ship. Fortunately it was quite speedy.

Back on board ship, it was straight to the pool to cool down and rehydrate. We then spent the next hour or two sitting in our deck chairs watching out to sea as our ship negotiated its way out of Singapore and through the shipping traffic – a unique perspective through which to experience Singapore. With the sun now set, it was time to head to dinner and then fall into bed for an early night.