Sentosa - Underwater World

Just a few months after I joined my first job, I was asked to fly to Singapore in 2 days time. Not having any experience of work, not knowing what I was expected to do at the client location in SG and afraid that I will probably make a fool of myself, feeling 2 days was an extremely short time to plan for the first overseas trip, I refused to go.

Well ! My loss was somebody else's gain and later it seemed that the whole project team was going to Singapore. One and all talked about their trip to SENTOSA when they came back to India. I had heard the name so many times from team mates yet I hardly knew what the place was like except it being an island near Singapore.

Finally, after close to a decade, I visited Sentosa.

Sentosa is south of Singapore and from the Harbour Front station one may take a bus/rail/cable car to reach Sentosa. We decided to take a cab and I sunk in the back seat -relaxing and looking forward to a long beautiful journey into the island, when suddenly in 10 minutes time I realized that we had already reached Sentosa. I never knew it was so near! It is actually only half a kilometer from the southern tip of SG.

Sentosa  means Peace and Tranquility in Malay. There is quite a history attached to it before it turned into the so called 'island resort' that it is today. It is interesting to know that the place has no residential establishment (except hotels) but has been developed solely for recreational purpose.

As soon as we entered the gates of Sentosa we could see the signature Orange buses plying here and there and a lot of construction was on for the upcoming Resorts World which features the Universal Studios theme park. Somehow, it felt like being in the Truman Show.

The Underwater world

We headed straight to the Underwater world and joined the queue for tickets. I suddenly saw a man with a big snake round his neck posing for a photo. A guy was renting snakes for $5 for photo and there was a small queue there too :-) Quite scary !

We watched with awe the amazingly colourful fishes...the clown fish seemed exactly like Nemo (remember 'Finding Nemo'!). There was a beautiful white fish with a small dash of yellow. Then there were extremely small deep purple ones which just found their way everywhere. At the same time it was quite disappointing to see so many fishes in a very small confined space.

We spent a long amount of time watching the jelly fishes...It seemed like watching a slow ballet. We waited there for the colour to change again and again ...I am at loss to describe it. Had to capture it in a video...but not able to upload here.

I spotted a travelator and hurried everyone on to it. We had spent a long time at the initial 2-3 attractions and I was worried that we will not have enough time for anything else. I was sure that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Kapil and I had been to the Scotland UW world or whatever it was called and it was so big that we could not see it fully as we had reached late.I also faintly remember the marine world of Mumbai which was huge as well.

So we jumped on the travelator, admired some more big and small fishes....some of them were sharks too but not as big as we were expecting, took a few photos and within no time we reached the end of travelator journey........ ummm so soon .... excuse me ......I am sure we are missing something.....I went up and down ...left and right to search for a turn that we had missed and which will lead us to more of the underwater world ! But there was none....I could not believe that this was all of it.

But wait ..there was the dolphin show and the sea lion show also included in the ticket. So we headed for the shows. They were not bad but not as good as the ones in the singapore zoo.


Overall, I felt it is quite a hyped attraction but may be good for someone who hasn't had a glimpse of the marine world before.

Next, we took the Sentosa bus for the next destination.........