This week’s travel dream: Savoring the many moods of Singapore

Singapore is a city that “relentlessly renovates and reinvents itself,” said P.F. Kluge in National Geographic Traveler. I fell in love with the Southeast Asian city-state 40 years ago, and it hasn’t stopped changing since. The core features remain the same—the “heavy, warm air,” the mix of people and cuisines, the deep layers of history, and the diversity of its neighborhoods. Location has much to do with its varied flavors. Malaysia lies just across a bridge, Indonesia across a narrow strait, and even India and Sri Lanka seem like neighbors. But “it’s a place that still believes in progress,” so wrecking balls and construction cranes are ever busy. Today, when I revisit old friends, “I sense their pride in Singapore’s emergence as a world-class city,” and I admire their city’s new audacity, its cockiness.

My dream home in Singapore would be one of the city’s old black-and-white Tudor-style bungalows, built in colonial days. Touring one recently, I fantasized about a life of late-afternoon swims and cocktails, about “going to bed under a ceiling fan, maybe a mosquito net,” and looking forward to a stroll the next morning in the nearby Singapore Botanic Gardens. The gardens are home to a thousand orchid hybrids as well as every imaginable lover of the outdoors, from Filipina nannies to students in a tai chi class. Some out-of-towners were no doubt staying across town in the city’s newest marvel—the Marina Bay Sands resort. The complex’s three mammoth hotel towers are connected across the top by a 370-yard-long platform called SkyPark, whose tree-shaded walkways and vast infinity pool look out over the bay and the busy streets far below.

I eventually found one neighborhood that felt like Asia’s past. In Geylang, a not-yet-renovated district where guest workers live, the sidewalks were clogged with stacks of eggs and bags of okra. Walking the streets in the morning, I nodded at hookers having breakfast and doctors offering herbal cures. At night, I settled in for dinner at a “raucous” Geylang food court that smelled of beer, cigarettes, and roast duck. Here was the city I’d first fallen in love with. “I had to search for it in the new Singapore, but it’s still around.”

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At the Marina Bay Sands resort (marinabaysands.com), doubles start at $359.