Forest Adventure and Sentosa

Two Saturdays ago I went to the Forest Adventure with a bunch of people from work. I was feeling like I wanted to do some zip lines so I googled zip lines and found this place. It's more on the east side of the island and it's a man-made reservoir/lake surrounded by some wooded areas with walking/running/cycling trails. So I organized a trip for me and a bunch of co-workers. I emailed out to the office for anyone who wanted to join, i made reservations for all of us, and in the email i put 'don't be late, we'll leave without you!!!'. I really don't like to wait for people and I appreciate punctuality. Anyways, long story short, LMS and i left the house at 830AM to meet everyone at 945AM at the forest adventure. when we were nearly there i asked LMS hey what time is it? she goes.. 947AM. what! i had no idea we were running late and after i made a big deal about others not being late i felt like a moron... so we ended up RUNNING to the entrance and made it just a few mins before 10AM. no one seemed to care and we started on time. whew.

the weather was PERFECT this morning. sunny, warm, light breeze. the lake is beautiful and you can rent kayaks and there were lots of people on the lake doing training on dragon boats, some kayakers, even some water skiiers. So it was me, LMS, Moe, liong, judy, and hammim. raymond came too but his son had to go to a music lesson i think so he couldn't do the course.

so we go through a brief safety. basically you have a helmet and a harness with double carribiners (sp?) so you're always hooked onto something with at least one of your hooks, if not both. there are four tree-top obstacle stages, and the end of each stage is with a zip line. 3 of the 4 zip lines go over the lake so it's REALLY fun. some of the obstacles were really scary and I couldn't do all of them. the best one i think was the tarzan swing where you jump off this little platform and then swing into a cargo net. so for the drop there's no tension on your harness, just in free fall, and it's really exhilerating. i'm kind of a wuss with heights, but hammin and LMS were doing everything so easily.

By the way i was fiddling around with the settings and somehow i changed something so i've been having some problems inserting the pictures, so hopefully it turns out OK. the whole forest adventure takes about 2.5 hours to make it through the whole course. after we were done we all went over to the east coast (where i rented the bike a few weeks ago), and we had a big shared lunch. We all ordered different things and just ate ate ate. The others ordered this enormous coconuts to drink/eat.. they were about the size of bowling balls. We got chicken wings (they really look like chicken wings, like the full arm), fried oysters, some lettuce veggie thing, even some sting ray. the sting ray was sort of flaky like a white fish but more mushy and not much taste. it's smothered in chili sauce and then it's pretty good. after lunch we rented bikes and rode up and down for an hour. the weather was so nice, just perfect. we took a picture on the pier, see below!
After we rode bikes, Judy to me and LMS to this local market near Bugis. I wanted to buy some bulk fresh nuts and she knew just the place. we walked through the main shopping area and up some stairs I probably never would have found, and upstairs is complete madness. It's a chinese bulk foods market with all dried foods.. everything from HUGE bins of bulk nuts to dried sea urchin and dried sea cucumber, buckets of dried mushrooms, all kinds of seaweed and spices. everyone is just yelling and asking how much? how much? and there's a zillion people everywhere. I got about 3 kilos of bulk nuts... pistachios, cashews, and almonds. i ate so many nuts over the weekend on monday i brought in the cashews and tried to give them away i was so nutted out. by the time i got home on saturday it was about 7PM and i was pooped! i worked on my scrapbook for a little while and then went to bed and i slept like a coma patient. great day!

On Sunday i got up and did a pool workout, then i took the MRT to vivo city and took the Sentosa Express to Sentosa Island, which is right off the coast of singapore. they've turned it into kind of a family resort island, it has man-made beaches, hotels, a tram and bus and MRT service, aquarium, segues and bikes to rent, plenty of restaurants, shopping, and bars, observation tower, and they're in the process of building an amusement park. i was there only one afternoon but it's very family friendly and you could easily spend the week there and be thoroughly entertained. i did this really cool land luge thing. you take the ski lift up and then luge down in these little carts. i was going way too fast on mine and when i came around the corner there was a little girl totally stopped right in the middle of the track. i swerved and i missed her but i damaged my cart somehow and then it was kind of scraping the ground going really slow the rest of the way down. hahah oh well i guess i deserved that.

i also went to the aquarium which has a really cool underwater tunnel so you can see all he fish swimming around. the aquarium is kind of small, the underwater tunnel is definitely the main attraction. it's always interesting to me when i see people taking a billion photos of all of the fish. what are you going to do with those? they don't even come out well since you can't use your flash. it was really really crowded and when i got the point of wanting to drown someone i thought it was about time to leave. sentosa was really fun and a great little fun way to spend the afternoon. i thought about when i went to my friend's bachelorette party at Disneyland... i could see her having a bachelorette party at Sentosa if she lived here. :)