The BEST 21 hour layover in SINGAPORE! 🇸🇬 (Gardens by the Bay, trying satay, & MORE!)

The 21 hour layover clock starts now. The city is from the future. This city is wild. We have spent the last six weeks traveling all over Vietnam, including checking out some of its large cities, smaller towns, epic nature spots, eating tons of delicious local foods, meeting some of the kindest locals, going on a caving adventure, experiencing its culture and learning its history and motorbiking around the stunning Northern part of the country. It's impossible to put into words just how incredible, memorable, and special the last six weeks have been. Vietnam is an amazing country that now holds a huge spot in our hearts and we have loved every single second. Well, almost. Don't let the train bugs bite. It's now time to head back to the US, but we're going to squeeze in one final adventure in Asia before we go. Today starts our three day journey back to Texas. And for our first leg, we have a two hour flight from here in Ho Chi Minh City to Singapore, which includes a 21 hour layover. You may remember that on our way to Vietnam, we also had a layover in Singapore, but we only stayed in the airport, which has some pretty amazing things to do. This time we're going into the city and we're going to try to squeeze in as many sights and eats as we possibly can. We have a long list of everything we want to accomplish and we're going to have to hustle, but we are so excited. Now let's just hope we don't have any flight delays. So we have as much time as possible to explore. I forgot to do our arrival card. Whoops. We have made it to Singapore and through immigration, which is the easiest immigration out of any country we've ever been to. And the 21 hour layover clock starts now. The downtown area of Singapore is just under 30 minutes from the airport. So we're going to grab a grab because that's the quickest way to get there, drop off our bags at our hotel and then begin exploring. We're right by the waterfall. We got to quickly go get a glimpse of it. It's just as beautiful as I remember it, but we got to get going. Time's a ticking. Singapore is an island city state, which means the whole country is within the city, similar to Monaco and Vatican city. And it's only 275 square miles, which makes it smaller than Rhode Island, the smallest state in the US. In the 19th century, Singapore was a British trading port, then was occupied by Japan during World War II, then reverted back to British control in 1945 and then became part of Malaysia in 1963 before it finally became an independent sovereign country in 1965. Singapore is home to different cultures and religions and to experience some of its diversity, we're heading to the Muslim quarter. This mosque is gorgeous. The history of the Muslim quarter, also known as Kampong Glam goes back to the British colonial times in the 1800s. Sir Stanford Raffles, who was in charge of the British colonies in the East Indies and is considered to be the founder of Singapore, agreed to allot the area to the Sultan and designated the area around it as a Muslim settlement. Over the years the area has changed quite a bit with an influx of trendy shops and restaurants, but you can still see a lot of the Muslim influence with the Sultan mosque, numerous curry shops, fabric stores, and more. It is such a beautiful and colorful area. There's an alleyway here called Glam Gallery that's filled with artwork and murals. And we love coming across these alleyways during our travels where they turn something that was just used for trash into something beautiful to look at. For lunch, we came to Zomzom, which is an Indian Muslim restaurant that's been around since 1908 and it came very highly recommended from my best friend's mom who grew up here in Singapore. First up, we're starting with teh tarik, which is a hot tea with condensed milk. I will say today is not a hot tea kind of day. It is in the eighties, but it says it feels like 101 and we are just completely drenched. Thankfully they have AC. That is delicious. It has such a strong tea flavor. I'm not the best at describing tea, but it just tastes like a really strong black tea that has that sweetness from the condensed milk. We've had so much condensed milk over the last six weeks, way more than we've ever had in our entire lives. And I love it so much, but I think I do need to go on a condensed milk break for a bit because that stuff is rich. For our first dish, we got biryani, which is a rice dish that has a bunch of seasonings in it and meat. And I got beef and it also came with a side of this and I didn't know what to do with it, but they told me to put it on there. So hopefully that's right. Oh wow. Look at this. It's like a whole chunk of beef in there. Oh my gosh. I was not expecting that. Wow. There is so much going on in there. I have a little bit of a tingle in my throat from the spices. I think the best word to describe it is it's just very fragrant. I don't know exactly what spices are in here, but it's just like a party in my mouth right now. As soon as you put it up to your nose, you can smell all the spices. Wow. And our other dish is a murtabak, which is a pan fried bread with meat and eggs inside. And inside this one, we got mutton, which is lamb. Oh buddy. The murtabak on its own doesn't have a ton of flavor. Other than the meat flavor, you get a little sweetness from the onions. And then also you get, of course you taste some egg in there, but once you dip it in this sauce, which is like a tomato based sauce, it kind of brings out the flavors and it is so good. As you can see the bread is really thin. So some of it's still kind of stretchy, but then you also get some crispy bits that are super good. It is so freaking cool to finally be here and see all this in real life instead of just in movies and on the internet. This is so cool. We've headed to Marina Bay where many of the top attractions in Singapore are located. And this statue right behind me is Merlion, Singapore's mascot. It's a mythical creature with the head of a lion and the body of a fish and the fish body represents the city's origin as a fishing village. While the lion is after Singapore's original name Singapura, which means lion city. Singapore is very different from what we experienced in Vietnam and Thailand. For one, basically everything is in English, which is not something we're used to seeing in the last six weeks. Also this is such a modern city. There are tons of just these modern skyscrapers and some very unique futuristic looking buildings. And also Southeast Asia is kind of known for being more affordable for us tourists, but that's not really the case here in Singapore. Singapore is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in and has one of the highest percentage of millionaires. So we're definitely not paying $2 per meal like we did in Vietnam, but I'd say it's kind of more on par with us prices. So it's not that bad. As we mentioned in our Singapore airport video, Singapore is striving to be a city in nature and Gardens by the Bay is a huge part of that. Gardens by the Bay is a nature park, spanning 250 acres with different gardens, one and a half million plants, the largest glass greenhouse in the world, second tallest indoor waterfall and so much more. It is the number one thing we wanted to see while here today. And we are so excited. There are a bunch of different attractions here. Some of which are free while others have a fee. We unfortunately don't have time to see everything, but we narrowed it down to the three paid spots that we wanted to check out the most. We paid $130 Singapore dollars for our tickets, which is around 98 USD. And first we're going to the Supertree Grove to go on the OCBC Skyway because apparently it's weather dependent and it might storm soon. And she said, you should go now. Supertree Grove is home to 12 of the 18 Supertrees here at Gardens by the Bay, which are these crazy tree like structures that are not only cool to look at, but are sustainable vertical gardens that house almost 170,000 plants of over 200 species. And seven of them are designed to harvest solar energy. You can view them for free right here, but we're going up to this OCBC Skyway, which is a 128 meter long walkway that's suspended between two of the trees, 22 meters above the ground. This is so cool. I feel like I'm in some sort of futuristic movie right now. I'm surrounded by all these gnarly looking tree structures. And then there's the craziest buildings all around. This city is, this city is from the future. This city is wild. This thing's kind of like a suspension bridge and when a bunch of people walk by, it starts to wiggle a little bit. Kind of freaky. I think we got here at the perfect time because it's starting to rain and they're trying to shoot people off of this thing. Got that shot just in time. It is pouring now. The guy was like, go, go, go. We got to close it down. At first I was like, it's just a little bit of rain. No big deal. We're just walking in the rain. Then all of a sudden the biggest boom of thunder happened. That made me jump and say an expletive because it scared me so bad. And now it is torrential downpouring. This is crazy. Shout out to the lady in the ticket booth who told us to do that first. Cause we would have missed it. Thankfully everything else we want to do here today is indoors, but now we just have to find a way to get there safely. Wow. This is so cool. Next up we're at the cloud forest, which has vegetation that is normally found 2000 meters above sea level. And if you can't hear or tell behind me, it has one of the world's tallest indoor waterfalls at 35 meters with the tallest being the 40 meter tall rain vortex in the Singapore airport, which we saw on our first layover here in Singapore. We're currently walking on the cloud walk, which takes you from the top of the cloud forest down to the bottom. And we read that as you go down, the vegetation changes just as it would if you were in a real cloud forest. We're also here during one of their misting hours, which happens a handful of times per day. And they just have all this mist going everywhere. And I'm just so impressed by how much effort and thought they put into making you feel like you're truly in a forest here. It's just amazing. This place just feels like Disneyland for plants. Last but certainly not least, we are checking out the flower dome, which holds the Guinness world record for the largest glass greenhouse. And apparently it is the size of 75 Olympic swimming pools. The dome is climate controlled and it's kept between 23 to 25 degrees Celsius. There are also 3,332 glass panels that allow sunlight in for the health of the plants. And there's also a sensor activated retractable sail to provide shade when it gets too hot. There are nine gardens from five different continents and we're currently in the Mediterranean garden and it's pretty wild how they're able to keep all these plants from all over the world alive and coexisting together. I can't even keep a succulent, which is said to be one of the easiest plants to have alive. One amazing free thing to do here at gardens by the bay is the nightly light show at the super tree grove. It happens twice a night and every few weeks or so they change up the theme of the show. And tonight is the enchanted wood show. I have no words. This is spectacular. It's like a electronic firework show. That was absolutely phenomenal. The music and the lights were just so magical and lucky for us, Singapore not only has one free light show, but they have two free light shows. The Marina Bay sands casino and hotel also has a nightly light show called the spectra light show happens twice a night. We're gonna try to book it over there to make it for their second show. That was awesome and very intense. It started out so calm, just like doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Then it ended like that was really fun. We are hitting a wall and it is well past our bedtime, but we have one more stop we want to make. We're going to go check out a hawker center. These are super popular here in Singapore and they're basically an open air market where you'll find tons of stalls selling delicious, lower priced foods. There are many to choose from, but we are at the Lao Passat hawker center, which is one of the oldest markets in Singapore. And one of the most popular hawker centers, especially with tourists. We would have preferred to go to a more local spot, but this one was the closest to where we were. And we've got to maximize every second on this layover. One of those popular food items to get at this hawker center is satay. In fact, it's so popular that every night they shut down an entire street and turn it into satay street with a bunch of satay stands. Although we hear stands number seven and eight are the best ones. So how the satay works is that you go up to the stand that you want to buy it from, you order, you pay, and then they give you this buzzer. And then there's open seating so you can sit wherever you want. And then I guess this will buzz when it's time to go get it. He said 15 to 20 minutes, but I did hear sometimes it could be like an hour or so. We'll hope it's not that long. But while we wait, we got some drinks. We have teh tarik, which is the drink that we had earlier today, but the ice version because it's 10 PM and it says it still feels like 94 degrees out. And this is lemon juice. Which one should I try first? Oh, that's so good. It tastes like the, the Thai iced tea that we had in Chiang Mai at the night market. Oh, it's so good. First thing I'm going to do with this thing. Oh, genius. Genius. Oh yeah. That is so good. So refreshing. Satay is a very popular food item in Southeast Asia. It is grilled meat on a skewer and is often seasoned with a concoction of spices like tamarind and galangal and served with a sweet and spicy peanut sauce. We got five of four different proteins. We got mutton, chicken, beef, and prawn. I'm not sure which one this is. I'm going to guess beef because it just looks like beef. It's satay roulette. Yeah, satay roulette. All right. We're going to get a good dip in that peanut sauce. It's mostly sweet, but then you have some little grill marks there that add a little char flavor to it and then dip it in this peanut sauce. And of course you're going to taste a bunch of peanuts, but it's also sweet. And then if you finally get some spice in there, Oh, these are so good. I see why you get like you order a bunch of them because you just like go to town. Like they're going to disappear really fast. Oh man. That meat is cooked perfectly. They're just over there. Just tons of meat on the grill, tons of fire. Then the rubbing sauce all over flipping them. It was very, very fun to watch and yeah, cooked to perfection. Peanut sauce is probably in my top five favorite sauces of all time. And this one is so good. There's little chunks of peanuts in there. So you get a little bit of a crunch. Oh my goodness. I have no idea which meat this was. I have zero clue, but it's really good. Let me give one of these little prawns a try. Look at his eyes. Staring into my soul. These are nice and moist and tender. They're not overcooked to where they get like kind of chewy and rubbery. We would have loved to try so much more food here, but we are exhausted and we have two very, very, very long travel days ahead. So we're going to throw in the towel. Tonight we're staying at hotel G, which is located a little bit North of where we spent most of the day, but it's the cheapest hotel I could find with good reviews. And it is actually really, really nice. Our hotel room is pretty small, but it has everything we need. We have a nice comfy bed. We have a bathroom, which is a pretty interesting setup because the sink is outside of the toilet and shower area, which I actually think I might like better. And just the design and vibe of this place is super cool. 21 hours is obviously not enough time here in Singapore, but we're so glad that between our two layovers, we were able to check out some of the amazing things to do in this country. We will be back to not only Singapore, but to Asia as a whole. We fell so in love with Asia this trip. And we know this is just the first of many more trips out here. But for now we have another 30 hour travel day back to Austin to reunite with our girl Kona. We have missed her so much. We are so excited to see her and our van brisket. And the next time you see us, we'll be sharing the big upgrades we've been making to the van over the past four months before we hit the road to explore our final seven States. It is so much bigger than I thought it would be. I tried to say that with a straight face and I couldn't. We are at the flower dome, which holds the Guinness world record, world record. We are checking out the flower dome, which holds the Guinness world record, world record. You're wondering why we're not selfieing today is because it looks so close to our face because our lens broke and we're using our other one and it's not as good and it makes us look too close. No one wants to see us that close. You can see our pores.