We did a lot of walking and exploring while we were on a recent holiday in Singapore. Fort Canning was only a few kilometres from our accommodation in Chinatown. We had spend the morning and lunch at the Little India markets. It was super hot and on the way back we thought, "This looks shady and might be cool to look at". The hill and all the stairs had me worried. Luckily, we saw some other tourists coming down the stairs who said it nice inside and worth exploring.
I like to try and understand a bit of the history of a place when we visit. Sometimes it is hard to take it in with a quick overview but it seems the British bought the island of Singapore off the Malayan empire and set it up as a port. Migrants came and did a lot of work to make it more liveable. It must have very hot and hard work way back then.
The park used to be called Bukit Larangan, or 'Forbidden Hill' in the Malay language. It is interesting how most places have hills or outlooks as key historical places. The Malay royalty apparently ruled from here, then the British built the fort and surrendered to the Japanese on the Hill during World War Two.
This is one of the signs I read to learn more about this place.
Everywhere I go I always look for the map.
There were some cool wall carvings.
There was many gardens within the park. My favorite was named after the founder of Singapore, Mr Raffles and was home to an old lighthouse.
I'm not sure if this was a replica of the lighthouse or the actual original lighthouse. It's certainly in a high enough spot.
There were some magnificent big trees which were great for some shade on this really hot day.
There were more relics and reminders around the garden that this did, in fact, used to be a fort.
This is the old Fort Gate. You could even walk through it, which we di
More maps. I like maps.
This was the view of that same old Fort Gate but from the other side. It's lovely seeing it with greenery growing over it.
Many of the walkways looked like this. They were well maintained and easy to walk on. Except that this was one of the rare flat spots!
There were not a lot of animals around in Singapore since it's such a built up, busy place, so it was great to see this rooster here in the park.
And that's it! Thanks Garmin for tracking our walk around the park and back to our accommodation for a well-earned rest.
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