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Thanks to the late bedtime last night after staying up to watch The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I slept straight through until Bryan and Uncle Remie started their morning toilet in preparation for seeing Bryan off to work.
For breakfast I toasted two slices of bread, topped with American peanut butter and Scottish berry preserves. Then, seeing the ripe bananas that were attracting ants and flies, I pulled out two mixing bowls and started to make chocolate banana bread. Around the same time Papa entered the kitchen to fix himself some breakfast, leaving me one banana short for my intended recipe. Improvising with a little extra orange juice to make up for the flavor deficit, I put the pan into the oven and hoped for the best.
I wouldn't learn until much later how the baking experiment turned out, because we were about to embark on a full day adventure in the untamed lands on the northern coast of Singapore. Our first stop: River Safari.
Papa plotted a route to River Safari that involved two bus-train transfers and one train-train transfer. A misinterpretation of his remark about the LRT while on the elevated train to Choa Chu Kang led to my standing alone on the LRT platform while Papa and Mom had already passed through the gates headed toward the bus interchange. Papa re-entered the station to fetch me from the LRT platform, and we resumed our journey to River Safari.
Although some of the aquatic vistas on display felt like a repeat of what Mom and I had seen at the Sentosa aquarium, this park emphasized freshwater life. A few of the world's rivers were represented only by walls of text and color photos, but at least the Mississippi, Ganges, Mekong, and Amazon rivers had living exhibits. One organism in particular captivated me and Papa with its grace and "limbless" locomotion. The giant freshwater stingray, which generates a wavelike undulation in its body, had apparently been discovered only twenty years ago!
For $5 each we got to board a boat that took us past some species that thrive near the banks of the Amazon river, starting with the collared peccary. True to the disclaimer at the ticket office, some of the beasts were nowhere in sight as the boat proceeded past their roaming areas on the Amazon River Quest. I would make up for failing to see a live giant anteater by getting an anteater T-shirt from the gift shop at the end of our visit.
We ate lunch at the River Safari Tea House next to the welcome center. Two vegetarian dishes and a slab of ground-up-and-reconstituted meat helped us put some cognitive distance between the animals we had just seen alive and the dead animals that provided our mid-day sustenance. Two pots of hot tea, an ice-cold Diet Coke, and lukewarm bottled water that we had been carrying since Kent Vale, if they didn't make their way out of our pores as sweat, settled in our bladders to grant us the pleasure of faux-outdoor micture events at the half-open toilets in Sungei Buloh.
Sungei Buloh wetlands reserve, famous for its migratory birds and monitor lizards, did not disappoint on the latter (we counted 11 on our walk through the park), but birds were in short supply at this time of year. Maybe they were scared off by the loud music being played by Malaysians across the water celebrating the New Year. At least the mudskippers and crabs, with their more limited range, came out in greater numbers. Their friskiness made a neat contrast to the laziness of all the monitor lizards except one, who crept across a 20-m stretch of mud in search of food.
The return trip again made use of Choa Chu Kang interchange, except this time we transferred to another bus instead of boarding a train. From the bus we got a ground-level view of what Papa called "the heartland of Singapore," a more affordable area where ordinary people live.
An early evening workout in the fitness center put the finishing touch on an active day. A well-earned shower provided the only overhead dose of water on this unusually rain-free day.