A Big Adventure

As a sort of catch up here are reviews of the hotels that we have stayed in so far on the journey. These are our views and as such should not be taken as comprehensive, before booking any hotel do your own checking, I suggest using http://www.tripadvisor.com/ which we have found to be a very helpful website, also please take your time to add your reviews to Trip Advisor as it helps your fellow travelers.

In Singapore we stayed in The Golden Landmark Hotel (a Far East Hotel)  (November 2008) which is at 390 Victoria Street,  in the Arab area of town and was just 5 minutes walk from the Bugis MRT station – It’s a big place with a nice open air pool, the staff are friendly and helpful,  the rooms are probably a small step above the most basic.

As the Far East Hotel connection, well that might help explain why this place is very popular with the Indian Market. I would not recommend using the in room wifi – it’s expensive and slow and I had many problems!!
They have a couple of free internet computers at the reception or better still go to the MRT and on the Purple (north) line they have wifi at the stations, it’s fast, it’s free and it’s nice and cool down there!
The surrounding areas have very good food options and with the MRT makes everything so accessible, almost all of Singapore is just a short inexpensive ride away.
A TIP: When using the MRT get a A Singapore Tourist pass – it’s a daily ticket it looks expensive at 18 singapore dollars but its not, 10 dollars of that are a deposit for the card – so compared with somewhere like London for instance, you can travel on a nice clean modern reliable train for less than the price of one trip on London’s broken down overcrowded and overheated so called integrated system.
For the price the landmark offers no thrills for those on a budget it works just fine but to be honest there are many better options, In the same area I would recommend a look at The Victoria Hotel also on Victoria Street, it’s right next to the Grand Pacific Hotel, it’s smaller, cleaner and has better staff, sadly no swimming pool though, but book on line for the best prices.
This whole area is alive with shopping malls from the famous Sim Lin and Funan IT Malls to Bugis Village, Raffels City, Marina Square, Suntec and on and on the shopping in Singapore is world class.