We first visited Singapore together in , on our way back home to see family in England. In the seventies you had to go through a travel agent; airline tickets had multiple flimsy pages most of which were barely legible towards the end; you had to confirm and reconfirm bookings; and there were no ATMs so you carried US dollars very carefully and changed them into local currency at banks or currency exchanges or occasionally on the black market.
This journey was a bit of a step up from our earlier, individual, travels. We stayed in hotels rather than hostels or sleeping in beach huts. Singapore is a small island with a large population and even back then bits of it were being knocked down and built over, or under, all the time. One such place was the old Boat Quay food centre, now replaced with trendy restaurants and bars. Another was the original Bugis Street.
In the late seventies Bugis Street was a notorious spot on the tourist circuit. It came alive at night with street dining, while transvestites and prostitutes provided adult entertainment. Very popular with sailors. The whole area was bulldozed in the eighties to make way for Bugis MRT station below and Bugis Junction upmarket shopping centre above.
The nearby large covered Bugis Street market is not the site of the original street, but the name lives on. One of these not only had an enormous bedroom, bathroom and lounge but also five telephones, two loos, an office, huge picture windows and a conference table β that one was obviously intended for businessmen rather than tourists but we revelled in it anyway.
Some suites on the second level of the hotel overlook Bugis Junction. Perfect for leaning on the balcony, staring down at the shops and carts and remembering how it used to be. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website.
