Imagine, for a moment, you live in Singapore.
One sunny morning you stumble out of bed in the nude, and (in your sleepy state) you forget to flush the toilet. You shower, get dressed, pop some chewing gum in your mouth and set off for work. On your way you spot an old friend on the opposite site of the road – so you dash over four lanes of moving traffic and surprise them with a big, friendly bear hug.
This being Singapore, you may or may not be hugging them to the sound of blaring sirens and TV news helicopters whirring overhead. This is because you have broken the law no less than five times since waking up. Singapore is famous for its strict penal code, outlawing among other things: chewing gum (plus one year imprisonment for 'gum smuggling'), walking around your home nude (if someone sees you), hugging (without permission), not flushing the toilet (expect a big fine), jaywalking and also urinating in elevators. The last one seems fair enough – although some elevators in Singapore have urine detection devices, automatically trapping you in there with the offending puddle until the police arrive.
We had our first encounter with Singaporean law enforcement this morning, arriving at the border on a sleeper train from Malaysia. A sniffer dog growled at my rucksack full of smelly socks (most of which had last been washed at least five time zones away). The dog was held on a leash by a beefy customs officer who looked ready to thrust his rubber-gloved arm elbow deep into a dark, dank place. This frosty reception is nothing new – in Lonely Planet's first guide, Across Asia on the Cheap, Tony Wheeler even advised long-haired hippies to wear a 'short hair wig' to look respectable at the Singaporean border.
But what Tony wrote in 1973 still holds true: "It's a groovy place once you've got in".
After weeks bouncing along dusty potholed roads in Southeast Asia, arriving in Singapore feels like accidentally disappearing down a wormhole into some strange utopian city of the future. There are shiny skyscrapers built in strange, contorted shapes. Everyone seems eerily friendly and happy and well-off. There's no litter. There's a futuristic park – 'Gardens by the Bay' – which has a giant indoor waterfall and solar-powered artificial trees and various things that look like props from Blade Runner. And of course, there is almost zero crime.
This afternoon we watched the sunset over Singapore from the Marina Bay Sands SkyPark – a viewing platform cantilevered on top of three skyscrapers. Little ferries were pootling about the harbour way down below us, and the glaring lights of office blocks were going dark, floor by floor, as people headed home from work. From 57 floors up we could see almost all of Singapore – a whole country set on a chunk of land the size of a postage stamp. It looked intriguing.
Almost as intriguing was inspecting the elevator on our way down.