AROUND the middle of 2008, some Australian friends and I were sitting in my house and lampooning the latest farcical fallout from the unfinished local swimming pool. The Leisurelink Aquatic & Recreation Centre, to give the pool its full mouthful, was going to be the jewel in Geelong’s municipal crown. The town planners of my former Victorian home promised a 50-metre pool to go with a learn-to-swim pool, spa, toddlers’ pool, hydro pool, gymnasium and a couple of water slides for the kids. My daughter was due in June 2008. The aquatic complex was also due to be delivered in 2008. The swimming serendipity appropriately synchronised. However, there was a delay. There were many delays, with the deadline constantly pushed back by increasingly castigated councillors. So with my friends sitting comfortably in my living room, I regaled them with the Singapore story. No, not that Singapore story. The shorter one, the one about the even smaller island.
I explained that there was an island off the southern coast of Singapore called Sentosa. A former military garrison turned tourist destination, the green isle was an escape from the encroaching urban sprawl on the other side, so much so that most Singaporeans had forgotten about it. Sentosa had gone stale. An entire makeover was needed to resurrect the faded funhouse, pull visitors away from Hong Kong and Macau and bring the roar back to the Merlion. So around the time that the City of Greater Geelong unveiled the blueprints for an all-under-one-roof aquatic complex, the island’s radical transformation began under the stewardship of the Sentosa Development Corporation and Resorts World Sentosa.
And that night I made the boldest—and daftest—of bets. In many respects, I was the first person in the world to place a bet on the Sentosa casino. I had a friendly wager with those present in my living room that Resorts World Sentosa would be topped off and opened before the public swimming pool in Geelong.
At that time, the prediction seemed preposterous. Geelong’s swimming pool was only a year away from opening. In contrast, Resorts World Sentosa had to knock up several themed hotels, including Crockfords Tower, Hard Rock Hotel Singapore, the Festive Hotel and Hotel Michael; dig a couple of lakes; add some state-of-the-art productions and animatronics shows and build a galleria with more than 20 high-end boutiques and fashion labels. Oh and throw up Universal Studios Singapore, too, if they could possibly spare the time.
Resorts World broke ground on its Sentosa site on 16 April 2007. Resorts World Sentosa celebrated its soft opening on 20 January 2010, just 34 months later. Whatever one’s thoughts are on gaming, such productivity throughout a global economic downtown is bewildering.
Meanwhile on 4 August 2010, the Geelong Advertiser reported that Victoria’s second-biggest city was still waiting for its aquatic complex to open after another deadline had passed. Originally scheduled to open in 2008, D-Day was moved back to late 2009, then again to April 2010, and again to August 2010, before finally opening in September 2010. The Geelong council insisted that the coordination of such a vast project (a public swimming pool, remember), the weather and transporting equipment from overseas had affected all the deadlines (and those council shovels cannot lean on themselves).
I know, I know. This is a mischievous, facetious comparison. Resorts World Sentosa was built with private funding, using building materials purchased from much closer to home and employing (and exploiting) the cheapest non-unionised foreign labour around the clock. Geelong’s terrific aquatic complex (where my daughter eventually took her first swimming lessons) relied upon tax payers coughing up A$31 million for a public development so every design feature, alteration and modification had to be voted on before being able to move forward. The swimming pool was built by a committee. Resorts World Sentosa was built by a casino. Had Geelong filled the complex with roulette wheels rather than rubber rings, councillors might have met their deadlines.
Still, I won my bet. Only a fool would bet against Singaporean efficiency. But then, only a fool would bet against a Singaporean casino.
I stepped off the escalator and thought about a recent chat with a taxi driver. Before embarking on this second journey around Singapore, I had been discreetly pumping taxi drivers for information about the two casinos. They are a better barometer than any government survey. Through their daily trips to both Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World over a long period, they have an instinctive gut feel for how each of the casinos is faring and whether visitor numbers are up or down, simply because they are always there. Sometimes they drop off passengers, too. One taxi driver told me that he can make up to six trips a day to the casino but hadn’t once dropped a local family off at Universal Studios Singapore. That single anecdote says more about a national mindset and a country’s priorities than any number of tedious government statistics.
“I always go to Resorts World,” the taxi driver told me, when I enquired where his favoured baccarat tables were. “I tried Marina Bay, don’t like it. Not my kind of people. You wanna go casino, go Sentosa. Sentosa got more people like me, you know, got more my kind of people.”
I wasn’t entirely sure whom he was referring to. Who was his kind of people? Singaporeans? Chinese? Taxi drivers? Or did he specifically mean Singaporean Chinese taxi drivers? I envisioned a packed gaming floor of Chinese guys forever bemoaning long airport queues and who abruptly disappeared between the hours of 7 a.m. and 9.30 a.m. and from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. every day. In truth, I had little interest in visiting a second Singapore casino—there’s only so much passive smoking and coughing one can tolerate around blackjack tables—but decided to pop into Resorts World’s cash cow to meet the taxi driver’s people.
Asian casinos like red. No other colour quite says prosperity (or chintzy) in a casino the way red does, with a splash of gold in its gaudy bits. I took in the vast, curved entrance, which was far more conspicuous than that of Marina Bay Sands, and was dazzled by the reds and golds competing for attention on the walls, pillars, carpets and mosaic floors. I was struck by the vision of an interior designer, standing where I stood now, hands on the back of his hips, very light on the loafers, theatrically effeminate and shouting, “More red, darling, we just can’t have enough red. We need to make these poor sods feel as lucky as possible ... Wait, is that black? Tarquin? Where’s Tarquin? Can I see something black there, Tarquin? You know how I feel about black. Tarquin, fetch my poodle. I need to lie down.”
Have you pictured the interior designer yet? Now imagine he was given a design project, in which the colour scheme was vibrant red with splashes of gold, taste and subtlety were optional and money was no object. That’s the entrance of the casino at Resorts World Sentosa.
Inside the casino, the red walls and carpets will soon be diluted by a hint of nicotine yellow. The gaming floor stank. Clouds of second-hand smoke hung in the air at every turn, allowing more than 7,000 chemicals—70 of which can cause cancer—to really permeate the lungs of unfortunate, non-smoking croupiers. Halos encircled the tables, suggesting their occupants were either obliterating their vital organs or Simon Templar had popped in (a pop culture reference for the aunties and uncles, that one).
Even though I visited both casinos at similar times, Sentosa was much quieter. Perhaps this was not surprising. Having opened first, the casino enjoyed a brief monopoly until Marina Bay Sands started to claw at its clientele. In its first full non-monopoly reporting period after MBS opened, Resorts World’s revenue fell 15 per cent. The government also intervened. In September 2010, the resort’s free shuttle buses within Singapore were banned (except for hotel guests coming from the airport) after the service was sneakily extended into the heartlands. Of course, no one should get their hanky out for Resorts World Sentosa. At the time of writing, the island’s casino business was expected to earn in the region of $2 billion in 2011 alone. The entire costs of knocking up the entire 49-hectare site will probably be paid off by the time you finish this sentence. That’s why they were in such a hurry to finish the project, just in case you had assumed the corporate suits had rushed completion so they could all ride the Revenge of the Mummy roller coaster. (The Geelong swimming complex needs the population of Australia to visit before it dreams of generating such revenues. Still, that’s no excuse to charge an adult A$5.60 to swim. Swimming pool staff wear City of Greater Geelong shirts but they should wear ski masks and carry shotguns.)
The well heeled were not well represented on Sentosa’s gaming floor. Indeed I was hard pressed to find someone not wearing shorts. I joined a small, appreciative crowd to watch a bizarre musical performance. Before an audience of no more than twenty, a rocking band enthusiastically backed the Chinese version of Celine Dion. Her name, I was later told, was Cui Xia and she is apparently well known within the Mandarin ballad community. Indeed, she belted out the tunes with astonishing gusto. She was in the middle of a Chinese cha cha cha and, not content with her perfect pitch, performed little dance routines in a slinky black number, spinning around like one of the Spice Girls. She closed her eyes, smiled broadly and raised her hand aloft as she nailed the big notes. She had lost herself in the moment. She was gone. She was in residence in Vegas, singing for another full house at Caesars Palace. It’s a shame she had to open her eyes again really and see an old guy dozing at the bar, his head bobbing up and down on his arms, several over-aged ah bengs counting out their chips, a white Lamborghini parked beside her at the side of the stage that was being offered as a jackpot prize and a couple of Chinese mainlanders with rusty-nail dyed hair dancing drunkenly with all the rhythm of Robocop.
I kept waiting for the gentle shudder and the slight clinking of shaking glasses that always signalled the ship pulling out of Keppel Harbour. I was on Star Cruises again, surrounded by men and women in shorts and flip-flops impatiently waiting to reach their favourite regional destination known as “international waters”. No need to buy a cruise ticket and shuffle along in those interminable queues for the buffet any more. Genting has brought its casino and its clientele to dry land. If Marina Bay Sands at least made an attempt to maintain a facade of international glamour and respectability, Sentosa barely bothered. Like its Genting predecessor in Malaysia, the new casino already felt jaded and old. This was the gaming home of the housing estates, and the casino was more than content to throw a few free Fantas their way as they dropped a day’s salary with every hand. From housewives to hawkers, taxi drivers to technicians, blue-collar punters were the bread and butter here. I was the only Caucasian on the gaming floor. My conspicuous demeanour cannot be overstated. When the notepad came out for some furious scribbling, even the croupiers and pit bosses paid attention. As for the punters, I might as well have been naked. They only ever had their eyes on the prize.
I lost $10 in less than a minute on a jackpot machine and drank three cups of Fanta orange in a pitiful attempt to get my money back (a pointless exercise, I will now acknowledge, because I didn’t have enough money left for a taxi home and later belched all the way to Bedok on the MRT). Before leaving, I stopped at a three pictures table, only because I had no idea what the card game of three pictures involved. Unfortunately, the table was situated in yet another smoking area so it was some time before the fog cleared to reveal that everyone seated at the table was wearing shorts, including two aunties. I was beginning to think trousers and dresses had been outlawed. I was drawn towards a chunky Chinese auntie sitting at the corner of the table. A picture of concentration, she squinted at the croupier while her legs jigged up and down under the table. She wore shorts and flip-flops and held a cigarette in one hand and a can of Guinness in the other.
It is an image that will never leave me.
In search of something less grubby, I left the casino and took my place in a waterfront amphitheatre along the new FestiveWalk. While I waited for the free Crane Dance show, I realised everything had gone: the old Sentosa arrival centre, the crappy gift shops and the quirky cafe with the fluffiest omelettes. Everything had been torn down since my previous visit and replaced by a fancy seafood restaurant with presumably other swanky eateries to follow. Even Sentosa’s famous bird stand, from which exotic parrots and macaws once welcomed visitors with squawks and mimicked phrases, had gone. That particular loss hit me pretty hard. The bird stand was where a macaw once bit my mother-in-law as she posed for a photo. Sentosa staff refused to let me adopt the macaw. I loved that bird.
But most of old Sentosa has gone and not before time. The bits that were worth saving—Images of Singapore, Fort Siloso, the nature walks and all the World War II sites—have been preserved. I’m still not sure about Butterfly Kingdom though. In fairness, my jaundiced view can be attributed to once visiting the attraction with my wife, who had convinced herself that every butterfly species had a life cycle of only 24 hours. Whenever a butterfly fluttered nearby, she nodded knowingly, smiled empathetically and said, “I wonder how many hours he’s got left.”
“Look, we’ve had this conversation a million times before,” I replied. “Butterflies do not all live and die in a single day.”
“They do, you know. I read it in a magazine.”
“What magazine? The one with the cover story about the fat woman from Leeds left heartbroken after her Egyptian husband ran off once he got his British passport?”
“I know, it was terrible, wasn’t it? Yeah, that one.”
“It’s not true.”
“It is true. Every butterfly in this place will be dead by the time they close tonight.”
“So there’ll be a carpet of butterfly bodies at closing time, will there?”
“Yep, and then there’ll be a whole new lot of butterflies in the morning ... Ah, look, I reckon he’s on his way out.”
She now acknowledges that some butterfly species do get to see Tuesday if they emerge from their chrysalises on Monday, but remains adamant that they are very much in the minority. Unlike her daft theories, however, Butterfly Kingdom has survived the islandwide makeover. Old Sentosa endures only in fragments, dotted around the place like its camouflaged gun posts. But the perennial favourites are still there, maintaining a sentimental peephole into the quirky and certainly quieter island I first visited in 1997.
But new Sentosa soars on the mechanical wings of the astounding Crane Dance. In a valiant stab at verisimilitude, I thought I had better hang around for the free water show. To be honest, the prospect of looking at projected images of national pride stretched across a wall of water for the umpteenth time did not appeal. I had already seen them all: strobe lights, fire plumes, animated characters, dancing fountains, even green lasers shooting from the Merlion’s eyes. As the sweat melded my buttocks together, I shifted uneasily and expected more of the same set to an eclectic classical soundtrack.
I could not have been more wrong.
The Crane Dance was such a groundbreaking, original marvel of technological innovation that I am not going to reveal anything other than it is a love story between two birds. To deny you the opportunity to sit there as I did, transfixed and spellbound, with all my weary cynicism immediately dispelled by childlike wonder, would be unfair. Just watch it and hopefully succumb to its audacious size and scale like I did.
The beautiful balletic images were indelible, following me along the Sentosa Boardwalk and onto the MRT. And then I lost them. They were gone. I spotted a rotund woman at HarbourFront Station and my memory played a vicious trick. The crane birds vanished, leaving me with a chain-smoking, Guinness-swigging, gambling auntie getting jiggy with it under the table.