We circled back to Singapore, where we now felt like experienced tourists. This time our first priority was the Gardens by the Bay, an extraordinary urban garden of 250 acres. The most dramatic part of the garden are the two huge air cooled conservatory domes with dozens of garden scenes and over 1.5 million plants, thousands of which are quite rare. Inside the three-acre Flower Dome, which is the largest glass conservatory in the world, the year of the dragon was being celebrated with colorful sculptures and thousands of flowers.

The fine art installations throughout the gardens sometimes illustrate famous stories, such as the Alice in Wonderland theme below.

Sometimes the art installations are part of the story of the plants themselves and where they came from, like the Incan Thinker, below, and the African sculptures below him.

There are 18 of these 20 to 50 meter tall “Supertrees” outside the domes. They are vertical gardens that are home to ferns, orchids and other exotic plants. They not only add a stunning drama to the landscape, but they are are equipped to collect rainwater and draw in and extract air from the glass domes for cooling purposes. Below is a close up of the Supertrees and another more distant view of them from inside the dome.

We ended our day in Singapore taking this cable car ride from the mainland up to Mount Faber and then in the opposite direction over to the resort island of Sentosa. We had great views of our cruise ship from above.