The Far East Coasters: East Coast Park Awesomeness

During the busy work week filled with subway rides and long periods of time sitting in florescent lighting its a little easy to forget that we live on a tropical island (minus the unrelenting heat- which is a regular reminder we are not in NY anymore). So yesterday, thanks to our friend Toby, we were reminded that we live in a pretty cool place when we were invited out to the famed East Coast Park to watch some sail boat racing from the beach.

Dave on the walking path- looking for sailboats.

Toby had given us pretty specific instructions on how to get to the beach club, which was conveniently located next to a very famous hawker center- but, as is fairly typical, we had a misunderstanding with our cab driver, who dropped us of no where near where we wanted to be. After a few minutes of walking and seeing NO sailboats in the water (mainly just Asian men in Speedos) and realizing this East Coast park thing is BIG we decided to be resourceful and rented some bikes to help us find our destination.

The friendly bike rental shop. Promising "All Brand New Bikes"

The bikes were a great deal- S$8 for two hours! What was funny about this transaction, besides the lack of helmets, liability waivers and leaving of any monetary deposit- was that the very normal looking bikes you see here are listed at S$6 dollars an hour- but the price we paid for different- but still totally normal looking bikes was S$8 dollars an hour. So maybe the cheaper bikes are small Asians only bikes? Or we just looked like suckers? I don't know, but for less than $US2 it wasn't worth arguing about. So we happily hopped on our rented bikes and away we went in search of sailboats.

The bikes turned out to be an amazingly good idea- not only because we were located pretty far from the sailing, but also because the path along the beach is a great ride and there were lots of interesting things to see along the way. The funniest attraction on the path has to be armies of tiny Asian girls trying to roller blade- very very very unsuccessfully. The obvious problem with this form of entertainment is there is more often than not someone taking an epic fall right in front of your bike, which happens to have limited breaking and steering abilities. A few near misses later we learned to give a wide berth to any group of adolescent girls on roller blades.

One cool thing we saw is the Ski 360 park, which is Singapore's only cable operated water skiing park. Instead of being pulled behind boats, there is an elaborate system of cable tows, not unlike a T-Bar ski lift, that pulls the skiers and wake boarders around the lake.

This is something that is being added to my "must try" list- looked like SO much fun and instead of having to start in the water and be pulled up by the boat (have had multiple fails with this method) you start out on a floating dock- which I hear makes it much easier. The one question I do have is that if you fall down way out in the far side of the lake and drop your cable tow- how do you get back to the doc to start over?

After some more bike riding we eventually found the sailboats.

Dave found the sailboats!

As it turned out, it was less than ideal conditions for the racing of sail boats. But the lack of wind did make for some interesting attempts by the various sailors (mainly Toby) to use alternative methods to propel their boats.

This was our favorite method:

This is the motor boat method of sailing- when there is no wind, create your own power

We hear that officially this is cheating... but I think it deserves points for creativity and effort. Needless to say, although he crossed the finish line (the red buoy) he was disqualified for not actually being in his boat when it happened.

After cheering on the sailors- we checked out the famous East Coast Park Hawker Stand- apparently home to some of the best sea food in the city.