Four days in Singapore: the best eating in Asia happens in a food court

Three nights in the centre, everything on one MRT card, with Chinatown, the Botanic Gardens and the bay done on foot.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Singapore
Places
9 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Singapore is 734 square kilometres, which is smaller than the Isle of Man, and it holds six million people, an airport that has been voted the world's best more times than anyone can be bothered to count, and a national obsession with lunch. Nothing here is far away. Chinatown to the Botanic Gardens is a quarter of an hour on the train.

That compactness is what makes four days the right length. It is enough to eat properly, see the three or four things worth queueing for, and still spend a couple of afternoons doing nothing much in air conditioning, which is how residents survive a climate that sits at 31C and 84 percent humidity every single day of the year.

The other thing to know before you arrive: the good food is not in restaurants. It is in hawker centres, which are open-sided halls of numbered stalls where a plate of chicken rice costs four dollars and the stall that has been cooking the same dish for forty years has a queue and the one next to it does not. Follow the queue.

Highlights

  • Chicken rice, char kway teow and laksa at Maxwell Food Centre, standing room only at noon
  • The Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay, free, and best at the 19:45 light show
  • Chinatown's Hindu temple, Buddhist temple and mosque, all within four streets of each other
  • Sunrise in the Botanic Gardens before the heat arrives, also free
  • The view from the 50th floor of a public housing block, for six dollars

Where to stay

Singapore, three nights

Stay anywhere on a red or green MRT line and you have solved transport. Chinatown and Bugis put you inside walking distance of the older streets and the cheapest food; Marina Bay puts you next to the water and the towers and costs roughly double.

The city divides neatly into the bits worth walking. The colonial core around the Padang is museums and churches. Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam are the three immigrant quarters, all shophouses, all still working neighbourhoods rather than preserved ones. Marina Bay is new ground, most of it built this century, and it is where the skyline photographs come from.

Day by day

Day 1 in Singapore

Marina Bay, the museum and the Supertrees

Changi to the city is 30 minutes on the MRT and about 25 dollars in a taxi. Whichever you take, do not plan much for the rest of the day: the flight into Singapore lands most people at an unhelpful hour and the humidity does the rest.

The bay is the right place to start anyway. It is all reclaimed land, most of it under water within living memory, and it is the clearest possible statement of what the country has done with itself. Do the indoor half in the afternoon heat and the outdoor half after dark, when the gardens are lit and the temperature has dropped to merely warm.

  1. 13:00

    Changi to the city

    Travel

    The MRT runs from both terminals; change at Tanah Merah for the city. Immigration is usually faster than the walk to the train.

  2. 15:00

    ArtScience Museum

    Culture

    A lotus-shaped building on the water, showing large touring shows about art and technology. Book online for a timed slot and go in the hottest part of the afternoon.

  3. 18:00

    Dinner at Lau Pa Sat

    Eat

    A Victorian cast-iron market hall turned hawker centre. From 19:00 the street beside it closes and the satay grills come out.

  4. 19:15

    Gardens by the Bay

    Leisure

    The outdoor gardens are free and open until two in the morning. The Supertrees light up and play music at 19:45 and 20:45; stand underneath rather than on the paid walkway.

With more time: If you land early instead, the Singapore Flyer next door turns slowly enough to see Indonesia on a clear day, and Marina Barrage has the best free view of the skyline from its roof.

Day 2 in Singapore

Chinatown, from the temples to the top of a housing block

Chinatown is four or five streets of two-storey shophouses, and the reason to walk it slowly is that it holds Singapore's oldest Hindu temple, a Buddhist temple built in 2007 and one of the country's oldest mosques, all inside a few hundred metres of each other. Raffles' 1822 town plan assigned each community its own quarter, and the communities built what they needed where they were put.

Get here by 09:30. Both temples are working places of worship, they are busiest and most interesting in the morning, and by noon you will want to be sitting down under a fan with a plate of rice in front of you.

  1. 09:30

    Buddha Tooth Relic Temple

    Religious

    Four storeys of red and gold, finished in 2007 and modelled on Tang dynasty architecture. The relic itself sits in a stupa upstairs; the rooftop garden with its prayer wheel is the quiet bit most visitors miss.

  2. 10:45

    Sri Mariamman Temple

    Religious

    The oldest Hindu temple in the country, founded 1827 by a Tamil trader, with a gopuram over the door stacked with painted deities. Shoes off at the gate.

  3. 12:00

    Lunch at Maxwell Food Centre

    Eat

    A hundred stalls two minutes from the temple. The chicken rice queue is the long one and it moves fast; the coconut and peanut desserts at the back are worth staying for.

  4. 17:30

    Pinnacle@Duxton Skybridge

    Architecture

    A public housing block with a 50th-floor sky garden running the length of seven towers. A limited number of tickets is sold each day at the ground-floor machine; go for the last hour of light.

With more time: With the afternoon spare, Thian Hock Keng Temple on Telok Ayer Street was built by Hokkien sailors facing a shoreline that has since been filled in, and Baba House is a Peranakan family home kept exactly as it was in 1928, visitable by booked tour only.

Day 3 in Singapore

The Botanic Gardens, the national museum and Kampong Glam

Start at dawn. The Botanic Gardens open at five in the morning and the first two hours are the only time all day the weather is pleasant, which is why the paths are full of people running, doing tai chi and walking dogs before work. Orchids are the reason the gardens matter historically: the rubber that built colonial Malaya was propagated here, and the orchid breeding programme has been running since 1928.

From the gardens it is one train line east to the museums and the old civic district, then a short hop further to Kampong Glam, the Malay and Arab quarter, where the afternoon ends. Arab Street and Haji Lane are the two to walk, one for textiles and the other for small bars and painted shutters.

  1. 08:30

    Botanic Gardens

    Nature

    Free, 82 hectares, and a UNESCO site since 2015. The Rain Forest section is six minutes of genuine primary jungle; the National Orchid Garden inside costs 15 dollars and is the one paid part worth paying for.

  2. 11:00

    National Museum of Singapore

    Culture

    The country's oldest museum and the best single explanation of how a fishing settlement became this. The history gallery takes about 90 minutes; the Singapore Stone, a fragment of undeciphered 13th-century inscription, is the object to find.

  3. 13:15

    Lunch on Bras Basah

    Eat

    Kopitiam stalls and Peranakan places surround the museum. Order laksa if you have not yet: coconut, prawns, and enough chilli to justify the iced drink.

  4. 14:30

    Sultan Mosque

    Religious

    Golden domes visible from the end of Arab Street, and the base of each dome is ringed with the bottoms of glass bottles donated by poorer Muslims in the 1920s so they could contribute too. Visiting hours end at 16:00 and robes are lent at the door.

  5. 18:30

    Dinner in Kampong Glam

    Eat

    Murtabak, a stuffed fried pancake the size of a dinner plate, is the local order. The old Malay Heritage Centre grounds beside the mosque are a good place to sit afterwards.

With more time: Little India is one stop away and busiest on Sunday evenings, when the whole neighbourhood is out. The Peranakan Museum, on the way back from the gardens, covers the Chinese-Malay culture that produced most of Singapore's distinctive food.

Day 4 in Singapore

Breakfast, then the Changi story on the way out

Have the breakfast the country actually eats: two slices of toast with coconut jam and a slab of cold butter, two soft-boiled eggs with dark soy and white pepper, and coffee ordered in the local shorthand. Kopi is with condensed milk, kopi-o is black and sweet, kopi-c is with evaporated milk.

Then, if your flight is afternoon or later, there is one thing worth doing on the way to the airport, and it is a short walk from a bus stop two stations before Changi.

  1. 08:00

    Kaya toast and kopi

    Eat

    Any old-school kopitiam will do it and the chains do it well too. Dip the egg-soaked toast; that is the point of the eggs.

  2. 10:00

    Changi Chapel and Museum

    Culture

    The memorial to the prisoner of war camp that held tens of thousands of Allied prisoners after the 1942 surrender, rebuilt near the original site. Small, unsentimental, and about 20 minutes from the airport.

  3. 12:30

    To Changi

    Travel

    Bags can go into left luggage at the airport or into your hotel's store in the morning. Allow two hours before an international departure; the queues rarely need it.

With more time: With a long layover instead, Jewel inside the airport has a 40 metre indoor waterfall and a rooftop maze, and it is on the public side of immigration so you can go without a boarding pass.

Before you go

Getting around

The MRT goes almost everywhere and costs between one and two dollars a ride. Tap in with a contactless bank card or phone; there is no need to buy a tourist pass unless you are riding more than six times a day, which you will not be.

Taxis and Grab are cheap by European standards and worth it after dark when the heat has not dropped. What is not worth it is renting a car: parking is deliberately expensive, the entry charges into the central district are automatic, and there is nowhere you need to go that the train does not reach.

Heat, and how to plan around it

There are no seasons, only rain. It is hot at 08:00 and hot at 22:00, and the sun between 12:00 and 15:00 is genuinely punishing. Plan around it: outdoors early, indoors through the middle of the day, outdoors again at dusk.

Carry water, and do not be proud about ducking into a mall. Singapore's malls are connected to the MRT stations and to each other, and locals use them as covered streets rather than as shops.

Eating

A hawker centre works like this: find a seat first, leave a packet of tissues on the table to claim it, then go and order. Stalls are cash-friendly and increasingly take QR payment. Nobody tips and nobody clears your table for you, so return your tray.

The dishes to get through in four days are Hainanese chicken rice, fried kway teow, laksa, satay, roti prata for breakfast, and a kaya toast set with soft-boiled eggs and coffee. That last one is breakfast for most of the country and costs about three dollars.

Rules worth knowing

Chewing gum is not sold, though bringing your own for personal use is fine. Eating and drinking on the MRT carries a fine and the fine is enforced. Vaping is illegal, including possession, and this one catches visitors out regularly.

Dress covered for the temples and mosques: shoulders and knees, shoes off where indicated. Robes are lent free at Sultan Mosque and at the larger Chinese temples.

The thing visitors get wrong about Singapore is treating it as a layover with attractions. What is actually good here is the ordinary stuff: a numbered stall in an open-sided hall, a temple with a queue of office workers at lunchtime, a housing block with a garden on the roof.

Four days is long enough to stop looking at the skyline and start eating properly, which is the same discovery every visitor makes on about day two.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is four days enough for Singapore?
Comfortably. Three would cover the essentials and four gives you the Botanic Gardens and a slow morning without cutting anything. Five starts to need day trips, and the obvious ones are Pulau Ubin, the island off the north coast that still has stilt houses and no cars, or a bus across the causeway to Johor Bahru.
How expensive is it really?
Accommodation and alcohol are the two things that hurt. A beer is around 12 dollars, a hotel room in the centre rarely under 200, and a taxi to the airport 25. Food is the opposite: a full hawker meal is five to eight dollars and it is the best eating in the city, not the cheap alternative to it.
When should I go?
Any time. The temperature varies by about two degrees across the year. November to January is the wettest and February the driest, but rain arrives as a violent hour-long downpour rather than a grey day, so it costs you an afternoon at most.
Do I need to book anything in advance?
The ArtScience Museum, the Night Safari and Universal Studios sell timed tickets and are worth booking. Everything on this plan otherwise takes walk-ups. Copy the four days into the planner and shift them around if your flight times are awkward, since the order matters less than doing the outdoor parts early.
Is Singapore worth visiting, or just a stopover?
It is a real destination, but a short one. The pleasure of the place is in the details: three religions on one street, a food culture UNESCO listed in 2020, orchid breeding, and a level of public competence that is genuinely startling if you have arrived from almost anywhere else. Four days is the length at which that stops being novel.