Coverage / Singapore
Singapore
Southeast Asia
Where Singapore earns a visit: 4 activities across 8 curated destinations.
4 activities · 7 pairings · 11 verified providers
What you can do in Singapore
Culinary / Cooking
- Chinatownyear-roundChinatown is the best introduction to the food culture that runs Singapore, because two landmark hawker centres sit a few blocks apart and hold the whole story between them. Hawker centres are open-air food courts of individual stalls, a national institution recognised by UNESCO in 2020 as living heritage, and they are where most Singaporeans actually eat. Maxwell Food Centre is the polished, tourist-friendly one, home to the famous Tian Tian Hainanese chicken rice. Chinatown Complex is the sprawling local one upstairs from a wet market, with hundreds of stalls including Liao Fan Hawker Chan, whose soya-sauce chicken rice once held a Michelin star and made it the cheapest starred meal on earth. Around them the streets carry char kway teow, bak kut teh pork-rib soup, Hokkien mee, chilli crab, satay and kaya toast with soft eggs and thick kopi. The catch is that the best stalls hide in plain sight behind long local queues, close on rotating rest days and sell out early, so a guided food walk is the shortcut to eating what the locals eat without guesswork.
- Katongyear-roundKatong is where you learn to cook Peranakan food, the cuisine of the Straits-Chinese descended from Chinese settlers who married local Malay women across generations of trade. Nyonya cooking fuses Chinese ingredients and technique with Malay spices and aromatics, built on a laborious rempah spice paste of pounded shallots, chilli, galangal, lemongrass, candlenut and belacan shrimp paste. The results are dishes like ayam buah keluak, chicken braised with black nuts, laksa, itek tim duck soup and a rainbow of kueh cakes. It is a heritage kitchen that was historically passed from mother to daughter and never written down, which is exactly why a hands-on class matters: you pound the rempah yourself, understand why the order of ingredients changes the flavour, and eat what you cook. Katong and neighbouring Joo Chiat are the living backdrop, home to Katong laksa, Peranakan shophouses and the community that created the food, even though the best teaching kitchens sit a short ride away in the city.
Witness / Attend
- ThaipusamLittle IndiaJan FebThaipusam is the most extraordinary act of devotion you can witness in Singapore, and Little India is where it begins. On the full-moon day of the Tamil month of Thai, Hindu devotees honour Lord Murugan by carrying kavadi, and the heaviest form is astonishing: a decorated steel frame borne on the shoulders, anchored to the body by dozens of skewers and hooks piercing the skin, some with spears through the cheeks and tongue, carried in a trance sustained by weeks of prayer and fasting. Others carry paal kudam pots of milk on their heads. Thousands walk the roughly three-kilometre route from the Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple on Serangoon Road to the Sri Thendayuthapani Temple on Tank Road, cheered and chanted along by family and volunteers, through the night and into the day. The ritual symbolises surrender, penance and the personal journey of each devotee, and standing on the route as the kavadi bearers pass is a raw, humbling window into a living faith rather than a staged show.
- Formula 1 Singapore Grand PrixMarina BayOctThe Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix is the greatest reason to attend an event in Singapore, and Marina Bay is the stage. When it debuted in 2008 it was the first night race in Formula 1 history, run under nearly fifteen hundred floodlights on a street circuit that laps the downtown waterfront past the Padang, the Anderson Bridge and the illuminated skyline. It is one of the most physically brutal races on the calendar, a twisting low-speed circuit in tropical heat and humidity that pushes drivers to the limit, and one of the few grands prix where the racing is almost secondary to the spectacle: three nights of trackside grandstands wrapped around headline concerts that have drawn acts from every corner of pop. For 2026 the weekend grows again, hosting Singapore's first F1 Sprint, so Saturday adds a full sprint race to the Friday practice and Sunday main event. Sitting in a grandstand as the cars scream past the Bay after dark is a bucket-list night out, not just a motor race.
- Singapore Botanic GardensSingapore Botanic Gardensyear-roundThe Singapore Botanic Gardens is the one place that shows why a city famous for skyscrapers calls itself a garden city, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site you can wander for free. Founded in 1859 and inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 as the first and only tropical botanic garden on the World Heritage List, it is a living record of British colonial botany that grew into a world-class scientific institution. This is where the rubber-tree cuttings that seeded Southeast Asia's plantation economy were first propagated, and where orchid breeding turned into a national art form: the National Orchid Garden inside it holds the largest orchid display on earth, thousands of species and hybrids, including the blooms named for visiting dignitaries. The grounds also protect a six-hectare fragment of primary rainforest older than the Gardens themselves, alongside heritage trees, swan-filled lakes and the sweeping lawns designed in the English Landscape style. Walking it is a quiet, shaded counterpoint to the city, and a lesson in how plants shaped the region's history.
Best months at a glance
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