Pinnacle @ Duxton – take 2

I went up to the Pinnacle@Duxton for the second time the other day, and the experience was somewhat different as the initial excitement of being there for the first time was absent.

In a nutshell, I wouldn’t recommend any tourist to visit the Pinnacle@Duxton without being accompanied by a local person – or anyone with a local mobile line.

The reason is because things just don’t work very well at the Pinnacle@Duxton. First, the ezlink payment machine takes forever – and more than one try – to read the card and deduct the $5 admission fee to go up to the Sky Garden. Also, the machine doesn’t accept NETS Flashpay cards, and the group of tourists we encountered had to trot over to the 7-Eleven to purchase compatible ezlink cards. Since we didn’t see them the entire time we were at the Sky Garden, I assume something went wrong and they left without heading up.

Also, the gates to the Sky Garden simply don’t work. There were two of us but out of the 4 attempts to gain access to and from the Sky Garden, only 1 attempt was successful. For the other 3, I had to call the numbers on the notice above the gates to ask them to let us in/out.

Imagine if both of us were typical tourists – we’d have had to spend an unnecessary amount making an overseas call to the hotline on our mobile, or would have had to forfeit the $5 we’d paid cos we simply couldn’t get into the Sky Garden, or worse – we’d have been stuck in the Sky Gardens cos we couldn’t get out. I don’t understand why there isn’t an intercom system or a button you can press to reach the helpdesk if hiccups occur. The first time I visited, I also couldn’t access the Sky Garden and had to call to gain entry.

The fact that we needed to spend a fair amount of time weaving in and out of the walls looking for the ezlink payment machine to make our payment – before realising that we were actually on the 3rd floor and not on the 1st floor where the machine is – put a dampener on the visit, especially when I subsequently recalled that I had similarly spent quite a while searching for the machine the first time I went.

It was nice once we were up though, but I’ll be sharing all these with anyone who expresses an interest to visit  just to make sure they go prepared.