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.

Odeon Towers and the Pinnacle@Duxton

My dad brought us out to Hanabi Japanese Restaurant at Odeon Towers one weekend for their Japanese buffet. He had bought a voucher which gave us some discount, but even then the buffet still wasn’t worth it as the food wasn’t that great.

I liked the view there however:

I went exploring Duxton and the Pinnacle@Duxton after that. I think the fun part was getting there, as there were some interesting sights:

There was even a sign for a martial arts school, but the school doesn’t seem to be there anymore:

I think the Pinnacle@Duxton makes a really nice view from the Duxton park area:

Visitors who are approaching it from the Chinatown side must be prepared to walk though, as it took me a really long time to reach the end of the estate where the public entrance is. That my ankle hadn’t fully recovered then made things worse I think.

It’s peaceful once you reach the top though. The view of the cranes, while not the most beautiful sight to behold, was quite superb. The below picture, especially, illustrated the sheer number of containers our port deals with.

Singapore has so many tall buildings:

But what I liked were the “themes” that each block had, and the accompanying props to the theme:

The blocks itself are pretty cool: