

The eggs were great at Singapore Zoo. So was the toast. The juice and coffee? Spot-on. And nothing makes a tired parent’s day like an excellent breakfast.
In fact, if you are designing the perfect holiday, start with the words Buffet Breakfast and the rest will fall into place.
But the trouble with breakfast at Singapore Zoo is the company. It’s very, very distracting to be trying to focus on your breakfast when there’s a family of orangutans sitting in the trees right next to you – munching banana palms and making eyes at your kids.
So starts the day at one of the big-ticket attractions on a Singapore stop-over. The Jungle Breakfast with Wildlife, as it’s called, was one of the things we did in the place they call the Little Red Dot that my kids and I were in complete agreement about: It was excellent.
Singapore Zoo’s orangutans are so famous that Michael Jackson once tempted one of them – the very famous, now-departed Ah Meng – to leave the zoo to come to have tea with him at Singapore’s fabled Raffles hotel. And now I’ve eaten with them, I can see exactly why.

Brent, Matilda and I with our breakfast companions at Singapore Zoo. Image: supplied.
This three-day stop-over in Singapore was full of experiences that are now part of our family folklore.
Because travelling with kids is about making memories, and our banks are stocked from those few, sanity-saving days on the way to the other side of the world when we broke out of Singapore airport to see what lies beyond the seductive shopping malls of Changi.