You know those wooden, egg-shaped Russian dolls that are all stacked within each other so that you take one apart and there is another one within it, and then another within that. And they’re all similar but slightly smaller the further you go and different colours each time. Well that’s what this place feels like. Within the city of Singapore, there is an area called the Orchard Road District, and within that is the Botanic Gardens. Within the Botanic Gardens, you get to a gated area called the Orchid Garden. And finally, within the Orchid Garden, you find another small garden with these Golden Arches across the walkway.

Of course, when I say Golden Arches I’m not talking about McDonalds, however we did accidentally end up in McDonalds a few times throughout our time in Singapore, but that’s a story for another time.

So now that we’ve finally ended up at that final golden nugget within all of those frustrating wooden egg dolls, let me explain it a bit further. I’m not much of a plant nerd or anything, but wandering around the botanic gardens of Singapore for 3 hours was really awesome. It’s so peaceful and pretty and so many different areas and paths to explore. The Orchid Garden is the only part that you have to pay for and we cheekily got in for $1 each with our expired student cards from university so it was totally worth it. Within the orchid gardens there were all of these fancy pants hybrid orchids and better-than-your-average-orchid orchids but I couldn’t really tell the difference. More than anything, I just enjoyed the pathways, especially this one with the archway of flowers and vines over the top.

At first, I tried using a wide angle lens and looking kind of upwards to try to capture the archways but it didn’t look very good. So with pathways and things like this, I’ve found that my favourite thing to do is go back a little ways and then use a more telephoto lens (like 50mm-ish). This compresses the pathway and gives everything a tighter and more closed in look.