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Singapore: a neatly groomed spur of land bitten from the base of Malaysia, but one that sails in very different waters to its Malay and Indonesian neighbours. A wealthy island state that, infamously, bans chewing gum, canes foreigners for graffitoing cars, and allows the Government to exert an asphyxiating control over all spheres of economic and private activity, down to choice of marriage partner… As a travel destination, it sounded about as tempting as frog porridge.

Singapore's renown as Asia's most puritanical state arose Under Lee Kuan Yew (1960-1990), the father of Singaporean independence, who once charmingly quipped: “Between being loved and being feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right.” Thanks to Lee Kuan Yew, a generation of Singaporeans sacrificed personal freedom at the altar of economic return, allowing their leader absolute control of everything down to visitor's hair length (in the Sixties and Seventies hippies were offered haircuts upon arriving in Singapore).

However, since the election of Lee Kuan Yew's son, 'Baby God', in 2004, rumours are rife that a new spirit of liberalism is loosening the nation. Plans for a change in gambling laws to allow for two lavish luxury casinos, and a recent change to legal status of gay civil servants and gum chewers seemed to substantiate this. But I needed hard evidence of this softer Singapore. This - after all - is still the nation that bans films such as Eyes Wide Shut, forbids Greenpeace and forces its overweight children to skip school lunch and jog up and down stairwells to fight the flab. Intrigued, I headed out in search of the unwashed underbelly of the slick concern that is modern-day Singapore. I wondered, did an animal heart beat beneath Singapore's cereal-box architecture and poker straight roads?

“What did I do with my squid ? I cut it off… my dress was white when I put it on…” What I'm doing would have been unthinkable in Singapore 10 years ago. I'm surrounded by Singaporeans laughing as if they've just ingested wind instruments as Kumar - 1 metre 80 of brown spaghetti limbs, and Singapore's most famous transvestite, shoots from a well-glossed lip about Singaporean politics and sex in a fast-changing city.

“The government have started a Speaker's Corner… ha! They say you can talk about anything, but you must register your name and the topic you want to speak about! What do you do? Go and talk about it and run? If you mention HIS name, you're gone…”

Kumar - a drag queen who lives with his parents and complains about teenagers enjoying 'corrupting' R 'n' B and Korean pop - both vocalises and personifies the hypocrisies wired into the mainframe of modern-day Singapore. It's a startling statistic that, per capita, Singapore has as many gay men as London. It's also one of the great ironies of Asia that prostitution is permitted in Singapore but is illegal in Bangkok. Yet - and this is typically Singaporean logic - an Indian case that dates back to 1817 in which a man was charged with having intercourse with a buffalo's nostril was evoked a few years ago to jail a man for engaging in oral sex (itself illegal without full sexual intercourse).

“Pah! Singapore's conservatism isn't a political stance… it's a personality disorder…” If Kumar is the errant son of modern-day Singapore, Ivy Singh - Indian socialite and netball association head turned organic farmer (you really couldn't make it up) - is its eccentric aunt, a woman who peppers her conversations with denunciations of Government 'morons' and was once memorably featured in the Singaporean press with her head superimposed onto the body of Xena, Warrior Princess. Since retirement, 'Poison Ivy' has divided her life between her two passions - government-baiting and creating Bollywood Veggies (www.bollywoodveggies.com, Singapore 6898 5001), an organic farming concern in a land that famously grows precisely nothing.

“You know, Singapore is truly bizarre”, continues Ivy darkly, through a mouthful of her organic banana cookies, “the Government's done a good job… if the tsunami had hit Singapore no one would have drowned because all of our beaches are inaccessible. An island and no one can get to the bloody beach! Or sail on The Straits (the artificial waterway dividing Singapore and Malaysia) apart from at high tide, it's so shallow.”

Hot words aside, Ivy's raison d'être is to take the model of boutique farming that sprang up in Australia in the Eighties and transcribe it to Singapore. In essence, to persuade Singaporeans to drive to the handkerchief-sized strip of Kanji countryside in northern Singapore and experience nature on their doorstep, rather than flying to Bangkok in pursuit of Botox and consumer bargains. Her characterful organic farm and café is a real find, and the epicentre of Singapore's nascent New Ageism movement. Like-minded iconoclasts - young farmers, entrepreneurs - meet here over fresh Indian veg dishes, under the blanketing shade of banana and Angsana trees. Happy for an outlet for their politics, they attack each other with conversation. Rakish, thirty-year-old Kenny Eng is typical of Singapore's new entrepreneurial hope. Heir to a garden centre in Kanji, he has high hopes of running residential breaks for Singaporeans ignorant of the soil and animal husbandry (www.nyeephoe.com).

“Our grandfathers wanted their children to work for the Government, so they took away all spirit of private enterprise and squeezed them into submission. For my generation, we need entrepreneurs… but where are they? The government thinks it can order us to be entrepreneurs… what irony!'”

No shortage of mouth in today's Singapore then. But what about its trousers? Risqué and hip-hugging; or the same old greying civil-servant slacks dressed up as something racier? Does the experience of visiting Singapore undermine the stereotype of a sanitised city?

Overlooked by the Kafkaesque 'ministry of manpower', Orchard Road is the well-scrubbed face of Singaporean tourism. Malls lit up like vast pinball machines flank either side of this mile-long paean to consumer sin as Singaporeans junked out on neon lighting and the promise of five-dollar boob tubes shuffle in formation from gaudy shop front to gaudy shop front, soundtracked by the audio dementia of Japanese pop (J-pop). This merry roundabout peaks during 'The Great Singapore Sale' - eight weeks from late May, when malls open on 24-hour rotation (greatsingaporesale.com.sg).

Much less likely to haemorrhage your will to live is Chinatown, located in south-west Singapore. Despite the government's assiduous clean-up campaign - which involved packing many of the area's colourful stals and iconic street hawkers away into yet more drab malls, you'll still find shadowy and aromatic shops run by Chinese octogenarians - who travel through life at 90 degrees to the floor, as if they're tacking into a gale. Not to be missed are the medicine shops offering, amongst other things, to expel wet wind and soothe your loins with everything from snake gall bladders to 30-year-old ginseng roots (at a meagre $23,000 dollars).

Also worth seeking out in Chinatown are the reflexologists, who ply their centuries-old trade at the north side of Hong Lim Complex, in shops thick with the scent of clove cigarettes. Practitioners with knuckles swollen like bulbous vegetables probe away at your soles, seeking out ailments, clearing acupressure channels and inducing something akin to the pain of childbirth as a pleasant extra. Yet once the nausea subsides, the 48-hour lift is not to be beaten.

Sadly however, the guidebook depiction of Singapore as a vibrant epicentre of cosmopolitanism is somewhat misleading. After all, in truly cosmopolitan London, upwards of 300 languages are spoken, making Singapore's 11 (subs, please check) somewhat paltry in comparison. But what Singapore does achieve with panache is integration. Serangoon Road (Little India) - all slick shop fronts in ice-cream shades and billowing silks for sale - may be geared to the tourist market, but head to a forgotten little nook at its edge (Sam Leong and Verdon Roads) and you'll find CLE African restaurant, cohabiting happily. CLE is the first African restaurant in Singapore, catering to Singapore's newest migrants: Nigerians working in construction, or as skilled players in the Singaporean soccer team. The experience is perhaps more noteworthy than the dishes on offer: Birds custard with beans, plantain and egg doubtless being invented after a one too many palm wines.

In fact, nothing gets the otherwise stoic Singaporean as fired up as food, and this is one area where Singaporean idiosyncrasies reach boiling point. Take, for example, the 'laksa wars', an inter-restaurant rivalry that garners more column inches in the Sinaporean press than international politics. This innocent bowl of al dente rice noodles, shrimps, cockles and chilli paste in a fragrant coconut broth is the subject of fierce debate. The dish is the proud invention of the Katong Peranakans, a people descended from the rich Chinese businessmen of the 19th century and their Malay wives, famously accomplished in 'the feminine arts'. Visit the Katong strip (47, 49, 57 and, bizarrely, the next-door 328 East Coast Road, Singapore) and test the spicy wares of the shops claiming to serve the 'best/most famous/original Katong laksa'. It's perhaps advisable to ignore the legend that holds that the Katong's great laksa secret is the addition of minced worms to the coconut broth.

However, should this appeal, you're either mildly deranged, or of the constitution to stomach frog porridge, another great Singaporean delicacy. Of Chinese derivation, frog and chicken porridges are meat suspended in a bowl of soupy glutinous rice and decorated with crispy fried onions and various condiments, a popular breakfast treat. One famed frog porridge emporium in Chinatown is run by would-be celeb Alvin Koh - a former bodybuilder and TV host with a penchant for circa 1984 wraparound sunglasses, box-jacketed suits and baring his hairless chest.

Seek out frog porridge, and other palette-enlivening gastro treats such as Durian (the oniony peachy 'king of fruits' beloved in much of South-east Asia); oozing chilli crab; or the national drink of sweet lime juice at many of the musty traditional food courts scattered around the city (The Maxwell Food Centre on Erskine Road is one of the best). Despite most of the dishes looking and sounding like a medical condition, this is where you'll drink deep of a vibrant Singapore. And, if you have an appetite for further gastro adventures, visit one of Singapore's many food markets. The Farrer Road Markets are a good start, offering fresh coconut ground into milk on the spot and hawkers with huge barrels of nuts, dried pickled veg and sea crustaceans.

A pleasing antidote to Orchard Road, even if there is nothing you'd actually care to buy here, is Sun Gei Road Flea market, a long-running illegal market that's still thriving, and largely ignored by the authoirities. The old-clothes forms of care-worn vendors droop beneath umbrellas, sipping coffee from old tin cans and punting an array of paraphernalia: from abacuses to circuit boards and watches that were past their best when the Beatles were playing.

To put your finger on the pulse of after-hours Singapore, try the lively gay bars in Club Street, just finding their disco feet now, hetero dance club Zouk, or for a real Singaporean quirk, visit The Upper Club at Chijmes (www.chijmes.com.sg), a new ballroom-dancing enterprise beloved of Singapore's new generation of female power brokers. In a pleasing, if surreal, reversal of gender stereotypes, characters such as prominent middle-aged banker Elizabeth Sam expertly dance tangoes and foxtrots with their latest accessories, Filipino 'DIs'. DIs are young (largely in their early 20s and gay) male dance instructors flown in and out on temporary visas.

Kick back in The Upper Club over a cocktail and watch the DIs and their charges gliding proudly across the dancefloor as if they've had a fencepost inserted in their backsides, to the strains of Fifties hits such as 'Sugar Pie Honey Bun' (sung, naturally, by a Taiwanese pop star), and you'll probably wonder when you ingested the gram of LSD.

However, oddities such as ballroom-dancing female bigwigs, drag queens and acid-tongued organic farmers are fast becoming rather less odd in Singapore. There's the scent of ripe possibility in the air now, the raw energy typical of Bangkok or Mumbai with a shot of the self-deprecating humour of London. Once the nationhood equivalent of boiled rice, Singapore is fast developing a flavour uniquely its own as Singaporeans learn to make their own choices over who to marry and how to go to the toilet.

And you get the impression that the emerging shoots of this new, spirited Singapore, are in good hands. “You know”, says Ivy as a parting riposte, “I was saying this to a Chinese man the other day. There is no such thing as no - you can fly to the moon, you can change your sex, and Viagra has proved that anything can be raised. So there's no no…”

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