Bride-To-Be Sheila Sim Tells Us All About Her Upcoming Wedding And Her Fiancé On Our Trip To Canberra

The idea that models and actresses subsist on a diet of air and industry pressure do not apply at all to Sheila. In fact, she balks when I tell her that a supermodel once said that “the best cure for hunger is cigarettes”. “It’s stuff like that that gives modelling a bad name,” she frowns.

“I love to eat,” she says, when I mention how thrilled I am to find out she is fuss-free when it comes to food. There’s no calorie counting, sugar-abstaining on this trip (but Sheila does adore organic produce and doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth). “I love to eat even if the food is bad ’cos I want to taste how bad it can be,” she says. In case you think she’s one of those stars who boast about their passion for eating, only to pick at their food like birds, I can testify that Sheila’s the real deal. She has a hearty appetite, as evidenced by her demolishing of a bowl of mussels when we sit down for lunch. The next day, she surprises herself by devouring a huge rack of lamb, ’cos “it’s just too delicious”.

It’s important to remind everyone again that Sheila not only styled herself — the six outfits she brought to Canberra come straight from her own walk-in wardrobe — she also did her own hair and make-up. And mind you, she didn’t just slap on the same face every day. She had meticulously come up with different looks and hairstyles, ideas she says she got from her beauty industry pals, to suit each location. For many stars, this wouldn’t just be a major undertaking. It would be Mission Impossible. But not for Sheila, ’cos she revels in challenges. “I like to dress myself up,” she says. “Sometimes, I do my own hair and make-up for events too. But never for a shoot. I’ve always liked people to know me for me but [pictures in] a magazine can sometimes be very skewed… People think that’s you but it’s not. Not this time.” We can go on and on about how she’s the physical embodiment of being OOTD-perfect but we’re sure these pictures speak for themselves.

In an industry full of high-maintenance divas (and yes, that includes the men), she’s a showbiz anomaly — a super low-maintenance chick. We had been totally prepared (and would have been totally okay) to help her with her make-up bag or whatever multi-purpose, bottomless Mary Poppins carpet bag that female stars tote on shoots but that was just wishful thinking on our part. All Sheila needs is just a small handbag, about the size of an iPad-mini, and her trusty digital camera and she’s good to go.

We’re now up on Mount Ainslie which is not the first mountain she’s ‘climbed’ this year. She tells us how she and her fiancé — she asks that we not print his name, so he’ll be known only as D until their wedding at the end of this month — had scaled Mount Rinjani in Indonesia in early 2017. “It was so tough!” she laughs at the memory. “We’re both adventurous people but we had never climbed a mountain before so we decided to pick one that was near Singapore. And suay suay, this one was organic! That means there are no steps or railings for you to hold on, so it’s like you climb up one step and you fall two. We should have done more research! And ’cos [the mountain] is 3000m above sea level, it was freaking cold! When I was doing my research, I saw that people wore winter jackets but D said, “No need lah, I go for so many marathons [on high altitudes] and I just wear normal clothes. So I brought my dri-fit, which doesn’t trap heat (laughs). I nearly froze to death (guffaws)! We almost made it to the peak, which was just two hours more away, but it was too cold and I couldn’t take it. It was a real Titanic moment — we were both hiding behind a rock and I was like ‘Is this how we’re going to die? From the cold?’ (Guffaws)”

The conditions on Mount Ainslie are far less treacherous, of course. We can see rain clouds rumbling towards us from the distance and the winds are picking up but we’re nowhere near an “I’ll never let go, Jack” moment. It’s 8pm and the sun is only now making its slow descent (thank you summer!). Our photog asks Sheila to stand close to the precipice — he wants a shot of her with the Canberran skyline in the background. She lifts one leg up on the ledge and bends her body forward. I worry that she might get blown off the cliff (she is stick-thin despite her love for food). No issue for Sheila here — she has no fear of heights. Click. Picture perfect.

We’re up bright and early on Day Two and first on the itinerary is a trip to Canberra’s wineries. Maybe it’s ’cos Canberra is three hours ahead of Singapore (which means we’re going to start drinking at 8am Singapore time) or maybe it’s the very filling breakfast we just had, but Sheila falls asleep in the backseat faster than we can say ‘Roadtrip!’. Here’s the thing about Sheila: she can take a power nap anytime, anywhere.

The first vineyard we arrive at is Clonakilla, which is known as one of the best wineries in Australia. Of course no winery tour would be complete without some wine-tasting. And what do you know, she’s the perfect drinking buddy. After six glasses of vino (sure, they’re just tasting portions but still, it’s 8am!), we’re buzzing and giggling like students in a library.

She tells us she’s been drinking a lot less these days ’cos her husband-to-be D, which could also stand for ‘Darling’ as we overhear her calling him that when they chat over Whatsapp call, isn’t much of a drinker. “It’s good ’cos now I spend less on alcohol and I can get drunk easier,” she laughs. We ask her if her upcoming wedding is going to be a dry one and a look of shock washes across her face, like we had just asked her if she was going to be drowning puppies that night. “Of course not! You know, I told him that I wasn’t going to get pregnant by our wedding ’cos I want to drink on that day. And he’s like, ‘Can you please get your priorities right?’ And I was like, ‘My priorities are right!’ (laughs).”

By now we’ve made our way to the very quaint Poachers Pantry, which we’re told, is one of Canberra’s most popular wedding spots. And so naturally our conversation segues to her upcoming wedding, the location of which she prefers we not reveal. “Not at least until after the wedding,” she says. She had wanted an overseas wedding but since it would be inconvenient for her 77-year-old grandma to travel, she decided on just doing it in Singapore. “Plus, I’ve always wanted a small and simple wedding.” She lets on that her wedding will have 22 tables (“that’s not a lot right?” she asks), and that she and her fiancé are not inviting a lot of friends. “My family is very big,” she says. “His family is quite big too but some of them won’t be able to come ’cos he is from Malaysia.”

“You know, he never wanted a wedding anyway,” she volunteers.

Say what?

“He didn’t want a wedding ’cos he doesn’t like it when all the attention is on him. And then suay suay he chose to marry me,” she laughs. “But I think he’s slowly getting used to [the attention]. It’s why I still have not revealed his face on my social media yet. I didn’t think it would be fair to him and I wanted the relationship to stabilise first.”

It’s the last day of our trip and I’m awake at 4am. No, we hadn’t gone on a bender with Sheila. Quite the contrary, actually. We had an early night ’cos this morning we’re going on a hot air balloon flight. A lot is riding on this — it’s where we had planned to snap our cover photo. I make a quick call to the company that runs the flight to check if it’s still on — ballooning is very weather dependent and any sign of bad weather means the flight is off. No prizes for guessing how that call went.

We meet Sheila at the lobby — even though she has so much to do, like prep her outifts and do her own hair and make-up, she’s always on time — and her voice sounds a bit scratchy. But she brushes it off, saying it’s from a lack of rest. A mini bus takes us, along with the 15 other hot air ballooners, to the location where the balloon would take off — an open field no bigger than a primary school field. It’s all very exciting. There’s a couple who are celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary and their kids had given them the flight tickets as a gift, a recently engaged couple, who seem to be carrying more camera equipment than our photographer, and a little boy who’s wearing a vest with the words ‘I’m A Balloon Pilot’ emblazoned on it — his dad later tells us that his son “is obsessed” with ballooning and now helps out with the company when he’s not in school.

We introduce ourselves to the pilot, um, the actual one, not the kid, and explain to him the type of shots we are hoping to get. “It might be a bit tricky ’cos there isn’t a lot of space and time,” he tells us. “But we’ll make sure you get your picture.” A for Australian hospitality, indeed.

It’s a chilly morning, much colder than we expected, but the propane burner, now roaring to life, sends much-needed waves of heat in our direction. The pilot signals to us that it’s time to start our shoot and we kick into action. When discussing the shoot with Sheila the night before, she had assuaged our concerns about getting the perfect shot in that short amount of time with: “Can one… one shot one kill”, which really means ‘Trust me on this”.

This is where Sheila gets in her zone. A zone very unlike the zones she gets in when she sees seafood or when she’s shopping. This is what she’s born to do. She climbs on to the wicker basket and drapes her long limbs over it like a spider who has caught her prey. From where we’re standing, the flame that is burning brightly above her looks like a crown. We turn to look at the other passengers, some of whom (the men) are slack-jawed, while some others (the women) seem to be taking notes. But all of them are so distracted by Sheila that they forget that a giant balloon is inflating in front of them and that they should be admiring that instead. One shot, one kill, indeed.

“You can go in!” the pilot shouts to us over the increasingly loud burners. He’s telling us to enter the balloon, which, is still lying on the field, halfway inflated. For a second we think he’s kidding. Wouldn’t the air inside be um, hot? But he looks like he’s serious so we run in. Wow. It’s like we’re in an empty circus tent, with our photog the ringmaster and Sheila the, okay, never mind I didn’t think this analogy through. But you know what I mean. It’s awesome and unforgettable… like everything else on the 45-minute hot air balloon flight we’re about to take.

“Okay, my legs are actually starting to feel soft,” Sheila laughs when the wicker basket we’re in — it’s about the size of a small car — starts to float slowly. The basket is divided into four sections and the two of us with our photog are in one while the other 15 passengers are split into the other three. We try not to think about how our lives are literally hanging by a thread, okay fine, not thread, but steel cables. “Actually, D was worried about the hot air balloon flight and didn’t want me to take it but no way am I going to miss this,” Sheila smiles when she thinks of her 37-year-old beau, whom she famously met on a dating app. They had dated for six months before he proposed last New Year’s Eve on a ski slope in Hokkaido.

It’s 7am now and most of the city is still asleep, not knowing that we are floating over their houses, playground, schools. With nowhere to run, I figured it’s my best chance to pry into her relationship with her husband-to-be, who works in finance. “He is very simple and very honest,” she says when I ask her what she loves about D. “‘Kind’ is a very lousy word to use to describe him but he is kind. We are both very traditional and he is very family-oriented, which is what I love about him. He’s simple in the sense that he doesn’t drink smoke, club, which I guess makes him… it’s hard to find someone like him in this day and age. He’s a breath of fresh air ’cos I was a model, where everything was very fancy. And he is so disconnected from fashion and TV, so being with him is like being in another life. He’s husband material.”

She says her fiancé has never gotten starstruck when he meets her celeb pals like Chen Hanwei and Dennis Chew. [FYI: Sheila loves that he had no idea who she was before he swiped right on her profile.] “You can tell when someone is secretly starstruck. They will casually ask about a celeb, but not him,” she says. “Sometimes he doesn’t even know who some of [my colleagues] are (laughs). You can say that he is as interested in my other friends as he is in my celeb friends.”

Sheila’s parents divorced when she was 12 (they are both remarried now) and she says that only in retrospect did she realise how tough their split had been on her. She was studying for her PSLE at that time and her older brother had passed away from leukemia when he was 14 just three years earlier. “Our family of four suddenly became a family of two… so there was a lot to get used to,” she tells us. “I think I had to became stronger because I was put in situations where I was given no choice.” But despite the lemons that life has thrown her way, she has always believed in love.

“I’ve been through many phases. When I was younger, I always wanted someone to love me, to find the right man. But I’ve realised there’s no such thing. Then there was a period where I gave in too much ’cos I wanted the relationship to work even though it was wrong for me. I’m now at a point where I feel like a marriage should just be about two people who are comfortable with each other. My mum says that if a person loves you, he must always tell you that. That was one thing that my dad didn’t do enough and that’s why I always show [my fiancé] how much I love him. But I don’t really need to tell D to do that ’cos he is quite vocal.”

If you’re one of Sheila’s 110K IG followers, you would know that she almost always hashtags her posts with #sheilalovesherlife. (She sometimes also includes the other permutations like #sheilalovesherjob, #sheilalovesherfood and #sheilalovesfashion). The hashtag, if you ask me, is her way of telling her followers to feel the same way about their lives — that they too should be looking out for life’s simple pleasure here, there, everywhere. “I used to care a lot about how people look at me, the future, like what if I end up alone blah blah blah,” she says. “Maybe it’s meditation or maybe it’s my coming of age but I live in the moment now. I’m happy. Work is going well. My relationships with my family and husband-to-be are good. I’m in a good place.”

By the time we return to the hotel, Sheila’s scratchy throat has turned into a full-blown bout of under-the-weather. And we still have one more location shoot to go to. The good news is that we’re leaving for Singapore tonight. The bad news is that she has a commercial shoot that would require her to be in the studio at 7.30am. And what time do we touch down in Singapore? 4.35am. Yikes.

“Well, that’s life I guess,” she shrugs as she hands me Ziploc bags to store the bottles of wine I had bought yesterday ’cos apart from the fact that she’s an absolute trooper, she also happens to be an excellent life hacker. “If the bottle breaks in your luggage, at least the wine will be in the Ziploc bag and not all over your clothes,” she sniffles, like a sick Martha Stewart.

After dinner, we head to the airport to catch our red-eye flight, where we sit, you guessed it, away from each other. The next time I see Sheila, we’re back in Singapore. She’s looking better already, having “slept all the way on the plane”. “I wanted to watch It but I decided that rest is more important,” she laughs. We hug and say goodbye and I watch her get into her cab. For someone who is sleep-deprived, under the weather and still has to go to work, there’s a surprising bounce to her step. Maybe it’s ’cos she’s headed home first where she’ll be reunited with the man of her dreams. Or maybe it’s ’cos she’s just someone who’s living life.

After walking along Lake Burley Griffin (see next pic), which is the centre of a lot of Canberra’s activities, we chance upon Commonwealth Place.

This James Turrell ‘Skyspace Within without’ art installation at the National Gallery Australia is meant to affect the way you look at the sky. It’s also where you’ll snap your best Instagram photos.

As alluring as Sheila are the lakefront properties at Kingston Foreshore, which is also a very happening food enclave.

The winds up on Mount Ainslie are strong, much to Sheila’s delight ’cos she had packed mostly winter clothes... even though it’s summer in Australia now. “Winter clothes nicer for shoot mah,” she laughs.

Sheila doesn’t drink coffee so that’s a cup of hot tea she’s holding at popular brunch place Mocan & Green Grout.

“My dream is to have a farm,” says Sheila when we arrive at Clonakilla winery. We’ll cheers to that.

The best thing about Bar Rochford? Well, other than it’s cocktails? It’s good-looking staff.

Sheila’s pose means that dinner at popular Braddon precinct restaurant eightysix is forking good.

Sheila tucking into a tart from Singaporean-owned bakery The Dessert Jar at the Old Bus Depot Markets.

Sheila goes crazy at organic health food shop Naked Foods, where she stocks up on bags of quinoa, paleo mix and chia seeds.

It’s not every day one gets to take pictures in a hot air balloon while it’s getting inflated. Today is our lucky day, thanks to the guys from Balloon Aloft.

PHOTOS: AIK CHEN