Singapore

16th March 2010 We awoke this morning to more activity across the street in the food market. A really bustling little place with people calling in for breakfast as they start the day. I am finding Malaysia quite different from Singapore. It is certainly not as clean and well ordered as Singapore, especially in the old part of town where we are staying. The streets have open gutters and pavements are few and far between, meaning you have to have your wits about you when walking about as there are loads of cars on the roads. ...

15th March 2010 We took an early bus from Singapore’s Golden Mile Complex to get to our next destination, Melaka in Malaysia. We were at the border about an 45 minutes after leaving Singapore and passed through immigration and customs with no problem. On entering Malaysia, the predominant landscape was palms, a lot of which seem to be plantations, although I’m not sure whether that’s for palm oil or coconuts. Most of the journey was on a long straight motorway although we did stop at a food court for about half an hour. ...

14th March 2010 Sentosa is a popular island resort in Singapore, just a short journey from the city centre and visited by some five million people a year. Attractions include a two-kilometre long sheltered beach, Fort Siloso, two golf courses and two five-star hotels, not forgetting the Resorts World Sentosa, featuring the new theme park Universal Studios Singapore. We took the MRT down to the Harbourfront where we got off at the Vivo Shopping Centre. With it being Sunday there were loads of people milling about the mall and also wanting to go across to Sentosa. We then caught the monorail across to Sentosa. There is also a cable car which goes from Mount Faber across, but this is currently closed for renovation work. ...

13th March 2010 One of the things on our ‘must do’ list for Singapore was the Singapore Botanic Gardens and the National Orchid Garden so this was today’s destination. The Singapore Botanic Gardens are home to a great diversity of tropical plants set in verdant landscapes and covering a large area at the end of Orchard Road in the city. It is a tropical Eden, rich with 150 years of history, where time seems to stand still. A wonderful place away from the hustle and bustle of Singapore’s shopping streets, ideal for a rejeuvenating walk in a peaceful setting. ...

12th March 2010 The hotel that we’re staying at does provide breakfast, but since it’s very much a cereal and toast meal we’ve been missing our daily fruit fix. That changed this morning as we’ve discovered a fruit stall at our local food mall where we can get a large plate of mixed fruit so we can start the day right. After our fruity breakfast we had to go back to the Vietnamese embassy to collect our visas. This time we took the bus all the way there as we knew where we needed to go. We were a bit early so had a quick coffee in a local shop near the embassy. We were only in the embassy literally 5 minutes before emerging with our approved visas for a month in Vietnam. ...

8th March 2010 Anna and Sofia kindly dropped us at the airport this morning so we could catch our 9.30am flight to Singapore. We were really looking forward to this next part of our trip into Asia, somewhere where neither of us had visited before. The flight with Singapore Airlines was excellent and the service far superior to anyone else we had flown with. The food was lovely and Ed actually ate all his airline meal for the first time ever! ...

10th March 2010 The current plan after Singapore is to travel by train to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia then to fly out to Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam. Vietnam is one of the few countries we need a visa for in advance so this morning we caught a train out to the Vietnamese embassy which is about a thirty minute train ride from the centre. We were slightly wet by the time we arrived at the embassy because it had been raining hard all morning, but we were able to fill in our forms and leave our passports in order to (hopefully) collect our visa on Friday morning. ...

9th March 2010 Singapore Airlines run a hop on, hop off shuttle bus around the city which has reduced rates for people who have flown with them (you simply show your boarding pass). We thought this would be a good way of getting our bearings. We headed off and sat at the bus stop for 45 minutes with no sign of the bus at all, so we gave up and of course as we rounded the corner having decided to walk saw the appropriate bus go sailing past not just us, but also the place it was supposed to have stopped so even if we had been at the bus stop it wouldn’t have passed us. ...

1st & 2nd March 2010 Monday morning’s weather report said that Queensland has had the wettest summer on record, hmmm, perhaps it’s something to do with Welsh visitors bringing their rain :D. Tina very kindly dropped us into Brisbane to collect a hire car to go out to the coast where we’ll be staying with Aunty Mary for a few days before flying out to Singapore. Back out at the Gold Coast, Ed couldn’t wait to re-aquaint himself with the pool, even though it was starting to overflow with all the rain, which was still falling. I jumped in, but it was much too cold for anything but the quickest of dips! ...