Sweets and sweat in Singapore

Singapore has much to see and do. Especially for the businessmen and women of the CBD, there are plenty of ways to get away from it all. In contrast to what we have become accustomed to over the past month of travelling, when we arrived in Singapore it felt like the future.

We meet with a school friend of mine who kindly put us up in their lovely condo for the duration of our stay. It was brilliant to catch up, spend time with them exploring this extraordinary island city, do some washing, eat some chocolate, eat more chocolate, and then bake some chocolate cake.

After a good night's sleep, we headed out to check out the sights. The Marina Bay area is spectacular. As Singapore is quite a small place, they have created some interesting ways to stay entertained, such as giant trees and laser shows with water. It's amazing what money can buy when you have a surplus amount of it...

This is the view from up the top of the Marina Bay Sand Hotels, you know, the funny looking one.

It was only November and Xmas was already being utilised as a marketing strategy/reason to celebrate...

What big balls you have! The tree that is.

We took a boat ride over to an island just off from Singapore. We hired bikes and went around in the rain. Got caught in a frightening storm... I don't want to talk about it right now

Lisa and Heather looking ready for a bike ride

One night we went to see a production of A Midsummer's Night Dream. We sat right at the back so it was hard to hear all the Shakespeare nonsense, but was entertaining watching the actors prance about on stage.

Medicine for what? No idea about this one

Selling eggs by the tonne

These are giant super trees that varied in colour. We sat under these while Christmas music played and the lights changed. 

Singapore at dusk was beautiful

From Heather's condo before the rains came

Looking back, Singapore was a lot of fun and some good times had by all. Generally speaking, along our travels, we are never sad to leave a place and move on to the next, or we've never felt like we've needed to stay permanently. After all we are Europeans and like old stuff... so I think Singapore would be an interesting place to stay for a few years before claustrophobia sets in.

From Singapore we flew across and down to Jakarta, Indonesia, with a handful of Rupiah and open minds.

Kuala Lumpur: two days in Malaysia

It's been a while since we've done a post, apologies to all our fans, but we have had our reasons. Shortly after our tablet and camera were stolen on a night bus across Indonesia, our laptop decided to stop working. Not a good start to the last leg of our journey across Asia! Fortunately we had our photos backed up, but not a pleasant experience.

Before we reached Indonesia, we had a great time in Kuala Lumpur and also Singapore. Our time in Malaysia introduced us to our first couch surfing experience during ours travel, which worked out really well. We stayed with a Malay chap who was very kind and generous. Living outside of Kuala Lumpur, we got a quick train ride in and explored the tall buildings and big shopping centres. It was the rainy season, so intermittent drenching was to be expected.

We spent two nights in Malaysia, enjoying good food, good company and a film night at the cinema (felt like a normal thing to be doing for once!) We watched Interstellar with two subtitles, one for Malays and the other in Chinese.

Here are some of the highlights from our short stay in this incredibly interesting place.

The shopping centres in KL are MASSIVE. This is a small one, only 6 floors.

Lisa with our host in KL who showed us around some of the sights. Thanks!

I really liked the design of this shopping centre, with its crazy panels.

There's a really pleasant park by the KL two towers which we strolled around. Just up ahead is a race track for joggers.

Me and Lisa posing for the shot under the famous towers.

A metallic whale thingy in the children's swimming area in the middle of the park.

Looking at part of the city from the train station near where we stayed. 

A marvellous statue near the Batu Caves. This freaked me out a little bit though.

Inside the Batu Caves there are tourists, religious icons, tourists, and stalls selling stuff. Oh, I said tourists twice...

Lisa standing outside the Batu Caves. Not only were there pigeons but also monkeys to contend with going up those steps in the background.

From Kuala Lumpur we booked ourselves in for a chilly, air-conditioned train ride all the way south to Singapore. A post coming shortly for Singapore... and also a new camera!

Island life... and feeling crabby in Krabi

We reached Koh Tao, one of the small, beautiful islands dotted around the Gulf of Thailand, after an enduring 12 hour journey to get there.

The journey started with a long, seven hour coach ride from Bangkok to Chumphon at 9pm, then followed by an hour and a half on a boat (a couple of hours were spent waiting for the boat in between).

Fortunately for us, because it was the wet season in south-east Asia, this also meant it was the low season for tourists. The beaches were generally quiet and party goers were a few.

With all our hours put into trekking across the Annapurna circuit in Nepal, we decided to walk the 3km from the pier on Koh Tao to our hotel.

Taxi’s cost a flat fee of 150 Baht (that's about 3 quid), but walking gave us a good idea of the island's layout. It's a relatively small island but very pretty, which made walking the distance with all our stuff a bit easier to deal with.

Koh Tao is a bit smaller than Koh Phangan, and although you have your fair share of scuba diving and snorkelling options, Koh Phangan was the island we were holding out for.

Lots of people hire motorbikes, which we did when we reached Koh Phangan. Biking it is a really great way to get around, being very cheap and convenient.

On Koh Tao, what more was there to do than lie on the beach (as to be expected) and watched some very lovely sunsets...?

Taxi boat anyone? The engines on these were interesting...

We chose a nice hotel to stay in on Koh Phangan (it was going for half price on Agoda.com). It was called Salad Beach Resort, and had a well maintained pool and was right by the beach!

A beauty!

A breakfast buffet was included with the room, so was really where we earned our money back.

We got hold of a bike for a couple of days, costing 200 Baht per day to rent, and it’s a lot of fun and really easy to drive. You don’t even need a license for mopeds. Just legs, hands and some eyes so you can see where you're going. I really put everyone else to shame with my super cool helmet...

Bike virgin

'A licence to ride'

Big ol' spider in our room one night... just about fit inside the cup.

Once we realised that we couldn't really afford to stay in the Salad Beach Resort for the six nights on Koh Phangan, we took some time to look over our budget. We decided to go further south down the island and ended up choosing some cosy little beach huts. For 250 Baht a night (that's about 5 quid), we downsized a little. Also went back to cold showers and a fan.

We couldn't work out what they were selling in this stall, so we moved on...

After checking out one of Koh Phangan's waterfalls, which was just a short bike away from our beach hut, we got caught in a downpour. And what do you do when it rains in Thailand? Eat a pancake and watch an old guy train a bird to talk.

We ended up doing a number of different activities on the island because they were so cheap. Elephant trekking through the woods, for example, was one of them. This was only 400 Baht per person, which comes to about £16 in total, and included feeding them bananas as well. A bargain!

The same place also did shows with crocs, snakes and monkeys... check out the armour and teeth on this one!

Also we did a bit of scuba diving at the best spot around, called Sail Rock, and what an experience that was.

We decided not to do an Open Water licence, which would allow us to dive anywhere in the world to a limited depth, due to our budget. Instead, we did Discover Scuba Diving, which involved a day’s diving and a day spent in a pool getting used to the equipment. Fully recommend Sail Rock Divers. These are the only company on the island who have a pool, which was cool.

Approaching Sail Rock for a day of scuba diving. So interesting and so much happening deep down under the surface. 

When the week was up on Koh Phangan, we got a boat-bus transfer to a town called Krabi. It was a week spent sporadically going to and from the beach to soak up the sun, staying indoors in order to avoid the rain.

This was probably a low point for us in our trip so far. Behind it all we knew we had gotten ripped off slightly, especially for the Krabi hotel room (bought as part of a package deal in Bangkok from a travel agent. Never again! Lesson truly learnt). We had done everyone online up to now. It was a mistake to go through an agency. What were we thinking!

On our way into Krabi on the bus

Cloudy version of our hotel room's view

The sunny version of the view

Taking time to chill indoors while waiting for the rain to pass on by

When the sun was out we could spot some of the tiny islands and rocks from our hotel room. Room aside, the view was alright.

Grabbing a bite to eat on the side of the road in Krabi. Food is very cheap, and for 40 Baht (around 80p) you can have a decent meal

This sea snail was slowly making its way across the sand

After 7 days in Krabi, it was definitely time to move on. We were happy to be back on the road again, although this time we had to prepare for our longest journey yet; a 16 hour bus journey from Krabi all the way to Kuala Lumpur. Yeah, 16 hours... more on that in our next post.