We arrived in Singapore after stopping over in Darwin for about 20 minutes to refuel. We made our way to our hostel by the MRT, their efficient underground system. Our hostel was located just north of Little India, which was a short train ride from the city centre.

Our first full day in Singapore we spent wandering around the city. We got off the metro at Raffles Place, as I assumed that the hotel would be nearby, but it wasn’t! We headed towards it, stopping for an ice cream en route and taking pictures of lots of cool architecture. The heat was really intense, it was quite a shock after Australia, which is comparatively chilly! The sun was out all day while we were walking around and we ended up walking through metro stations just to get a bit of a cool down from the air con!

Eventually we found the Raffles Hotel. It looked pretty posh, and we walked around though the shopping arcade. One woman in a pricey looking tailor shop tried to sell Pete a suit, we went along with it just to see how much it would be but it wasn’t as expensive as we’d thought considering it was slap bang in the middle of the Raffles Hotel!

We found the bar in the outdoor courtyard and enjoyed a nice cold Singapore Sling - it wasn’t the cheapest beverage we’ve ever had! Afterwards, we went to a food court for some lunch, eating a meal that cost us approximately two English pounds!

After that we headed to the National Museum which was interesting but not fantastic. After that we took refuge in a lovely air conditioned shopping mall. Shopping seems to be the main pastime in Singapore, and they have LOADS of them and they’re all absolutely huge! We browsed for electronics for a little while, and then headed to another place where you’re supposed to be able to pick up bargains on electronics. Unfortunately, we then remembered that we’re running out of money, so decided not to buy anything (although Pete was staring wistfully at several camera lenses.) We got a curry for dinner, opting not to go for their speciality dish of Fish Head Curry.

The next day we headed to Chinatown in the late morning - it had been absolutely pouring down before that. We spent a while looking around the markets there and got another bargain lunch. After lunch we looked around the Clarke Quay area which is full of fashionable restaurants etc. but was mostly closed at that time of day. We headed back to the hostel and then that evening got another cheap meal for dinner then took the bus to the Singapore Zoo ‘Night Safari’.

It was a novel idea to have a zoo open at night to see the nocturnal animals, but one of the things about being night is that its dark, and so very hard to spot some things and impossible to take photos! We did see some interesting things, like fishing cats, tigers, very large bats and the very cute but apparently venomous slow loris. We also took a tram tour round and went to their cheesy show.

The next day we took the bus out of Singapore to Johor Bahru, which is the town on the southern tip of Malaysia. From there we caught another bus to Melaka which used to be a very important trade town. It was absolutely full of tourists from Singapore come for the weekend night market. We had a bit of a job finding somewhere to stay but ended up getting the last room in a guesthouse.

The markets there were quite interesting but I hope we’ll see better ones elsewhere in south east Asia - they tend to sell weird stuff and rubbish tat! The town itself wasn’t that interesting, it had some dutch colonial architecture but that was about it.

The following day we took the bus to Kuala Lumpur. We spent two days there looking round some of the Chinatown markets and also some shopping areas, and we went to the cinema to see Toy Story 3 too! The shopping centre with the cinema was huge - 10 stories high with a mini theme park inside including roller coaster! One evening we went to get our cheesy pictures of the Petronus Towers by night. The city is in a way quite similar to Singapore in that it has two very distinct sides to it - the big shopping malls verses the chinatown markets and poor people.

We’ve now left Malaysia, flying from Kuala Lumpur to Krabi in Thailand (although only just - it takes far longer than expected to get to Kuala Lumpur airport!).