I awoke early. Too early. Way too early. Did not need to leave 2 hours for KK airport, with its 2 shops in the international departures...

Flight was relatively fun though with a nice bit of turbulence and all passing by quite quickly. After a faff with a taxi app I got a quite expensive taxi from Changi Airport to Chloe's house here in Bukit Timah, a wealthy residential area of Singapore.

It's a verrrrry snazzzzy house. There's even maids. In fact I'd barely made my way through the door before Chloe was getting them to wash my jungle clothes...

We got food at some nearby street food stores, which had their fair share of creepy men. After that I had time for a short nap before Chloe's mum Ning came home and insisted she drove me and Chloe around Singapore and their fancy VW people carrier.

We headed to the gardens by the bay and me and Chloe made a rushed visit to the cloud forest and flower garden exhibits, huge air conditioned domes full of the world's plants. We then picked up Chloe's step-dad, a banker from BNP Paribas and headed to ATLAS - 'the number one bar in Asia'.

I had a £20 (£20!!!) Venezuelan Rum, Port and Tea cocktail that tasted surprisingly nice. I did feel very out of place in my Sabah Biodiversity Experiment Shirt and Jeans. Our final stop was to the Newton Street Market where we collected a variety of street food options including Stingray, Oyster Omlette and Prawns.

Singapore is a very green city. It's a motorer's paradise with its network of giant expressways and is very spread out with lots of greenery around the city. It was also really cool driving along the grand prix track (the race is this weekend). But the Sumatran forest fires are bringing an awful haze to this part of the world.

Still, Singapore has a dystopian uber-capitalist feel to it. A meritocracy that highlights the failures of the marriage between capitalism and democracy.

Ciao!