Singapore was a truly East meets West experience. Ie. It’s developed, the prices are high and the technology advanced but you can get yourself back to the roots within minutes. We stayed in Little India, which provided a convenient base for us after eating at Indian hawker markets every night, but it was very easy for us to get almost anywhere within the city with its state of the art metro system more reliable than London’s. So we had a mosey around Little India, Chinatown, Clarke’s Quay (a much larger and grander version of Cardiff Bay) and the numerous electronics shops (which we found weren’t really that cheap).

The highlight of Singapore for me had to be the infamous Night Safari (basically the night zoo where all the nocturnal animals live). It’s an open-air design zoo so the animals roam about in a larger space than usual and due to the special lighting are not overly aware that there are so many people watching them…it was absolutely brilliant anywho, and the ele’s, lions and giraffes were no disappointment.

So back to Little India and the food. My favourites were the masala and biryani dishes, oh and the mango lassi to slurp, delicious! Nights were pretty quiet there for us due to the expense, but we did meet a few Irish one night (and an extremely interesting 73 yr old guy traveling solo) in the hostel, hence all the Anchor cans. However this had its advantages as when arriving back in our room, we found someone had stolen our sarongs, which we’d had to sleep under with the aircon, so the extra beer jacket was welcome.

On our last day we made a visit to Hood Cho Temple. The idea of this temple was that it was somewhere to make a wish. You went in, took a pot from the side which held 30 or so chopsticks with different symbols written on them. You then knelt down on the rug in the middle of the temple and shook the pot until one (and only one) fell out. You then had to throw two curved segments into the air, one had to land facing upwards and the other facing downwards…if this didn’t all go as described you had to repeat it until it did. When it did, you gave your stick to an official guy who exchanged it for a piece of paper. This paper told you basically whether your wish would come true or not through an ancient Chinese fable. Mine said it would, Jonny’s didn’t, but then he did wish that Watford would get promoted this year. To confirm this, the very next day he learned they’d lost their manager.

Finding a flight cheaper than the train, we traded in a 50-odd-hour journey for an easy 2 hour flight up to Cambodia, landing in Phnom Penh.