SINGAPORE

Hooray! Back on track again with our travels, after the unexpected rainy interlude in Townsville. We weren't expecting too much from Singapore, as it generally gets mixed reviews, but we really enjoyed our first taste of Asia from the moment we saw the spectacular sight of hundreds of enormous oil tankers and container ships moored out to sea in the Malacca Straits as we came in to land. We spent a long weekend with our friends, Jackie and Jurgen, and their baby boy, Noah, who looked after us so well in their spacious colonial-era house in one of the few remaining parts of jungle in Singapore. It was still slightly hard to believe that we were now in Asia after the nightmare of Townsville. But no, we were here and even a little bit of rain on our first afternoon of sightseeing wasn't going to put us off from enjoying ourselves again.

Jackie, with four month old Noah gurgling away in his pushchair, showed us around the centre of the city and took us on a bumboat tour of the main sights around Boat Quay, including the iconic theatre complex shaped like the smelly, scaly durian fruit, the MerLion statue and the beautiful old Fullerton Hotel (where we later found out, Laura, Emma's sister, had stayed during her honeymoon). After lunch Jackie left us to explore on our own so we wandered around Clarke Quay, saw the old police station with its multi-coloured shutters and saw the great view from the top of the UFO-shaped, Norman Foster-designed new Supreme Court building. Later we took shelter from the rain in the famous Raffles Hotel but decided our already overstretched budget unfortunately couldn't extend to a £12 Singapore Sling so instead had a slightly cheaper coffee in the Long Bar, where palm fans flapped ineffectively on the ceiling and nibbled on monkey nuts, littering the floor with discarded shells as we saw everyone else doing. As it was getting dark we wandered over to the Fountain of Wealth statue where hundreds of hyperactive students in yellow T-shirts were running round and round in circles, singing to celebrate some sort of Freshers Week event. The Fountain of Wealth is supposed to have perfect Feng Shui, sitting in the palm of an inverted hand with fingers represented by the five surrounding tower blocks, and is therefore supposed to bring wealth to those who visit it. We're hoping that our budget, which was hammered by Apollo in Australia, would somehow be replenished as a result - we've got our Lotto tickets ready and waiting… Later that evening we went out with Jackie and Jurgen to a local hawker centre, where we had a delicious Indian curry and a few beers. The food in Singapore is excellent and often sold at different hawker centres like this one across the city, where there are loads of small stalls selling every imaginable variety of Asian food.

Next day our first stop was the Singapore Post Centre where we left a small package at the poste restante counter for our friends, Dave and Dav, who will soon be moving to Singapore for work. We caught the modern, efficient metro to Raffles Place in the heart of the CBD (Central Business District) and, giving a quick wave to the Prudential building, headed over to the Lau Pa Sat Festival Market for a late, cheap and cheerful, lunch. That evening we met up with Jackie and Jurgen at East Coast Park where they were having a leaving party for one of his colleagues who is moving to London. They were at a surf club with the ocean on one side and a wakeboarding lagoon on the other.

On Sunday we joined lots of other expats relaxing by the pool at the Hollandse Club (the Dutch Club) then Jurgen drove us across the island to Changi Village from where we took a bumboat across to the small island of Pulau Ubin. We hired bikes and spent a few hours cycling around the island and felt a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of the city. We returned to Jackie and Jurgen's, then the four of us headed out that evening to another nearby hawker at Newton Circus where we had the best, and certainly the biggest, tiger prawns we've ever tasted along with chilli crab, bbq stingray and black pepper crayfish all washed down with lots of the local Tiger Beer.

And that was the end of our brief stay in Singapore as the next day we crossed the border into Malaysia…