Thank you kind people

After another heated debate with the front desk staff upon checkout in Melaka (they decided after we had slept in the room that the rate had gone up) we left and headed for the bus station. We got on our bus for the 5 hour journey to Singapore.

After the usual rigmarole of getting off the bus with bags and going through customs we got back on the bus and were taken to Lavender Street bus station. Only having one night in Singapore and having seen most of the sights on our last trip here we weren't bothered where we stayed so we had pre-booked a cheap hotel close to the bus station. Or so we thought. We failed to check the scale of the map provided on the hotel's website; had we done so we would have realised there was no scale and that the hotel was a bit more than an inch away. We walked in the blistering heat for half an hour until we reached a bus stop which we both collapsed into (which also started looking like quite an attractive proposition for the night). With barely a soul around I set off to find someone to ask the way; I stopped a lady on a bike who was most helpful. The hotel was a good hour's walk away; we needed to take the bus. That'd be fine if we had any Singapore dollars on us. She then scrabbled around in her purse and gave us her change with a list of bus numbers to look out for. How lovely. We boarded the next bus and even though our $1.20 didn't cover the fare, the driver let us on.

As we later discovered the area we were heading to for the night was a little unsavoury, it dawned on us that nice lady on bike and kind bus driver may have been taking pity on us. A very elderly chap on the bus asked where we were from and when we told him he tutted in disgust and turned his back on us. I daresay he was old enough to remember the pompous English types during colonial times.

We disembarked the bus, navigated our way to the hotel (via an overpass with LOTS of stairs) and checked in. After a MUCH needed shower we headed out for something to eat. Hmmm…a rather large number of scantily clad ladies were lining the streets to greet us. We realised we were slap bang in the middle of the red light district and it wasn't a discrete affair. Right next to our hotel, what had looked like a sleepy street just 2 hours earlier had sprung into life with numerous 'establishments' and neon flashing 'open' signs. Girls were running around in underwear and towels and a few men were off for a spot of early evening window shopping. Giving the 'Claypot Live Frog Restaurant' a miss we found a reasonably clean-ish looking veggie Indian restaurant, ate, drank and headed back before our innocent minds were corrupted any more. At one point there was a 3 metre gap between me and Matt during which time he received 4 'hello big boy' type propositions .