Welcome to the first instalment of Roger and Lindsay's travel blog!

The flight from Heathrow to Singapore was challenging! Apart from the fact that there was a significant amount of turbulence I was sitting next to an excessively large lady who must have been at least 20 stone and spilled over into my space both above and below the arm rest. The situation was made even worse by the fact that the bloke in front of me seemed to be able to recline his seat a good 6 inches further back than anybody else on the whole plane! His wife, sitting in front of Rog, specialised in throwing herself into her seat and shaking his tray and TV screen as well as the whole plane every time she moved. Anyway we managed to reach Singapore without clobbering anybody or developing deep vein thrombosis so can't be bad!

Singapore was lovely. It is such a clean city and the fact that it is illegal to sell chewing gum means that all the pavements practically sparkle. We stayed in the Clarke quay area and as we have visited Singapore before we contented ourselves with exploring the river area by foot including part of the old colonial area where Raffles actually landed when he first came to Singapore and the Merlion which is a huge creature, half lion and half fish who spouts water into the river at a tremendous rate.

We enjoyed a really nice breakfast at a "Boomerang" bar on the river bank (purely in the interests of acclimitisation of course), enjoyed a quick swim in the pool to cool off from the 30 degrees heat (sorry folks couldn't resist - I know it's snowing back home!) and it was time to head for the airport. We were a little disgruntled to discover that, having successfully negotiated a shuttle bus to the hotel all the while congratulating ourselves on being seasoned travellers, it was actually just as cheap to take a taxi!

Arrived in Bali in the dead of night so we are eagerly looking forward to exploring - so far all we know is that the sun is shining, it is hot and we have a lovely room (retirement treat!).