Our last destination in South East Asia is upon us and we endeavour to make the most of the cheaper lifestyle while we can.

Arriving at the border, leaving Malaysia is easy but getting into Singapore is not so! We were told that this place is over policed (is that possible?) so we're prepared for anything. We pass our backpacks through the scanners and immediately they find something worth checking, asking us what metal objects are in our bags may have been easier to answer if the question was "what isn't metal?"!
It's very difficult to remember exactly what we have and what they could be asking about so you have to go through everything you can think of and when that doesn't satisfy them, you have to open your bag, including taking off the cage sealing it up and empty it in order for them to have a good rummage! It turns out that a few of our metallics were clustered together and they couldn't make out what they were. The metal cage probably didn't help either!

Finding a taxi once we were dropped off proved difficult. All of them, and there were a lot, already had fares. Not a single empty cab came past us and only when one dropped someone off next to us did we manage to get lucky.

Our hostel was outside the city centre but it was in a busy area with markets and near the monorail into the city. Checking in, they tell us that someone hasn't done there job properly and we're not assigned any beds. We wait for a bit while the friendly chap shuffles things around and after 10 minutes or so he realises that the double room is free (as opposed to the 14 bed dorm we had booked) and we take it at no extra charge! Brilliant!

This evening we were persuaded (by the free food on offer!) to listen to a talk in our hostel by an Australian who has set up a charity in Vietnam to help keep the street kids off the street. This was a highly educating and hypnotic evening, we could've probably listened to this guy and his team for hours about the excellent work they do and it also gave a real insight into life in Vietnam from the kids point of view as well (a few of them came along to).

The following day we set off into the centre of Singapore for a day of touristy sight-seeing and shop browsing! We get to Raffles mall first off and see lots of nice clothes we would buy if back home then we follow a set trail for an interesting sight-seeing tour around the bulk of the city. This is one of the best cities we've visited so far in terms of things to look at. It's also extremely clean, very multi-cultural and easy enough to walk around while raking in the sights. Some very colourful buildings, many statues and plenty of eating establishments based by the river also contribute to a fine city.

A little more of the same on our second full day here as we wind down the hours until our short flight over to the land of Oz.