Singapore

As you may be aware Singapore is well known for being a lot more developed than the rest of SE Asia, and therefore it is a lot more expensive too. We'd been aware of this and had shopped around on the internet for somewhere to stay that was cheap but that was in a location where we could still maximise the couple of days we had here...the hotel was in the middle of the red light district! It was a lovely clean, functional room, it's just that to get to the front door of the hotel you had to weave in and out of the working girls on the street. But it was fine, and we didn't see any trouble at all.

Our first night in Singapore was the last night of the Hindu Deepvali festival so we made our way to Little India area and had a drink. To be honest there wasn't much to see apart from the lights up in the street - apparently the night before had been quite a celebration though! Being in a developed country for the first time in nearly 4 months was really nice and so we indulged ourselves; we went to Starbucks and then to the cinema!! Afterwards we did go to a lovely food court where we ate Sushi and other Asia cusine, before getting back to our hotel to find some friends had also decided to follow us to Singapore and had the room opposite ours - a really nice surprise.

Jo had been suffering with some toothache recently and it had started to get worse so we spent the next morning at the dentists (now that we felt we could) where Jo underwent some scraping, drilling and new filling was installed. She was a brave liccle soldier! We tried to take her mind off the pain by taking the cable car to Sentosa Island which was nice but very overpriced. We went straight from here to Singapore Zoo Night Safari which was really cool and thoroughly enjoyable and we saw a panther up close and personal. The next day we went back to the zoo to do the normal zoo stuff (you can't see this stuff on the night safari). It was amazing and we saw loads of cool animals including; polar bears, white tigers, orang utans, etc. It rally is an amzing zoo and I recommend that if you go to Singapore you should go to the zoo! We changed in to some smarter clothes and thought that we would keep with a Thornewill tradition by going to Raffles Hotel for a Singapore Sling (any excuse)...it was a REALLY good cocktail and we enjoyed throwing our peanut shells on the floor - a tradition for all the bar not just the Thornewill's! We then made our way to Clarke Quay to celebrate Halloween with some friends - although we didn't bother with the fancy dress! Sadly, we had to leave Singapore the next day.