This is it! This is the culmination of southeast Asia, Part 2. It was somewhat surprising that we were never in Singapore last year at all, given that like Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, it is a practical hub for all sorts of flights in the region. But we have made it this time, and purposefully placed it at the end as a bit of a treat.

Singapore is worth more than a couple of days, and so we were relieved that we had in advance booked 4 nights. We made the land border crossing starting from Melaka via bus that unintentionally turned out to be our only land border crossing at all during these last 2 years (and now we know why we are way over budget.) It's an easy one, in case anyone is considering it! You do have to get off right before the bridge to Singapore to go through customs and immigration on the Malaysian side, and then do this process again once you are over the bridge into Singapore which takes a bit of time, but it's all good. We enjoyed the fact that despite being an important financial centre, Singapore does not seem overly built up in the downtown by endless skyscrapers, and still has a bit of an intimate feel to it. And there are numerous cultural neighbourhoods including Little India, Chinatown, and Muslim Quarter that offer great representations and experiences of the diverse history of this country. The harbour area with the famous Marina Bay Sands Hotel looks great lit up at night, and there are walkways around the water and hotel complex that give you lots of interesting vantage points for fun photography. Singapore has a reputation for being expensive, but we both felt that it wasn't necessarily more expensive than say, Australia. And there are lots of activities in the city that are free, including concerts, the Botanic Gardens, 2 different sound and lights shows down by the harbour, plus others that we didn't make it to. We managed to also save some money by eating at the various food courts, which are much more impressive than they sound; there are several stalls in Singapore that have Michelin star ratings! So lots of fun opportunities to do some savings with a little research. Oh, and Troy finally splurged and got his camera fixed at Olympus Singapore, which turned out to be cheaper than it would have been to fix it back home. Who says this place is expensive?! (Oh yes, still our Visa bill.)