Our Singapore Detour

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Today was the day we were going to complete our overland journey from London to Singapore, considering no one has been lucky enough to win the lottery and help fund our trip to go any further, Singapore is the furthest we will be able to go. We got up early but had to hang around for AGES waiting for someone to turn up to we could give our key back and get our key deposit back, we could have left it but at 10RM that was half a bus journey to Singapore.

We caught the local bus to the bus station then got another bus for 20RM each to take us all the way to Singapore. It took much longer than we were lead to believe in fact it took double the amount of time, completely messing up our ongoing plans, more about that later. Anyway we arrived in what one could only describe as a playground looking bus station in the middle of nowhere surrounded by apartment blocks, Lavender Street!! A 5 minute walk to the underground and to our annoyance we found no money changing facilities, of course there were ATMs but with us only still having problems with bank cards T went off in search of a moneychanger. T arrived back and we headed down into the subway only for T be stopped by a ‘jobs worth’ security women who had clearly failed in her chosen career and was now pissing off tourists , wanting to search his bag. After what felt like half an hour of explaining to this women that the bag is in fact a backpack and doesn’t have a zip down the middle, it is a top loader, T evidentially had to un-packed a third of his pack, for some reason she wouldn’t do it, even though it was her wanting to look in the damn thing!!! Thankfully all his smelly underwear and sweating t-shirts (waiting to have wash might I(T) add), were at the top and she got full view and smell ha ha ha!!! Once she was satisfied with whatever she was looking for we ventured down and boarded the train.

Now because of the amount of time it took us to get to Singapore we couldn’t get any buses up the east coast to where we wanted to go so our next option was the Singapore train station. Be forewarned it is not the easiest to find and is annoyingly not on the MRT line, with Malaysia actually owning all the land, the train tracks and station lock stock and barrel, which they won’t sell back to Singapore, this may have something to do with it! So after booking on a sleeper train back to KL we deposited our bags and set out for our mandatory beer - according to our rules you can’t say you have visited a country until you have the stamp and have had a beer (dry countries excluded naturally!), our rules are a play on a famous saying: “a country has to have its own airline, football team and its own beer to be called a country”. We arrived at Raffles Place MRT in Singapore’s financial district and instantly felt like ants, we headed to the strip of bars that line Raffles Place, an area called Boat Quay and enjoyed a couple of ‘pints’, first time on the trip thus far. G was over the moon she got her first pint of cider in 8 months!!! After recovering from how much we spent on our two pints (S$12 each), we wondered down along the river bank looking in at all these posh restaurants with envy, before we stumbled upon Clarke Quay - this being G’s surname we had the obligatory photo’s with G correcting the spelling to remove the letter E.

We headed back to the train station past all the lovely bars and restaurants noticing that if we had ventured a bit further along we could have had a jug of beer (2 drinks each) for S$14 doh!!!! Back at the train station we had a lovely mutton curry and rice and sat playing card waiting for the arrival of the night train to KL!

We are looking forward to returning in a few weeks time for our flight to Oz for more of a venture around the “city state”. We must also add how incredibly happy we are at how far we had travelled without using a plane, so far a rough calculation brings us to 20,000 miles, oooh think of all that CO2 omissions we have offset he he he.

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