Singapore

You queue in a neat line for a taxi. The man on duty hails one taxi at a time into its allocated position. You wait a moment in the air conditioned booth, awaiting the nod from the attendant to acknowledge your taxi has stopped and it is safe to proceed. As you wheel out your luggage on a trolley, the boot of the car opens and a smiling driver lifts your luggage up for you. As you turn to push your empty trolley into the terminal you notice another smiling man has already appeared from nowhere and silently removed the trolley and guided it efficiently to its appointed place.
This is Singapore. It's clean, it's tidy, it's slick.

We had four days in this haven. A good chance to catch up on sleep, e-mails, blogs and washing. The main attraction in Singapore seems to be the shopping centres, loads of them that never seem to close. Beth was pretty happy!

There are a number of districts within Singapore derived from various groups who have immigrated - the names speak for themselves - Little India, Little China, Arab Quarter and so on. Wherever you go you notice how neat everything is, nothing seems out of place. And what is particularly impressive is the lack of monkeys.

Feeling withdrawl symptoms from those furry creatures we took a trip out of the main urban area to see the Night Safari, annexed to the zoo. The idea is that the nocturnal animals come out to play and you have a chance to marvel at these wonderful creatures of the night. However, the animals were clearly in on this game and decided that it was far better to mock the tourists craning for a glimpse of the beasts by staying asleep. They probably lie around until 11 o'clock, when the Night Safari shuts up shop, and then come out to play. Grr.

We did, however, have a close encounter with a leopard. When I say close encounter, I mean she was lying on her back the other side of a thick pane of glass enjoying a snooze. It was still very impressive to see the size of one of these big cats. We were also spooked by some large bats. A bit like those 3D 'magic eye' pictures, just as your eyes got accustomed to the gloom, a batman type figure suddenly appeared right next to you. This wasn't so bad until the bats opened their wings, a good half meter span at least; and those eyes.......!

On the last full day, we journeyed on the monorail shuttle across to Sentosa , a well laid out, if not too touristy (and therefore criminally expensive)

island annexed to Singapore. From the air you can see the man made beaches as three small crescents (get Google Earthing). These try and block the view out to sea where huge volumes of tankers are at anchor or are heading into the docks. Still, the views away from the tankers were fabulous and with the beautifully warm weather it really felt like a tropical island.

We left Singapore thoroughly impressed. It is an amazing place. But we were glad to get going too - it's not the cheapest place on the planet and we still have a few more months of travelling to go!