Last day in SE Asia

This evening we fly to Sydney, Australia for the next stage of our trip. We're still in Singapore now, just finding ways to kill the hours before we have to head to the airport. Since we last updated the blog, we went with the whole group for a bit of food, a cocktail called the Singapore Sling at the rather posh Raffles Hotel (an essential part of any trip to Singapore), and then out to an outrageously expensive club to finish off.

It was too expensive to get drunk, so we got up early on the following day and found the Hop On bus tour. This is quite a nifty little system, you just pay for a ticket and the buses run on a set route all day. You can just jump off at the sights, then catch another one to continue the route. We popped over to the Botanical Gardens which were quite nice and relaxing compared to the city, and then went back to the hotel to meet up with some others to catch a cable car down to Sentosa Island. This is a tiny island just off the south of Singapore which has been turned into a complete resort, a bit like Disneyworld.

The cable car itself is quite an experience, floating several hundred feet above the port, giving a great view of the city. We went in the middle of a thunderstorm so that made it all the more scary.

Once off the cable cars we saw the massive statue of the Merlion; a half lion, half fish which is the symbol of Singapore. We had a quick look at the man-made beach there which is nice and pretty, and then went to the free musical fountain as it began to get dark. This is a spectacular light show, using holograms projected onto the spray from the fountain. It's more cheesy than you can possibly imagine but the effects are very impressive and well worth seeing.

We caught the cable cars back to Singapore, finished off a bit of booze that we couldn't fit in our bags and had an early night.

Summary

This trip has been superb, we've both loved Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore and we've already talked about returning to Thailand to see more of Bangkok and also the jungles of the north and the beaches on the east coast. The Thai people were particularly great, always smiling and friendly, the service almost everywhere is brilliant and you are made to feel welcome in the most unexpected of places.

We've done so much in the last three weeks that it's difficult to choose one, but our highlights have been the jungle-trek, riding the elephants and the speedboat tour of the Phi-Phi Islands.

Again we can't get photos online here so hopefully we'll update when we get to Sydney with a whole load of new ones from the last few days.