Is it real.....is it a theme park....is it one gigantic airport?......no, it's just Singapore!

We had heard a lot about Singapore from people on our travels, especially from expats working there on 1, 2 year or permanent contracts for the many engineering, marketing, accounting, banking and shipping companies that operate out of the island nation. We were expecting a clean, functional and hugely more expensive last few days compared to our last 5 months in SE Asia. You know what, that's exactly what we found.

It turned out to be a very long days travel from Lombok, Indonesia. We almost didn't make it at all due to the extortionate departure tax that we were asked to pay just before we boarded our flight to Singapore. We didn't have enough cash on us to pay it all and they said we could not board the flight. After the last couple of days that we had had (see previous blog) we both stood our ground and told them that we were getting on that flight. Eventually they gave in and we got on, a small but significant victory.

So, we were gently lead through Changi airport in Singapore by the very user friendly signs in air conditioned comfort. This was compared to sweating the equivalent of an olympic swimming pool while trying to combine toilet breaks with tout avoiding emergency manouvers and generally working out if we are going in the right direction. It was therefore quite 'nice' to step onto the direct metro into town that wasn't overcrowded and took you exactly to where you wanted to go. We checked into our hostel with ease and slept deeply thinking lots of nice clean, safe, organized thoughts.

We started our exploration of Singapore like we

usually do with any city, go to the center and have a walk around. This was our first mistake as most people will know Singapore's humidity sits around the 90% mark and a short 20 minute walk can leave you exhausted, which it did.So we decided to refresh ourselves in the Long Bar at the Raffles hotel with none other than a Singapore sling, behind whose hallowed bar it was created. The thing to do in the long bar is to eat copious amounts of freshly roasted peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. We didn't believe this at first, it being Singapore, but when we walked in it was just covered in them.

We duly obliged and felt suitably refreshed and thought we'd take a walk to see some free art exhibition, another mistake as soon we were both sweating, getting very tired and more irritable and then ran out of pavement!

We eventually made it, probably breaking a few road traffic laws in the process and after a delightful couple of hours decided to make our way back to our hostel via a shopping mall. It was at this point we had a revelation and realized why there was no one else walking around Singapore.

It appears that most of the malls, shopping centers, metros, bus stations and office blocks are all connected by a maze of underground tunnels and overhead flyovers, most of which are air conditioned and are lined with shops, eateries and beauty shops in which Louise was snared a couple of times. This was also the point at which we started to feel like we were those little plastic people that appear on an architects models, that city planning had gone a little crazy here. It was almost too perfect.

Singapore, like Dubai, Hong Kong and other wealthy and densely populated areas in world do not have enough people to do all the jobs that need doing e.g. construction, cleaning, serving.... basically most of the jobs they just don't want to do themselves. It has been, for a long time, a collection of people from around the world due to British rule and it's more recent transformation as a travel, shipping and economic hub. Consequently some of the cheapest

labour they can find is from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and this resulted in Little India being formed. When we left India in May we were pleased to leave the dirt, muck and grime complemented by a lovely dollop of Chaos! We walked into little India in Singapore and were hit with incense smells, shops spilling out onto the street with every type of fabric known to man and Singapore's version of Chaos (basically a load of Indians in a small area without the dirt!)

As we wandered through the streets we dodged round groups of men chatting in the street, mobile phone shops, barbers and the ever present market which oozed people in and out. As we squeezed ourselves through between the masses we found ourselves smiling as calls of 'hello sir, you come see!' rang out and the smiling faces stared as we walked past.

We also happened to be there during Deepavali, the Hindu equivalent of new year/Christmas/thanksgiving, basically a big celebration which made everything more intense. We left little India feeling, ironically, less constricted in this overly designed and created environment.

We also made it to Singapore zoo using buses that ran on time and went where they said they were going, a novel experience. As we sweated our way round the zoo the baboons roamed freely in the trees above our heads and we seemed to be within touching distance from white tigers to 'romancing' tortoises.

It was really a good example of how Singapore does things, clean and well engineered, trying to do things the most efficient and effective way. It did make us feel the whole city is like a massive business themed theme park, with controlled fun and a million shops.

Having enjoyed the efficiency of the place for a couple of days we actually got a little bored. Every shopping mall had the same shops, your walks outside were limited by how much liquid your body could hold and everything was so, well......CLEAN!!! We were glad to head back out to the airport, which we have to say is one of, if not the best, in the world. As we boarded our flight to OZ we realised that the life of most Singapore residents must be a bit like living within a massive airport terminal, but onward we must go to the land down under and Louise could finally return home!

A typical exit!

Exiting Indonesia was such a quiesential SE Asian affair that it was destined to be a blog entry. We saw it as leaving SE Asia, although of course that wasn't strictly what we were doing as a trip to Singapore was preceding our true exit from SE Asia to Australia. Somehow though Singapore doesn't really seem to belong in that generalised SE Asia category with it's organisation, integrated transport systems and cleanliness. Exiting Indonesia was a kind of two day affair, as is apt of course, considering the part of the world. We were on the Gili Islands, east of Bali and if we could have would have got onto a flight there which would take us straight to Singapore, but sure that would have been too easy. There is no airport in the Gili Islands (infact there is, rather uniquely, no motorised transport at all) so getting out of Indonesia was always going to involve a number of forms of transport.

Shunning the horse and carts rattling along the sandy track towards the "harbor" we donned our backpacks and set off on foot. It wasn't far we had to go, not that ridiculously short distances put off the many tourists who had more money than sense from using them - of which there were many! We headed first for the travel agency where we had bought our boat and bus ticket the day before...when I say travel agency read organised local gang out to exploit tourists with every sinew of being. There we were simply redirected to the "harbour", a small concrete box with three staff who would very happily help you with your travel arrangements for three times the price of the organised gangs (sorry i mean travel agents), a beach, the sea and a straw roof for shade from the sun.

As I padded bare foot down the beach, into the water and onto the boat I felt a certain nostalgia at leaving this way of life behind. By way of life I mean basic rooms with cold showers and, if you are lucky, a hand basin

I mean sitting for an hour wondering if the boat you are "booked" on will ever indeed show up and then spending the journey wondering if you will infact make it again to dry land. I thought about how nice it has been in so many destinations to be able to sit on a bit of quiet beach and have a drink brought to you for a few pounds and how amusing it is to watch the way of the locals as they splash around in the sea fully clothed, like 3 year olds.

My nostalgia didn't last long...

On arriving back on the bigger island of Lombok we were accosted by more horse and cart drivers telling us the bus stop was too far to walk "very far, you take horse cart" no thanks. Annoyed that our ticket which supposedly offered a boat then a connecting bus wasn't quite what it had been sold as we trudged along the dusty road in the heat, our bags on our backs and fronts! We couldn't see a bus stop but found ourselves drawn into a wee cafe, which it turned out was the "bus stop" we were looking for.

We told the guy who we were and where we were going and we were told to wait. We waited and waited and waited. Finally when the last mini bus load of people was about to go we asked him when our bus would be. In some mixture of frustration and disbelief he shook his head, pulled his hands over his face and approached the loaded up and ready to go van...a short discussion later and the driver was up on top undoing the strings holding down all the luggage. We passed our luggage up then went to get in only to find there was just one seat left. Now, this has happened so many times I don't care to even try to count, but at this stage we were just so ridiculously fed up with being treated like crap, being over charged for a service that we usually didn't even get in the end anyway. We argued. "two people, one seat, no good" we said. We refused to get in. They told us we had no choice. We asked for a refund and he said we'd have to travel back to the island which we had just come from to get it from there. We refused. We reached a stalemate and he began to have our bags unloaded. We got in. Grumpy, to put it mildly, and I squeezed between who strangers who also lost their fair share of seating space.

We got dropped off in Mataram where we would stay the night before flying the next day. Here our frustration melted again and we met lovely shyly smiling locals who looked bemused at our presence in their rather unremarkable town. We had a coffee in McDonalds for lack of other options and had a right good laugh at the groups of Australian P&O cruise passengers who had been brought into port and had obviously made a beeline for a big Mac meal each. Seriously, you have what like two hours in a place and you go to McDonalds?! For a meal between meals?!!

The icing on the cake however has to be the actual flight out. We were flying "Lion Air". Think of rusty baked bean can with paper wings. It was worse than what you just imagined. I have seriously never been on a more disgusting airplane and I mean I've flown Ryanair and easy jet!

Lion Air beats them hands down...as we sat on the runway waiting to take off I poked around and found a prayer card suggesting the passengers pray for the pilot to have the ability to do his job safely and that we would reach our planned destination. As John has written in the last blog, we would have laughed if we weren't so flippin nervous!

We're outta here!

Hassle, smoke and the odd earthquake!

We shall be honest and say that we were not particularly looking forward to traveling in Indonesia.  This isn't to say we didn't want to go, more about the type of traveling it entails.  We had slowly progressed from downright chaos in India to a 'rough around the edges developed country in Malaysia.  We had gotten used to buses being on time, the price of transport being on the ticket, which was exactly what everyone else was paying and also toilet paper in the bathrooms.  As we read about Indonesia we became physically tired about the prospect of having to haggle hard to get a decent price, sitting on dusty hot buses for hours on end and questionable 'Did someone, or someone's family, sleep in here last night?' bedsheets.

We arrived on Surabaya, on the north east coast of Java, early in the morning having slept overnight in KL airport.

The first impressions were fine through our sleep deprived eyes and after a successful money exchange and a quick breakfast we found ourselves on a bus to the town of Probolingo.  We began to relax as we were on time, had had relatively little hassle, were on the right bus and were chatting away to the locals who were a little amused at our presence.  We had heard the traffic could be bad at rush hour due to a mud volcano being drilled into in recent years (just google it, quite a funny story).  What we didn't expect was a 2.5 hour journey turning into a 7.5 hour nightmare.  As we watched the sun go down we kissed goodbye any chance of getting to our final destination, Guning Bromo, a spectacular volcanic landscape.  

We had heard nightmare stories about the tourist touts in Probolingo although we appeared to get off lightly (which included the bus stopping outside a tourist agency and letting a tout onboard to hassle us for a couple of minutes). So, we stumbled off the bus and were surrounded by tourist touts and cycle trishaw drivers, all vying for our Rupiah.  We ended up spending over an hour on a trishaw looking for a hotel, eventually crashing in one about 5 mins walk from the bus station and sleeping for about 11 hours.  

What we experienced next has been named the 'Bromo Experience!'

We got up for breakfast and were greeted with a very friendly hello, followed by 'You go to Bromo today?' along with questions of how we plan to get there etc...

As we left the hotel, about every 5 steps, we were accosted with BROMO! BROMO! from anyone who happened to be passing by.  

When Louise went to find the loo she was approached by a policeman and asked 'Where you go?' to which she replied 'Toilet!', the policeman replied 'OK'.  

We eventually found the 'public bus' parked near the bus station and we were informed that we had to wait for it to be full before we went.  Happily enough we sat our bags down and waited for it to do so...........3.5 hours later there was 3 locals and a grumpy granny in the bus.  By this time we were a bit fed up and we decided to speak to the driver and ask how much it was going to take for the bus to move.  We eventually agreed a price and got in the front of the van.  A sudden commotion behind us was the result of every local within a 200m radius piling into the back.  We turned towards each other and smiled knowing what had happened and not at all surprised.  

Unfortunately this was only one example of many times in Indonesia when we as tourists were abused, and we know that is a strong word, by the local tourist mafia.  We read a lot about how poverty affects most people in Indonesia but these gangs that run the popular tourist routes are not the poor people.  We passed dozens of people on the way up to Bromo straining under their burdens from a days hard toil in the fields. One man we saw was crippled, literally bent over from a life of hard labour yet still he was heading out for the day's work.  Our fare up and down the mountain on the 'public' bus that was full of tourists would probably pay for a months work.  We have tried as much as possible to be independent travellers but it is almost impossible here due to the grip these gangsters have.  This made us very sad because at times we felt we really could not trust people and the reality is the Indonesian people are just simply wonderful.  Anyway, we shall not dwell on this too much.

The Bromo landscape was simply spectacular.  We hiked up to the massive crater edge as the sun rose behind us (why do all these places need to be seen at sunrise!!!!) and it was worth every minute and every step.  The massive dust bowl of one crater housed 3 smoking volcanoes which bubbled and boiled away before us.  The obligatory tours were there having been shuttled up in their cramped 4x4 but we managed to enjoy the scene set before us. We took a leisurely walk back among the fruit and veg fields all housing their own little home for their residents and then down into the crater itself.

It can only be described as something out of a wild west movie with horsemen (and motorbikes) appearing through the hazy horizon and dust twisters spinning past.  We eventually found the stairs up Guning Bromo itself and were treated to a view of the crater, all smoky and threatening.

By the time we made it back to our accommodation the dust from the volcano had penetrated every crack and crevice that you can possibly imagine and we definitely deserved a nice hot shower.  Didn't get one though because the price was almost double for a room with one and again the prices were quite ridiculous.  We then got the 'public' bus (full of tourists) down the hillside, this included a 50 minute stop at another guesthouse to pick up more tourists as we sat in the van getting more and more frustrated.  The final straw was being taken to another tourist office and asked where we were going in Bali, which we weren't at that point.  We probably said too much and reacted too angrily but it was a culmination of three days of the abuse we talked about earlier.  

After letting off some steam we made it to the bus station and got on a local bus, and it actually was one, to our destination.  We had a wonderful, if rather warm and dusty time as we chatted to friendly college students who wanted to practice their English and lovely lady wrapped up in a wooly jumper (35 degrees remember) on her way home from seeing some family.  As the sun set we piled onto a bright yellow Bemo (minibus) with our bags being held onto the roof by gravity and made it to our accommodation.  A quick dinner in a local restaurant with no one but locals helped us feel more welcome in Indonesia and we were really looking forward to our next destination, Gunning Ijen.

Ijen was a spectacular and moving place for us to visit.  It is an active volcano and is an excellent source of pure sulphur.  The steaming crater produces a huge amount of the bright yellow material here through it's steam vents and has been mined for the last 80 years.

An army of men walk up the mountainside and down into the crater several times every day, heaving up to 120 kilos of sulphur each time.  This feat is incredible enough but what makes it truly amazing is that the steam that rises constantly up though the crater is laced with sulphur, making it incredibly hard to breath.  I (John) struggled especially as we ascended back up the crater, with my little backpack only weighing 4 kilos.

It really did affect me as some of these men sleep on the mountain because they cannot afford to go home everyday.  As we descended and ascended the crater the air was wracked with massive guttural coughs and wheezes as men struggled to get enough oxygen into their lungs, yet still they carried on.  Our guide told us that some men have been working there for 40/50/60 years, some start as young as 17.  Yet the men working this job every day still smiled at us, they even joked with us and asked for cigarettes and biscuits which we didn't have.  They earn what they can and take it back to their families, then return the next day for another days work.  The sulphur is taken to a local factory, were the men get paid 2p a kilo, cleaned up and sold on, at a 2000% markup.  Our guide also told us if anything happens to the workers the factory doesn't want to know, 'it didn't happen while they were working' is what they would say.  It reinforced what we felt about the tourist gangs that populated the tourist hubs here, that they simply did not deserve the relatively large amounts of money they charge to us.

We then headed to the very popular and very beautiful island of Bali.  By this time we had got travel fatigue with 8 months of moving, packing, re-packing and bumpy journeys having taken their tole so we decided to treat ourselves before we got to the more expensive countries on our trip.

We eventually settled in Ubud and loved almost every minute with it's boutique guesthouses (in which we stayed)

their foodie restaurants (in which we ate) and incredibly fantastic value spas (in which Louise was deservedly pampered).

We hired a car, which was an interesting experience coming from the UK, but we got the hang of it on the second day and were overtaking tractors and motorbikes with impending doom driving towards you.

We visited the northern coast and spectacular rice paddies in central Bali and even got lost at night on the way back, which showed us the map we had bought wasn't quite up to Ordinance Survey standards.  We also experienced our first and second earthquakes, I was on the loo both times but apparently there were no connections.  The first time though Louise thought I was walking back though our room towards her, charming!

We eventually tore ourselves away from Bali and made a journey by boat to the Gili Islands off Lombok which was an eventful one.  We initially were very impressed, our bags were loaded onto the boat, we were given bottles of water and sweets as we departed and the journey was relatively comfortable............then the front window broke and half the sea came in with it.

We were both thoughrouly soaked but got off lightly compared to the couple ahead of us who's seats was ripped from the floor due to the impact.  All was well though and we made it to the islands without further drama, we later found out that this particular company has had issues in the past and even had a boat sink in recent months.  Very glad we found this out after because prior to the window breaking it appeared that one member of the crew seemed to be dedicated to making offerings to Buddha throughout the journey.  We found this interesting at the time but found it extremely worrying that this seemed to be their only health and safety initiative.

We happily dived and sun bathed the days away on the Gili's before we were whisked to the airport, the brand new shining airport, that has opened after 20 years of planning.

We were loaded onto a crumbling, tatty plane where Louise found a prayer card for all religions.  It suggested we pray for safety and that the pilot would do his job.  We would have laughed, and we did but kind of nervously as the creaks, bangs and groans from the airplane didn't really assure us.  

We left Indonesia satisfied to go but also with a sense of sadness as we knew this was the last country on our travels were we would never be bored on a bus journey or wonder 'Is that actually chicken in our food?'  It was time though and we looked forward to the organisation and simplicity of Singapore as it beckoned on the horizon.