Our 5 days in Singapore were great. We wandered in and out of the shiny and ostentatious shopping malls riding the escalators and enduring the arctic air-con (apparently there is an escalator in Laos - we never found it). We went to the night safari (a zoo full of nocturnal beasties) to see fishing cats, flying squirrels, bongos and lions. We paddled on the imported beach at Sentosa Island and did other touristy things. We didn’t chew gum or drop litter, and although Tim was known to spit once or twice, we didn’t get thrown in jail. Best of all we enjoyed Pete and Sharmaine’s hospitality: sleeping in a decent bed, eating home-cooked food and browsing wedding photos. Thanks!

We didn’t really get under the skin of the place (although admittedly in Singapore appearance seems to beat substance every time) but Eppu reckons a couple of months living there would have her reaching for the spray-paint can, joining the Communist Party or generally becoming a rebel without a cause.

Next to Penang on the first leg of our grand but oh-so-slow rail trip up North. Penang is a small Malaysian island in the Malacca Straits, and the capital Georgetown was founded in the late 1700s as a British free trade port for the East India Company (a ‘Straits Settlement’ like Singapore). First we checked into the run-down Hotel Swiss, kept spotless by numerous pot-bellied Chinese men, but we made the mistake of taking afternoon tea at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel - Penang’s answer to Raffles - and ended up taking a suite there with a sea view and his-and-hers bathrooms.

Georgetown is a great mix of dilapidated and refurbished buildings - both small chinese shop-houses and the grand colonial architecture, and different cultures with distinct Malay, Chinese and Indian areas. We’d recommend it to anyone for a week, and if you don’t like the idea of the E&O’s khaki & pith helmet clad footman there’s an amazing upmarket B&B in the beautifully restored Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion. It a very cool combination of classical Chinese form and decoration (fully Feng Shui’d - down to the rainwater ducts inside the walls), and British materials: the tiles are English and the cast ironwork from Macfarlane’s of Glasgow.

The second sleeper took us to Bangkok for a day of Dermalogica facials and admin and the third on to Chiang Mai. We’re back home soon so we’ll tell you what we’ve done here when we see you!

So this is probably our last post on our travel blog - it’s kept us in internet cafes for many hours but it’s been fun, and we hope you’ve all enjoyed it.