We're just about to leave Singapore now, heading out on the next stage of our adventure - Malaysia. We've got all our things packed up at the hostel and will be getting the bus to Johor Bahru and on to Mersing, heading eventually for an island near Mersing (not entirely sure which yet).

We've had a busy couple of days in Singapore since Hanna last wrote here. We spent quite a bit of time on Orchard Road, shopping for, among other things, new headphones for Hanna (her old ones have pretty much packed up). We went to the Raffles Hotel to have a Singapore sling, of course, like all the rest of the tourists. It was extremely good, though! It was also fun throwing nut shells onto the floor.

After that we went for dinner with Ie Liang, an old friend of Hanna's mum. We had a really nice dinner at Pasta Fresca on Boat Quay and then went to a wonderful stand on Clarke Quay where a Turkish man sells you excellent ice cream in all sorts of imaginative and amusing ways.

Yesterday, we went to Sentosa, Singapore's rather artificial resort island. We took the cable car over, which was fun, if a little expensive (like everything else on Sentosa, we soon discovered). The main item of interest that Sentosa has to offer, though the least advertised and hardest to find, is Underwater World. It was well worth going to - very interesting. We also spent some time walking about the island's "nature discovery" paths. These are flanked wherever you go with interesting signs, which give information about the wildlife that you'd be able to see around the island if there weren't buildings in the way and which are full of heartfelt, woeful messages about how terrible it is that the wildlife is being destroyed by development. Along the same paths you find around every corner another artificial waterful, concrete rocks and steps. Nice one.

We also wandered down the artificial beaches and visited Dolphin Lagoon, where we saw the dolphins do their performances.

Returning to the mainland island, we headed for Chinatown. Most of the streets here are rather touristy, but we wandered about all the backstreets we could find and on the way paid my first ever visits to a Hindu and a Buddhist temple, one after the other. We then set out to find somewhere to have dinner. Whilst walking down what seemed to be the main street for food in Chinatown, a friendly old man told us that the food upstairs was half the price and just as good. We hadn't even noticed there was an upstairs, but we soon discovered that if you slip behind the street stalls you find stairs up to the upper level, where barely a tourist was to be seen (apart from us)! And the food was indeed about half the price of that on the street.

We finished the evening with a beer on the veranda outside our hostel in the evening bustle of Little India - our last night in Singapore. Today we go to Malaysia, then on to Thailand, etc, getting ever more adventurous as we go.