Leaving Malaysia and Singapore

So far on these travels we’ve described our day to day adventures in the various places we’ve visited on the www.catch-up-with-the-sun-asia.blogspot.com page. From swinging over the Great Wall of China on a rope wire at Simatai, being interviewed on Japanese TV in Toyako Onsen, swimming with the fishes, eels, turtles, and deadly poisonous sea-snakes in Pulau Tioman, to running away from giant monster-crabs in Hakkodate…. it’s been an interesting few months! At the end of each country we’ve tried to list a few pros and cons about the place, but in the case of Malaysia and Singapore we’re being lazy and lumping them together (we think Singapore is a bit small for an entry of its own).

So. The good versus scary list:

Some things we’ve found great…

1. Islands. Like Thailand, there are some truly beautiful rainforest islands off the coast of Malaysia (including Singapore I suppose!). We only had time to stay on one – Pulau Tioman – but it was lovely. Beautiful beaches, coral reefs and forests. Why don’t England and Wales have coasts like this eh?

2. Wildlife. This I suppose is very much related to the isolated island idea, but it also holds true even in Singapore where you can meet some alarmingly tame monkeys in the nature reserve. On Pulau Tioman we particularly loved the fact that the local wildlife was so abundant that you’d walk down the village and see huge lizards, families of monkeys, and turtles coming up for a breath of air by the pier. And if you venture into the water you’ll be rewarded by loads of fishes, eels, and even the odd octopus!

3. Malls. There are a fair few in Kuala Lumpur, but it is Singapore where the shopping mall comes into its own. It is actually difficult to walk 5m anywhere near the centre of town without coming across a new mall. We found the cinemas on the top floors were good too – much cheaper than the UK, and the popcorn is good too. Shame they blast the air conditioning on full power all the way through the film so that by the end you’re a virtual icicle…

4. Ice cream parlours. We spoilt ourselves regularly in Singapore – well, in a hot, tropical environment, a perfect way to cool down is by guzzling a nice Haagn Daz or Ben and Jerry’s’. Or if you’re not overheating, then a combination of Ben and Jerry’s ‘Chocolate therapy’ ice-cream and a hot waffle is very nice. These cafes are almost as numerous in Singapore as Shanghai, but unfortunately we didn’t find any ColdStone Creameries in competition. A shame – their chocolate brownie creation was particularly delicious!


And some scary things…

1. Fines. Singapore has far too many fineable offences. It ends up feeling really restrictive actually. The fact that you can’t cross the road without risking being penalised unless you’re at a crossing with the green man showing is absurd when there is no traffic! Or the national chewing-gum ban? Yes, chewing gum is illegal in Singapore. I mean it’s hardly a Class A narcotic now is it? OK, we couldn’t live with this fine culture, but there are some pluses. No litter anywhere, hardly any cigarette smoke, and no taxi touting – it’s illegal for cab drivers to hail pedestrians or overcharge customers. This is a breath of fresh air after the rest of Asia! But on balance, no, the restrictive laws in Singapore certainly detract from the pleasure of exploring it.

2. The MTR. Singapore’s underground system, the MTR is nowhere near as good as we expected. Well, perhaps that’s a little harsh – the actual network is reasonably extensive, modern, swift and clean. And doesn’t even cost too much. Just don’t eat or drink anywhere in the trains or stations, or – you guessed it – you’ll be fined. No, the problem is the ticketing system. It is absolutely infuriating! You have to buy plastic ticket cards from ticket machines, which at first glance seems similar to many other systems. But no. First, your fare is almost doubled buy having to buy a ‘deposit’ for the card, which you can get back at the end of your journey by feeding it into another machine. This leads to a lot of queuing – the queues for tickets are effectively doubled everywhere. Worse, at the airport it took us 15 minutes of searching to find the machines to reclaim our deposits on leaving Singapore – don’t tell me they were hidden out of site at the back of the station underneath the escalators by mistake when the ultra modern station was designed! No, they clearly want deposits for keeps! But perhaps most annoying of all is that the ticket machines only give up to $4 of change (about £2). This means you can’t use most notes (if you’re lucky enough to be queuing for a machine that accepts notes…), so you need oodles of coins to afford your trip. Worse, if you have no change and queue up (again) for a manned booth to try and get your ticket, you’ll only be told that they can’t sell any. BUT they can give you change and send you back to queue (AGAIN!!!) at another machine! Unbelievably daft! In summary – wherever possible, we walked.

Ah well. This is the last of Asia. We can’t quite believe it. We’ve arrived now in a new continent only to find it’s a lot like home – and have ended up with a strange kind of inverse culture-shock! Gary has been particularly vulnerable to this… more later in the post on Perth!

Devastating Asia

We’ve actually managed to spend half our year travelling just in Asia…

…leaving what feels like a trail of destruction. Seriously, we’ve been starting to wonder if we’ve cursed the region! See what you think:

1. Nepal – we had to change our plans and avoid this place as terrorists protesting about Chinese actions in Tibet started letting bombs off in Kathmandu about a fortnight before we planned to go there. So we got stuck in 41 degree Celsius Delhi instead…

2. India – no sooner had we left India for Hong Kong and terrorists blew up a region of central Jaipur, a city we’d particularly liked! I don’t think the culprits of this one were ever identified, but they killed 80 and injured 200 or so people. A few months later other cities were hit – Ahmedabad and Bangalore.

3. Burma – OK, we didn’t exactly plan to come here after the events of last year, however we have visited several neighbouring countries. The appalling typhoon that devastated a large area of Burma, killing unknown numbers of people (partially due to the Governments’ policy to limit international aid), occurred while we were in Hong Kong. It has been estimated that over 200,000 were missing.

4. China – just before we arrived in China we heard about a very serious train crash near Beijing which killed over 70 people. This didn’t fill us with a great deal of confidence as we planned to spend the next 6 weeks travelling by train through China! Luckily the trains we used were brilliant, cheap, and didn’t crash.

5. China – after we flew out of Hong Kong to Japan the most devastating earthquake for 50 years occurred in the Szechwan region, killing over 68,000 people. The effects of this natural disaster were very much in evidence as we travelled through China, carefully altering our route to stay away from downstream areas of the massive landslide lakes created by the quake.

6. Japan – a much smaller earthquake occurred in northern Japan, about a week after we left the country. The closest city to its epicentre was Sendai, a nice place that we’d visited briefly on the way back to Tokyo from Hokkaido.

7. Japan – at about the same time as the earthquake, a tragedy of a different nature occurred in Tokyo. A psychotic knife-killer hired a car and drove into Akihibara, the electronics centre of town to and created havoc by running over pedestrians and stabbing innocent bystanders to death. He killed 7 before being stopped by the police, but was disappointed by this – he later stated in court "I should have used gasoline so I could have killed more than I did". Nice. We’d walked down the same street, oh, a week earlier.

8. Thailand – we leave Bangkok, and two weeks later the People’s Alliance for Democracy move in and seize control of TV stations and the Government house in what they declare to be a new Revolution (in the light of the recent Thai Coup). Later Government allegations of corruption etc cause the Prime minister to be ditched… all this a few years after the (very peaceful) Coup D’Tat. A stable government system, eh?

9. Japan and Indonesia - more earthquakes occurred just as we were leaving Asia – this time in northern Japan (again), and also in Indonesia, which we had been thinking of visiting, but decided that we didn’t have enough time to cover before moving to Oceania.

Hmm. Is there a pattern here? I think Gary may be innocent on the cursing front, as I seem to have left a trail of destruction before – I was on the Herald of Free Enterprise in a force 9 gale about 6 months before she sank in Zeebruger, and on Greek Ferry in the Cyclodes a few months before it went down on some rocks! Both boats killed hundreds of people. Perhaps for the good of humanity I should stop travelling!

It does make you think though. We live a very cushioned life in Europe where we get far more protection from such things than most countries out here. Not that the UK hasn’t seen its share of terrorists and psychotic killers I suppose. Or, from another point of view, do these natural and man-made disasters happen far more frequently around the world than we realise as we sit in comfort at home in the UK?

So now we move on to Australia. If they will let us in that is!