Our Final Stop: Singapore

As we got aboard our final night bus, it dawned on us that this actually would be our last night bus and it was actually quite a sad moment. Not because I liked night buses, believe me I've had some of my worst nights sleep ever on them - it was just because it really marked the end, as we traveled to the last stop on our trip. The journey was fairly uneventful until at 3am when I sleep shouted "NO I BLOODY WON'T BE!" which was a tad embarrassing to say the least.

Once we got to the border, we discovered that we were committing a crime by smuggling alcohol in to Singapore without declaring it. Whoops! We had each bought a couple of bottles of Thai rum to take home for presents and wrapped them up in our clothes in our bags to make sure they wouldn't smash. When the customs workers saw them come up on the scanner, we were ushered in to what looked like a prison cell whilst our fines were calculated. We were deciding whether it would be taking the mick too much if we took a selfie and giggling a lot until the scary man came in and told us that our fine for not declaring our alcohol should be around the $560.00 + mark (about £280.00) but thankfully they decided to let us off and just make us pay only the tax which still annoyingly came to $57.00 - considering each bottle of rum was around £6.00 it was still an absolute joke, but it was apparently their way of discouraging people from drinking and smoking in Singapore. So thanks customs!

We arrived at our hostel mid morning to be welcomed by one of the nicest hostel owners we have met so far. She gave us lots of inside tips on how to get around, where to go and how not to have to pay the extortionate tourist prices (we loved her already!) Off we went to explore and of course our first point of call was the market. Bugis market was unlike anything i've ever seen as it was set over three floors and was full of tiny market stalls selling everything you could think of. Never one to miss a bargain, I picked up a few last minute treats for myself including a cute £2.50 dress which is now my go to outfit.

We grabbed some food in a Hong Kong restaurant where I had the nicest (and largest) iced tea i've ever had, of which i've had many. Anyone who knows me knows I have a ridiculously strange obsession with tea and teapots so this was a great find.

The next day, we moved in to a different hostel that we had pre-booked before we even left the UK as we knew that Singapore could be expensive. We booked this particular one because it had themed dorm rooms and thought it would be SO FUNNY to stay in the prison themed room (this was before our actual arrest at customs......) so imagine our disappointment when we were put in a dorm that was navy themed. Not only were we in a dorm that had life rings, and 'Welcome Aboard' signs everywhere, we also had two local old men who were living in the room who had the strangest sleeping patterns - left their lights on and banged the doors and left them open while everyone else was trying to sleep. They also made themselves very at home, by farting whenever they liked and rearranging their bits in full view. I think it was probably one of the worst hostels we have stayed in, just because of how uncomfortable the people living in the room made you feel - a very strange set up for somewhere that advertised as a backpackers hostel.

At least we had a lot planned and didn't need to spend much time in the hostel. We spent the next day mastering the metro and exploring Chinatown which does exactly what it says on the tin (a very pretty tin...)

We then headed to the river to grab a taxi boat which took us through the main town with a very cringeworthy commentary telling the history of each building, luckily the boat trip was nice and short and we walked the rest of the way around the harbour looking for one of the most famous buildings in Singapore. It didn't take us long to find and the closer we got, the better it looked. Marina Bay Sands Hotel sits here amongst designer shops and bars as well as an inside river complete with gondola ride.

Our inside knowledge from our lovely hostel owner was not to pay the $20.00 charge to go to the sky park at the top, but to go straight to the top and go into the bar where all you needed to do was buy a drink and you got the view for free. Our idea didn't go to plan right away when we realised that when you pay the entrance fee, you get given a key card which is needed to make the lift work. We had to awkwardly hang around the lifts until someone who actually had a key card was going to the 57th floor. Luckily it didn't take long and we found ourselves sipping a beer and looking at this view:

 

In true backpacker fashion, we could only afford one drink and then had to leave. That night, we went out to dinner with the only normal person in our dorm who took us round the corner where we had the best Biryani I have ever eaten and then headed back to the marina to watch the famous laser show which took three years for them to come up with and programme. They play the show twice a night and so we were excited to see what we would find. It made for quite a nice evening, but we really were expecting more. The 13 minute show really wasn't as impressive as I had hoped and we all left quite disappointed. 

The next day was a day we had been waiting for for a long time. Lisa was turning the BIG 25 and we awoke early to set up banners, balloons and lay out her present. Thankfully she loved it which was a huge relief since we (Leanne) had been carrying it all around in her bag. Of course, the only way to celebrate turning a quarter of a century was to head to Universal Studios! We had a fabulous day out pretending to be 5 years old running around the park, meeting the minions from Despicable Me and riding all the childrens rides.

To make sure Lisa showed us she was grateful for her gifts, we made sure she wore her I AM 25 TODAY badges all day. We ended the day with a traditional Singapore dinner at Hard Rock Cafe and some pre-drinks at our hostel. We knew that Singapore was too expensive for a big night out but we didn't realise that the only thing going on on a Monday night was a bridge party. It seemed that all the bars close at around 11pm and everyone goes to the 7-11, buys beers and gets drunk on the bridge. 

On our last day, we woke up hungover, headed straight for food and sat by the river feeling reflective and horrendously sad. We made sure we didn't speak about going home too much as we all knew how eachother was feeling but all just sat probably the quietest we had been the whole three months looking out over the harbour.

We packed our bags for the last time and the next morning, were up early and on the metro to the airport and that was it - only 16 hours in the way of it officially being the end. 

And that is it, back to reality. The hugest thank you goes to my two girls, Leanne and Lisa for the most amazing three months I could ever have wished for - we managed to laugh our way through the whole time and have come home closer than we were before knowing far too much more which I hadn't thought was possible. Another shout out goes to the Elle Meare for bringing the party for two weeks and to everyone else we met along the way..... YOU ARE ALL FABULOUS.

Lads on tour, Kuala Lumpur & the Perhentian Islands

After our time in Kanchanaburi, we unfortunately had to head back to Bangkok to get a bus down to Surat Thani where we could get a boat over to Koh Phangan. As we had a few hours to kill in Bangkok, for our sins we decided to head back to Khao San Road to pick up some cheap food, clothes and most importantly - a hair braid. Something I haven't had since I was about 10 but I think its really set off my traveller chic look. The night bus we had booked to go down south seemed dodgy enough when we were told to go to the train station and wait at the back door of KFC at 7pm. We did as we had been instructed, but of course the bus didn't turn up for hours and when it did, our 'sleeper' bus turned out to be a standard coach with non reclinable seats, what a long night!! After arriving in Koh Phangan, home to the infamous Full Moon Party, we set out to prepare for our friend Laura's arrival who would be joining us for two weeks. By prepare, I mean we bought the standard full moon outfits, florescent paint, alcohol and flowers. The next day we headed to the pier and awaited her arrival only to greet her with a beer which she had to shotgun as her initiation. So weird (but amazing) to see a face from home! The shotgun is where it all went down hill to be honest.... The Thai islands are beautiful but very focused around backpacking, drinking and partying. Our time here was no different and we spent the next two weeks island hopping, drinking alot of Chang and a lot of Sangsom & redbull buckets, staying out all night and spending the days trying to sleep off the hangover on the beach. We basically had a LADS holiday and didn't feel like travellers at all. It was the most fun two weeks but after Laura left, we were officially broken women who didn't leave our hotel room for the next 28 hours (exept to top up on hungover Mcdonalds of course)   The two most amazing things we did see were the viewpoint and Maya Bay or 'The Beach' both at Koh Phi Phi (easily my favourite island by far). I wont bore you with every funny, or unfunny story but the time went a little like this:

We had a flight from Phuket to Kuala Lumpur which we had booked before we even left home as we had heard that the southern border crossings between Thailand and Malaysia were quite dodgy. The flight was an easy one hour and luckily we'd already booked somewhere to stay in the Chinatown area. We grabbed a taxi from the airport and our driver was teaching us words in Malay, Cantonese and Mandarin (not sure how we were supposed to know when to use which) and warning us about how bad the in-town taxi (or teksi, as the write it) drivers were. "The worst taxi drivers in the world" apparently, which we were soon to find out. Our hostel was strange as it was very modern but very dark with only blue lights everywhere, but it was close to chinatown so we were happy and thats where we spent the next day exploring. Chinatown houses the longest street of knockoff goods I have ever seen - trainers, handbags, watches and everything in between so we had a good look round, bartering for some 'Nike' trainers and then hit the central market which was a very strange place which involved being stared at by almost all of the locals and Lisa being shouted at for her belly being open (she had a crop top on) and once this happened we started to realise that a high percentage of the population in KL are Muslim and almost everyone is covered up, so not only did we stick out because we are white, we also had our shoulders and knees out, whoops. 

We had already had quite a few struggles with the 'worst taxi drivers in the world' as even though it says on the side of the cars that they are to use the meter only and not allowed to haggle, none of them would as the traffic was too bad for them to make any money. After about 10 drivers refused to put their meter on, we finally gave in and once in the taxi found a whole list of rules that they weren't allowed to break, including not putting the meter on. When we pointed this out to the driver, he simply laughed. After this, we decided to take the metro everywhere we wanted and actually it was pretty simple and soo much cheaper and easier than the tube - it even has aircon. So the metro served us well until we aquired a chatty local who it was a struggle to understand even without the train noise over the top. He left at the same station as us and then asked if he could join us at dinner - all looking at eachother, saying ummm for an unconfortable amount of time, Lisa finally gave in and said no and we all had an awkard goodbye at the station - sorry!

That night, we decided to head to time square to have a look around, I think it is one of the biggest shopping centres I have ever seen and it had a rollercoaster at the top, my mind was blown. So that night, we decided to go in search of some traditional Malaysian food, we asked for recommendations at our hostel, and they could only say where the best Chinese food was. So off we went, and no, we found nothing of the sort. We had already had Chinese food in Chinatown so we eventually gave up out of hunger and had a Nando's. I think that was what put me off Kuala Lumpur - I was expecting it to be more western than the other places we had been, but I wasn't expecting what we found. There are so many sky scrapers and huge shopping centres with designer shops mixed with highstreet brands like Topshop and H&M as well as Starbucks and most fast food brands. You really don't feel like you are in Asia, you could be in London or somewhere, so I found it a little strange and didn't feel like I was seeing the real Malaysia or experiencing traditional culture. 

After our pretty western day at the shops, we decided to head to the Botanical Gardens and again, didn't find what we were expecting (a nice garden with birds and monkeys) and instead walked for miles and miles around alot of roads and not much garden. We finally found the bird enclosure but it was expensive to get in and wasn't anywhere near the nice open garden we were expecting, so in a huff, we went back to find a new, cheaper hostel. What we found was Podz - The Backpackers Home... Hmm, home as in you have to make your beds yourself and make your own breakfast, but otherwise not that homely at all. It was a strange place as the walls only went three quarters of the way up so you could hear the other 40 people in other dorms and private rooms on the same floor and they had a lights out policy at 11pm.

We had already been inside the shopping centre underneath the Petronas Towers, but we wanted to see them from far away along with the rest of KL's impressive skyline so we donned our best clothes and headed to Sky Bar, at the top of a swanky hotel. As we walked, we saw a water and light show (like in Vegas, but on a much smaller scale) and got to the entrance, already feeling like we stood out like a sore thumb. We quickly got in the lift before anyone could notice we were just dirty backpackers and got to the bar only to be asked for ID. ID?! I don't even remember what my ID looks like and not once had we needed it anywhere else. Luckily, we managed to sweet talk our way in when the manager came over and i'm so glad we did because this was the view of the towers and all we had to do in return was buy an over-priced drink.

Safe to say we didn't stay very long, since we felt very out of place so we called it a night and headed back to our hostel where the lights were out and you couldn't talk without fear of waking someone up, welcome home...

The next day we headed to Batu Caves, just outside of KL which is a natural cave at the top of a limestone hill and is also one of the largest Hindu shrines outside of India, so we found out once we got there. We also found that we would need to climb these 272 steps to get there:

The cave would have been very impressive if it had not have been for the mountians of litter and the religious paint/temples/shrines that were actually covering the natural beauty up. I think the only thing that made climbing the steps worth it were the hundreds of little monkeys running around them, chasing eachother and climbing up the arches. They were cute from far away, but when you got too close, and they started showing their growling teeth, it was actually quite scary being that close to wild amimals.

We ended our time in KL by googling the best place to get Malaysian food and going to one of the top ten restaurants in town called Songket. We are used to eating in shacks and peoples front room/kitchen/shop so this was a weird experience again, as we were waited on and were even called madame and ladies (haha). It was strange as a two course dinner and drinks still cost us all under £12 each and it was easily some of the best food we had eaten in a long time - the owner even offered to take us up to Sky Bar to show us the skyline, but as we had already been we decided to politely decline. During dinner, they even put on a traditional dance and music show which was good to see but slightly weird when they decided to ask you to go and join while you were half way through eating your dinner but there we go. 

The day we left, we got the metro to the bus station ready for our night bus to Kuala Besut at 9.30pm. All was well, the bus left almost on time and we settled in ready for the night. A couple of hours in to the journey, we were woken up by what sounded and felt like the bus had either crashed or run over something. After the initial scare, I decided to go straight back to sleep as it was still Asia and things like that seem to happen all of the time. I woke up a while later realising that we still hadn't moved but assumed that it was the one hour stop we had already been told about. Then, at 2am I was woken up by Lisa who had gone to find out what was going on. Yes, we had broken down and we were currently sat on a broken coach in the middle lane of a motorway with cars going around us! 

We were told that the nearest toilet was 500m down and through the tunnel. After asking the driver if he really expected us to walk through a motorway tunnel and him just laughing, we decided to brave it. We got beeped quite a few times but managed to make it safely to the service station, only after realising it was on the other side of the motorway and having to run across 6 lanes to get there. We finally got back to the coach realising that still nothing had happened and waited at the side of the road when at about 4am, the driver decided to take us carload by carload to the service station to wait for a new bus to come and get us - who knows where this mysterious car came from but we jumped in anyway. We waited for the bus by sleeping on some plastic cafteria chairs until around 8am when the bus set off again when sure enough, this second bus also broke down! We thought it must have been a joke but nope, we again had to wait at the side of the road whilst they fixed it. The fixing just sounded as if they were banging the underneath of the bus with a hammer which was quite unnerving to say the least but it seemed to work. So once the second bus was on the move, it took some people back to KL and finally set out to Kuala Besut. 

Once we arrived, 14 hours after we were supposed to, of course the boats to the Perhentian Islands had stopped. We paid some dodgy looking men to take us in their 'speed boat' which was basically a plastic shell with a motor on the back. They were driving the boat so fast that it was hitting the waves so hard and jumping about a metre in the air and crashing back down. The whole boat screamed every time while the driver just laughed and carried on. The main problem with this was that even though I was holding on for dear life, the plastic seats made my back kill for days from the impact and I couldn't move it without being in pain - shame all we had to do was lie on the beach...

As if our luck hadn't been bad enough, once we got on to Long Beach on the smaller of the two islands everywhere was fully booked. We walked up the beach asking in everywhere and finally a kind man let us sleep in their new rooms that were still a building site so we had no doors, plasterboard walls and a mattress on the floor that night but at that point we were so shattered that it seemed like a five star hotel. We ended up staying here, at Lemon Grass for our entire time on Long Beach - we moved in to a little bungalow and it was so nice to actually stay in one place for 6 nights. As good as travelling is, it is absolutely exhausting moving around all of the time, so it really felt like we could relax here. We had planned to move on to the larger island but actually decided to stay on Kecil as it was so nice. We spent the days tanning on the beach and the evenings having dinner at Coral Bay on the other side of the island and watching the fire dancers and chilling with some new friends. Its not really a place to party, there is a high population of Muslim's that run the restaurants so they don't serve alcohol and there are only two bars but I don't think it really needed it, and we also wouldn't have appreciated this view if we'd have been too hungover.

One thing we did do was go on one of the organised snorkelling trips where we saw a huge turtle laying on the bottom of the ocean. It's shell must have been at least a metre long and while we were taking photos on our disposable waterproof camera (lets hope they come out), it started to swim up and along so we could swim behind it until it came up for air. It was an amazing sight and the turtle didn't even seem bothered about us being there. We also went around and saw real life Nemo's, stingrays, lots of coral and other fish. We headed to shark point but unfortunately (?) we didn't find any. When we told our hotel owner we hadn't seen any, the next day he decided to take us out on his own around the bay where we found two Black Fin Reef Sharks! They were only small, but again its pretty cool to say we have swam with sharks in the clearest sea water I have ever seen  - even when you are a far as you can go stood up, you can see your feet so clearly, and I think thats why I was so at ease.

So now, its time to leave this little slice of paradise and head to Singapore for our last four days of the trip. I'm so sad to leave Kecil Island, its become like a little home but I'm excited to see what Singapore has to offer, but getting more and more nervous about getting home and facing the real world - but lets not think about that just yet.