My night bus down the Malaysian coast, half empty, I reclined my seat and tried to sleep. At one point, I raised my head to look out at the dark surroundings. We were on a little road, alone, our head lights blaring full strength, the trees to our sides flying past silently at incredible speed.

It wasn't perhaps the ideal reassuring bedtime realisation, but I had little choice and lay back again. Then the bus hit a dip, and we bumped and leapt into the air, I think, not leaving the road, just not being in full contact with it for a second, then regained control and returned to our lane. And resumed the same velocity.
I actually travel with a seat belt - I had it made up for me in San Francisco. Just a long wide strip that I wrap around my torso and the seat and then clip shut. I don't use it often, but like it for night journeys, as much for comfort as belief it will save me in some emergency.

--

Into Singapore, hot sweaty sticky outside, cold and dry air conditioning inside. I sat in the Indian quarter and read an intoxicating copy of the Lonely Planet India.

Slowly my hopes and plans for my four months (assuming I don't get worn out) in India (and perhaps Nepal) are taking shape. Meet my friend Gari in Delhi, head north, maybe to Kathmandu, then after he departs, head south to Gujurat, to Bombay, then towards Kerala, depending on how fast I am moving. Walking the rainbow paintedstreets of Little India, each TV showing Bollywood dancing, each smell of spices or cooking, the bright strange contents of each shop made me smile with anticipation. Even the way Indians use English I find fascinating. Indian English seems like a wild growth from a long stable tree - unusual and unique, but unquestionably belonging to the whole, the same language looked at through a different lense. In a copy of India Today that I picked up, some lines from an interview with a minister go:

Interviewer: Mouvli Abbas Ansari of the Hurriyat Conference says you are not senior enough to talk to him.

Minister: I will not become big or small after his remarks.

--

I met up with three people in the few days I was in Singapore. No.1: Matt, a friend of mine from London, is a rather well brained management consultant and happened by chance to be working in Singapore for a couple of weeks. Here is a picture of me at one of his houseparties a year and a bit ago (advance warning: my hair was a bit longer back then). He kindly offered to let me share his king sized bed at the 5* Conrad hotel. Our first morning after, he commented, "Sleeping with another man's a funny experience - far too much scratching, snorting, odd grunting noises". I laughed, "Well, while we're on the subject, you were the guy letting off a string of farts last night".

No2: The Sarong Party Girl. The person whom I'm meeting in Borneo, Cayce, has her own blog, and so I feel I've got to know her a little already. In one of her posts, Cayce had mentioned the very funny "Sarong Party Girl"'s blog, and her guide for Asian girls looking to find a Western boyfriend. Before clicking to the SPG's blog, I should warn very young and very old readers that the content is rather racy - well, certainly more exciting than my blog.

SPG and her guide.

While the steoreotypical male response to this male fantasy girl would be, "Wow, get me a plane ticket!", the actual response for most men (English men at least) is I think more, "Err... Crikey". So I decided I would challenge my initial response a bit and email her to suggest we meet for a coffee when I came to Singapore. I crafted an email and got a really nice reply back - so she and I met up in Singapore's central shopping district, Orchard Road. It was marginally awkward at first I felt - maybe she thinking, "Maybe he thinks I'm vacuous", me thinking, "Maybe she thinks I'm boring". But I think neither of us felt that way, so we had a long afternoon chatting about different romances, travelling and books we both liked. She brought along a book for me in fact, Wendy Dale's "Avoiding Prison and other Noble Vacation Goals" - so I was easily won over.
A friend of her's showed up, the "Girlfriend" of the blog, and took us to the bar of the incredible Mitre Hotel. This place seemed to stick two fingers up at everything modern Singapore wants itself to be. The building was, we were told, 140 years old, had been the headquarters of the Japanese regime during WW2 - and was crumbling into half ruin. Fans hung limply from the entrance hall's high ceiling like withered fingers, the lighting was weak, the central colour a very worn out white, the wooden boards above the squat bar area were patterned with encroaching damp. The roof drained in water each heavy rain, the sink had cracked open, and to flush the toilet I reached into the cistern to yank on a string. And everywhere not in direct use, thrown away crap was piled up close to the ceiling. In one area, idled a herd of broken down standing fans; in another, a team of weary ripped arm chairs; on a long "dining" table rolling hills of papers had been dumped. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Singapore authorities had stripped Hotel Mitre of its bar licence months ago, but under the cracks letting in the sky, the show went on each night, at least for now. People were living upstairs - an eldery pot belly, who we saw in passing, apparently preferred to throw buckets out his window instead of using the communal toilet or shower.
Why was the Mitre hotel allowed to fester like a scene from a Victorian novel within the centre of cleanliness and modernity obsessed Singapore? Well, the site was owned privately, and the feuding owning family it seemed preferred to hold on to the land until prices rose, or something on those lines.

During the evening, an Indian-Singaporean, Kiran, joined the little group around the bar. She worked for MTV Asia and very kindly offered me a contact in Bombay - something I suspect I am going to need for that mad sounding city. She had just got back from a trip to London and loved it - I offered my dubiously cool tips on where was good in the city.

3. The third person I met in Singapore was Tay Choonwei - he and I had first met back in Mexico City. At first I smiled to see the two enormous photo albums (of his journey in Mexico) which he hefted on to the table. But, as I leafed through Oaxaca, this barrage of images seemed the only way to capture Mexico. How else could one record the processions that went on (quite literally) all day, a dancing exhibition that progressed all night? I said goodbye to Choonwei feeling very nostalgic for many faceted Mexico. He and I went for lunch in my favourite restaurant in Little India, Gandhi's, and I introduced him into the joys of drinking Lassis. Gandhi's policy seems to be, once you've sat down and agreed to the banana leaf lunch, they will return with more rice and sauces until eating becomes agony. I finished my time in Singapore as I began it - dreaming of India.

Daniel, Johor Bahru, 6 July 04