Singapore

Day 1: Early afternoon flight from Kota Kinabalu to Singapore. My second flight with Air Asia and I've got no complaints so far - I've found them really efficient and offering a good service. The flight was nice and short and I arrived in Singapore late afternoon.

Upon arrival and getting a taxi into the city centre, I wondered if I'd been taken to back to England by mistake. All the road signs are in English only, there was English music on the taxi driver's radio and, when I arrived in the city, all the locals were talking to each other in English! Very strange but not unwelcome. Makes life easy for me.

After checking into a hostel, I had a couple of hours sunlight to go explore the city. I only had 2 and a half days in Singapore so was keen to make the most of it before I head to Bali. My hostel was in the colonial district, meaning it was just a short walk to the Marina Bay Sands hotel and the surrounding area. Walking around, I loved Singapore instantly and it felt so nice to be somewhere clean and that actually has bins for people to use. Throughout South-East Asia, there aren't a lot.

I took a walk down to the bay and it's very impressive and pleasing on the eye. The hotel is very unique in design - the shape of a boat resting on top of 3 skyscrapers. It's really nice. This overlooks the bay and is directly opposite lots of other skyscrapers, which tower up on the other side of it. It also has a football pitch with a side stand (a cool place to play I would think, apart from when the ball goes in the water) and lots of other structures, which make it a very scenic spot. I spent a couple of hours walking around before getting some excellent food from one of the street stalls. I'd only been there a few hours but the early impressions of Singapore were very good.

Day 2: I awoke to heavy rainfall in the city, which wasn't exactly what I was hoping for with only a couple of days to look around. After breakfast at the hostel, I spent most of the morning wandering around the nearby shopping malls, basically waiting for the rain to stop. I even went to the Cinema I was that bored - ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'', which I would highly recommend. Great film.

Thankfully, in the afternoon it did stop raining and I took full advantage by spending the rest of the day walking for miles around the city. I started off by heading down to Marina Bay Sands again and heading up to the very high observation deck for simply amazing views over Singapore. It's a very impressive city just walking around but it's pretty breathtaking from up there. Fantastic views over the bay and the other nice buildings surrounding it. On the other side, a huge Big Wheel and some other cool structures, which I took a walk around when I got back down to city level.

The rest of the afternoon was spent walking around, soaking up the city with no particular destination in mind. Ended up pretty far away from my guest house but managed to find my way towards Chinatown so I took a walk through there and found it just as busy as was expected - the Chinatown districts across Asia usually are. Afterwards, I headed back into the Colonial District for some more street food at an excellent, cheap place I found. The food in Singapore was amazing - some of the nicest meals I've had on the trip so far.

Day 3: A day of fun as I headed over to Sentosa Island. This is a very popular resort and was the main place I was advised to visit in Singapore by the guys running my hostel. I walked over there via the boardwalk and instantly headed for Universal Studios, where I spent most of the day. Lots of cool rides here, including a couple of awesome Roller-coasters I went on about 5 times each. There was also a brand new Transformers 3-D ride, which was also quality. Less fun the second time around when I forgot to pick up some 3-D glasses though!

Also on offer was an indoor, pitch-black Roller-coaster that was pretty good. I then checked out some of the other attractions, including a Shrek 4-D Adventure, a Waterworld Live show and a cool Special Effects Simulator of a hurricane hitting New York. Mainly kids stuff throughout the park as you can imagine but I was happy enough being a kid for the day and had good fun.

After the park, I took a quick walk around Sentosa Island before walking back into the city for the evening.

That's about it for Singapore. Short and sweet but I really enjoyed my 2 days there and I'm a big fan of the city. Thankfully, I've got one day back there after Bali and before heading to Australia so I'm going to check out Singapore Zoo - described by the guide books as ''world class''. We shall see.

Before that, it's off to Bali, Indonesia for a couple of weeks. Going to try my hand at surfing again. I suspect this won't be pretty.