On to Singapore

Thursday 25th October

In an effort to be more careful after the mugging, we had put all our valuables straight into the safe when we arrived at the hostel. But just before we boarded the bus to go back to Kuala Lumpur, we realized we'd left them there and were about to try and make our way out of the country without our passports, which would have made for an interesting story - but not one I would have liked to tell. I ran back to the hostel to get the valuables and we still got the bus on time. The driver of the bus was one of the most hilarious human beings I have ever encountered. The bus nearly broke down so many times and the driver got a little stressed. I thought this might be why he didn't talk, but shrieked. But in fact he shrieked throughout all of the five hour journey. I thought that there was a woman at the front of the bus with a really annoying, shrill voice, shouting at the bus driver, and realized only after some time that it was the bus driver himself. It was literally impossible to communicate with him. A couple of people tried to make inquiries about the journey but he just dismissed them with shrieks and hand gestures. It was like he was on a constant warpath. I wondered whether he was particularly jumpy because of a sensitive complex over his involuntary high-pitched tones, or whether his shrieking was a result of his temperament. I guess I'll never know, but I was very glad to debark.

After a couple of hours we were straight on to another bus to Singapore and went through the quickest immigration process so far. We were thrown off our bus once and were given no direction and had to figure out where to go and what to do. We showed our passports etc. and then jumped back on the bus again. About two minutes later we had to get off again and haul all our bags off and through security, before getting back on the bus again. When we terminated, at night, there was not a taxi driver or tout in sight, and we were slightly at a loss in this new city. We walked and hailed a cab and asked the driver to stop at an ATM machine so we could get some local currency, but my bank card would not work. I had had this trouble in Malaysia as well and had to make three international phone calls to sort it out. I was promised that the problem would not occur again (barring the card because of 'unusual' activity, i.e. possibility of fraud). So we had no money. Luckily the taxi driver was very generous and dropped us of at our hostel and said we could pay him the money the following day. We had some emergency fund left, in U.S. dollars. We used the last of that to exchange with the hostel owner, who gave us Singaporean dollars in return. We then gave almost all of that back to pay for the accommodation! We could not, for the life of us, make a successful international phone call to correct the problem, because the phone boxes and mobiles inside and just outside the hostel would not work. We didn't really want to venture out to try and find another phone as it was late and I'd managed to book us a hostel right in the middle of the red light district.