Life Below the Equator

If it was exoticism we were after, we certainly got it in Bali.  The very air felt different after stepping off the plane.  The climate was cooler.  The scenery was lush and volcanic.  The bustle was unlike anything we had experienced in Asia so far.  The men wore sarongs and cloth hats.  The women carried baskets on their heads.  Strange wood carvings and stone faces gave us the impression we were in Polynesia.  The sensation was immediate--I knew I loved Bali.

There were a few games we had to learn before we even left the airport.  The taxi drivers were persistent, surrounding their prey who were fresh off the plane.  Asking for 400,000 rupees to take us to Kuta, they weren't open to negotiation.  'Very far,' they would say, or 'traffic bad.'  Those were always the excuses.  It's hard to judge, just arriving in a place.  Do you trust them or not?  Well, it turned out--not.  Thank goodness there was a Westener around who informed us that we shouldn't pay more than 50,000 rupees.  There was a taxi booth right down from where all the taxi men were gathered, and there they were selling tickets for the appropriate price.  Our first lesson in Bali--don't trust the locals.  They'll clearly cheat you with a smile.

The roads were narrow and clogged with traffic.  Perhaps because Bali is just a tiny island, there aren't highways.  Getting from point A to B isn't a clear cut path.  It's a zigzaggy path, many times involving driving the wrong way down a one way street, skirting pedestrians and souvenir booths.  I loved it.  We arrived in the evening, and the streets were lined with activity.  Chris and I were wide awake looking out the windows.  It was as if we started our vacation afresh.  The thrill of travel was back.

Our taxi nosed its way down a narrow alley, parting pedestrians and motorbikes.  It amazed me that they allowed vehicles on back roads like this.  There was literally just enough room for a vehicle to get by.  Tourists had to press themselves into walls or step into a booth to avoid getting hit.  Lots of horn honking.  Lots of tourists looking over their shoulders.

We had picked a hotel out of Lonely Planet.  We needed something, less we get dropped off at some out of the way place that was owned by a relative of the taxi driver.  Fortunately the hotel was perfect.  Our own bathroom, a balcony, breakfast brought to our room in the morning.  The price was the cheapest we had encountered in a long time.  Our love of Bali was alive and growing.

Kuta is a tourist hub, something on the par of Khao San Road in Bangkok, except larger.  There was no shortage of restaurants or tourist shops.  Everything was cheap cheap cheap.  Chris and I splurged a bit the first night.  Just down the road from us was a place called Tubes, which was geared for the surfer crowd.  Stuck to the side one of the walls leading to the restaurant there was a surf board where you could stand and pose for a picture.  Chris did this.  I didn't.  I was more interested in the Mexican fare being served at the restaurant, particularly the margaritas.  After Malaysia, which isn't booze-friendly by any means, it was nice to get back to cheap cocktails.  Chris and I may have gone overboard that night, ordering dessert and cigarettes (cigarettes are sold on the menu along with the food) ontop of food and drinks, but the atmosphere was so relaxing.  There was gentle music playing, and waves crashing on giant screens around us.  There's something so satisfying about stepping off a plane and arriving in a destination and going out for that first meal.  You feel you've made it to where you want to be.

Another Sleepless Night

I was hoping to follow up our relaxing meal with a relaxing night of sleep.  After all, it had been a long time since I had gotten a decent night's sleep.  It started in Kuala Lumpur where Chris and I had shared a dorm room with two Asian princesses.  These girls had taken up the eight bunk room with their crap, draping clothes and accessories over every inch of space.  These girls were a pain in the ass from the very start, playing their music (despite Chris' snarky remarks) and doing themselves up into the late hours as Chris and I were trying to read.  They tottered out in their whorish garb just as Chris and I were settling into bed.  I knew they'd be back drunk in the wee hours of the morning, and of course I was right.  They not only turned the light on, but they sat on their beds talking to each other about god knows what, until Chris asked them to turn the light off and shut the hell up (good man).  One of the girls was on the phone for what seemed like forever.  Then she disappeared and never came back.  This was very weird behavoir for a hostel in Kuala Lumpur.  Were these girls travelers, or prostitutes?  We'll never know.  Anyway, we didn't receive a whole lot of sleep that night.

Singapore was a nightmare sleep-wise for me.  First we had those creaky bunk beds, then I had the bed bugs dropping down on me.  I just wanted somewhere quiet and bug free.

Bali looked like the place.  It was geared towards relaxation, bubbling fountains and koi ponds and massages.  The air was cool and bug-free in Kuta.  Chris and I sat up reading for about an hour in our nice airy bedroom.  As I sat there, it occured to me that down the road from us construction was taking place.  I could hear a drill.  'I hope that's not going to go on all night,' I told Chris.  Silly me.  The drilling stopped.  We went to bed.  I dozed off.  Around midnight a truck rumbled down the narrow alley, and then the REAL construction began.  Drilling, backhoeing, dynamiting... I don't know what the hell they were doing.  But the noise moved closer and closer until they were right outside our hotel.  I simply couldn't believe this was happening.  I looked outside to see a work truck parked in the alley, several men asleep in the back.  How were they able to sleep with all that noise?  It looked like it was going to be an all-night operation.  I went to grab some earplugs.  Up til then they hadn't seen out the outside of my rucksack.  I popped them in and the construction was lessened to just a mild roar.  Along with the workmen outside, I eventually dozed off.

Like a Surfer

We could have been on the Gold Coast in Australia.  Anyone with blond hair and board shorts in Kuta had an Australian accent.  Just a short hop over from Oz, Bali was the destination of the kangaroo people.  I found it interesting.  Just like Americans in Cancun, or Brits in Ibiza, the Austalian youths headed to Kuta for their partying.  Hearing 'Summer of '69' sung loudly in an Aussie accent outside our hotel at 1:00 in the morning was no different than hearing the any wanker closing down a pub on Manchester Rd back home.  The urge to shout 'Shut the **** up!' was strong in me.  One thing I've realized on this trip--I have a general dislike to young drunken party-goers, regardless of their nationality.  I don't find them witty or cute.  I don't even find myself dredging up old party memories from a decade ago when gazing upon them.  No, at best I just tolerate them these days.  I'm getting old.

But not every Austalian was in Kuta to party.  A good number of them came to surf.  Understandably so.  Kuta Beach is famous for its waves.  Huge honking waves that can take a novice out.  Girls and boys alike with gleaming trim bodies could be seen carrying boards through the streets, the most gorgeous people you could imagine.  I felt like such a frump in my gypsy skirt and tank top get-up.  To make it worse, I carried a boogie-board.  But I didn't even care.  Boogie-boarding I could do.  Boogie-boarding was a good time.  I wasn't going to die boogie-boarding.

Chris and I each took turns.  One would boogie-board while the other sat on the beach.  On the first day out, I went first.  What a thrill it was.  I don't even care if that sounds lame.  The waves were ideal for boogie-boarding.  I had mastered this little skill before back on a vacation to South Carolina.  I had spent three days in the water before I got the hang of it, droppin the board down just a split-second before the wave hit.  Timing was the key, and I got it right time after time after time.  A few times I rode a wave completely in, sailing past swimmers and waders, coming to a stop on the wet sand, rolling awkwardly off.  It was exhilarating when this happened, and I'd rush back out into the water to do it again.

I'd get braver, going deeper out into the water to catch the bigger waves as they crashed.  There was a line of surfers out past the break-line, just chilling out waiting for a really big one.  It was always exciting to see when one was forming, the surfers would come to life.  I'd get my boogie-board in gear and together we'd all try to catch that big one.  There were some exceptionally good surfers out there.  Some were crap, falling off their boards immediately, but some knew exactly what to do.  I'd never seen surfers up close before.  It was quite thrilling to be there among them, riding along with them, watching each wave that came rolling toward us.

Beware of the Hawkers

When my turn boogie-boarding was over, I squinted over the beach, trying to find Chris.  I had traveled quite a bit over but I knew we were next to a flag.  Everything was blurred without my glasses.  I looked for a solitary figure on the sand.  What I got was a blurry group of people waving at me.

I did an inward groan as I walked over.  Chris had attracted a whole group of hawkers.  They had actually made themselves comfortable, sitting around him like they were good friends.  They greeted me happily.  Chris looked happy, but only because he saw his escape, grabbing up the boogie-board and heading to the water.  I awkwardly sat down next to our new 'friends.'

It was all, 'Where you from?' 'What you name?' 'How long you here?'  I absolutely can't stand these conversations.  They're all a lead-up to, 'You want massage?' or 'You want sarong' or whatever else they're trying to sell.  We had encountered hawkers in many places in Asia, but these Balinese ones took the cake.  The conversations lasted forever, talking about family and life ambitions and such.  They talked with such seemingly sincere interest though, it was hard to break them off.  And with dread you knew the question was coming, 'Maybe you want ....?'  So awkward, especially after hearing about how their husband was out of work or their children didn't have shoes.

The women that surrounded me were annoying to the max.  I must have said no thanks to them at least 100 times.  The most persistent was an older lady who was wearing like five layers of clothes (she was cold, she said, though I was sweating in the sun).  She was dead bent on giving me a massage, even giving me a taster.  I wasn't opposed to a massage.  I might have wanted a massage very much.  Just not then and there.  I told her maybe later.  Good price, she said.  So I asked her how much, out of curiosity.  The price she gave was ok, so I told her I'd consider it, maybe get one later.  I couldn't shake her after that.  The other ladies wandered off, realizing that their time was wasted on me.  The older lady stuck with me to the end.  Chris returned with the boogie-board and I was so happy.  But here was the keeper of the money, and the lady turned to Chris.  'Your wife want massage, yes?'  Chris and I both got up, ready to leave the beach and get away from the hawkers.  'Another time,' I told the lady, not sure how else to be polite.  She turned nasty then, realizing her time had been wasted.  'You asked how much.  You don't do unless you buy.'  I hadn't signed up for her game anyway, so I don't know why she was calling me out for cheating.  'You bad luck,' the lady said, walking angrily away.  'You bad luck, you bad luck.'

God, I hated these hawkers.  Perfectly charming people, but they couldn't understand the meaning of no.  I saw lots of tourists just ignore the hawkers.  'Where you from?' was met with downcast eyes.  Chris and I just couldn't do that.  We'd always give out a 'no thank you.'  But in Bali, no thank you is just another way of saying yes.  It was exhausting.

The people were so unbelievably friendly.  It created problems because you didn't know if there was sincerity there.  If there was, and you were rude, you just looked like an ass.  Chris and I errored on the side of kindness, and for this we were pestered to death.  But we did interact with the people, and for this I give ourselves credit.

The only time we ran into problems with this kindness was at a money changers.  The guys there were jokes and laughs right from the very start.  While Chris changed the money, I sat outside and talked with a friendly young man.  The friendliness was overflowing.  Chris popped his head out to ask if I had 10,000 to make the exchange easier.  I complied, but it was still jokes from the money changer, and we were laughing along.  We walked away from there thinking, wow, those guys are great.  Chris actually thought we had gotten a good exchange rate and we were laughing about that.  Well the joke was on us, as we later found out.  At dinner Chris was counting out his wad of cash and realized that we had either spent way too much in the past few hours, or we had gotten ripped off at the money changers.  Well, we had failed to heed the warning from Lonely Planet.  Money changers in Bali are notorious for ripping off tourists.  They count the money in front of you, then cause a distraction (like, 'hey, you have 10,000 rupee note?), then pocket a good chunk of the money while you turn away.  It happened to us.

I was pissed off, and a little disillusioned to be honest.  We had had such a good time with those guys.  They were full of crap, ripping us off while patting us on the back.  I was so angry that when we passed that way later that night, I spouted off to the guy standing there.  He was the guy that had entertained me outside.  I figured he had been used in the distraction.  'Thanks a lot for ripping us off,' I spat at him.  He seemed deeply hurt, saying he was just a shopkeeper, he wasn't even the money changer.  The money changer wasn't around.  I walked away from him feeling confused.  Had he been part of the scam, or had he been genuinely nice to me?  As much as I loved Bali, I hated that aspect of it.  You didn't know who to trust.

The construction continued through the next few nights.  I stuck my earplugs in and learned to sleep with this background noise.  Like the hawkers, some things you just need to tolerate in order to experience the bigger picture.

Singapore Surprise

I'll confess, I didn't know much about Singapore.  I know a few things since I've visited, namely that Singapore has to be one of the coolest city/states on the planet.  Before that kind of knowledge, Singapore was only known to me in terms of Micheal P. Fay's caning case back in the 90's.  This American twat was caught spraypainting walls in the pristine Asian city, and well, he got caned.  And rightly so, says I.  What kind of idiot tests the government of such a restrictive place, a place where you can't even chew gum?  Moreover, who would want to spraypaint in Singapore?  Go to Europe, where they consider spraypainting an artform.

Singapore was meant to be a stopover place; a night or two before catching a plane to Bali.  My expectations weren't only low, they were non-existent.  This worked vastly in my favour.

All I could think about on our journey to the Malaysian/Singapore border was food.  Since the advent of my Perhentian stomach bug, I hadn't eaten anything.  And I do mean anything.  I remember sitting in a Burger King at the central train station in Kuala Lumpur and turning my nose away from Chris' french fries.  I didn't despair though.  This was my opportunity to drop 10 lbs or so.  However, I was starving.  And I do mean really really hungry.  By the time we walked out of Woodlands station in Singapore, going through customs and all that, I was ready to devour any walking man or beast.  I grabbed Chris' arm, something I don't do a whole lot, and firmly declared, 'We're eating.'  Chris insisted on finding our hostel first.  With this I tightened my grip and with a determination I haven't used since walking away from a Jim Carrey movie, announced, 'We're bloody eating.'  Chris knew there would be blood if I didn't have my way.  Wisely he conceeded to my decision to patronage Mickey D's.  He was greatly rewarded.  We both were.  We scoffed down those Quarter Pounders like there was no tomorrow.

We headed into Little India.  There were a few hostels about.  Our first choice was full so we headed down the street to the next best thing.  We got a dorm room that was air conditioned and non-smelly.  That was all it had going for us.  They had placed us in the world's squeakiest bunk bed.  I mean really, you breathed and the bed squeaked.  I felt bad for the other dorm dwellers.  They must have thought we were constantly getting it on, when we all we were doing was getting comfy beneath the covers.

Disneyland Singapore

We had a few days to blow before dipping below the equator (Singapore is just a hair north of the line).  After the travesty of Malaysia (we had been sick from one ailment or another the entire time we spent there) we were limping along, just waiting to get to greener pastures.  Chris had mentioned a cable car.  Anything to catch some breeze.  Singapore was insanely hot.  The sun was almost directly overhead, and it was relentless.  It was the kind of heat where you dreamt of sticking your head into a freezer and leaving it there for an hour.  You'd kill someone to get out of the heat.  If the laws weren't so darn strict, more people would be doing drive-bys or other crazy kinds of s***.  Yeah, it was hot.

The Singapore tranport system was a pleasant surprise.  World class.  It didn't hurt that everything in Singpore is written in English.  The spoken language is Singlish, which is horribly pronouned English, but it's bearable.  Stuff can be accomplished in Singlish.  Takes lots of shouting and repetiton, but you get there in the end.  The written langauge was our saving grace.  Chris and I kicked ass when it came to tackling the mass transit system.  We grabbed the metro by its horns and rode it hard.  We rode it all the way to Harbour City where we boarded our Angry Birds cable car.

It must have been a slow day.  The cable cars were swinging by empty, the music and crazy laughter emanating from them, as we stood there on the 15th floor of some office building.  It was like some kind of nightmare; the glass door shutting close on our car, being stuck with some birds glaring down at us.  Can I just admit that I don't have a clue what Angry Birds actually are?  They're part of a game, right?  I just don't keep up on these things.  We were given masks, and like we were six and it was our birthday, we wore them, while swinging over the treetops.  Music played, and stuffed animals bore down on us with their angry eyebrows.  It's like they wanted us dead.  The good news was that the view was unbelievable.  We swung upward to a vantage point where we disembarked and walked through Angry Birds merchandise to get to the actual viewpoint.  It was good.  We caught some breeze.  The city of Singpore didn't look like much.  It wasn't anything like the skyline of Hong Kong.  However there was a lot of sea.  I got the sense that Singapore was a major Asian port.

The air was stiffling, even at the top of the world.  We boarded another cable car, heading back from where we came, and swinging even further, as we had purchased an all-day pass.  We rose higher and higher, the birds laughing even more crazily, as we approached Sentosa Island.

See, this is what I'm talking about in saying i didn't know a thing about Singpore.  This certainly wasn't the canning experience I had read about.  Singapore was nothing less than a theme-park.  The whole fricken city.  You didn't even need to pass through a ticket booth to enter the park.  From the air you could see that the city was something a bit above the regular up-and-coming city of the century.  Dubbed 'The Garden City', Singapore is a step beyond anything I've ever seen.  The love child of Vegas and Disneyland, but sanitized to kindergarten standards (cutesy poems on billboards abound), this was the city of dazzlement.  And there was nothing cheezy about it.  Well, there was some cheese, I guess starting with the Angry Birds.  Alighting on Sentosa Island, we found fountains and gardens and monuments to wow the senses.  All we really cared about was aquiring some water, to be honest, but the sparkle of the place wasn't lost on us.  I was impressed.  For a city that I didn't expect much from (maybe some flush toilets and air conditioning) I was dazzled.  Even back on the main island, the buildings were reminescent of Hollywood.  We turned a corner off of the metro, and there we were at the Oscars.  A building, like something out of Gotham City, rose infront of us, golden statues dominating the avenue from 20 stories up.  I imagined celebrities and a red carpet.  How the hell had we desceneded on this brand of themepark-acity?

That British Influence

Chris was adament about seeing Raffles Hotel, just a few blocks from the City Hall stop on the metro.  Now Thomas Stamford Raffles was the British chap that founded Singapore in the late 1800's.  He built a hotel and named it Raffles. We were thinking about kicking back there for awhile, sipping on Singapore Slings in the garden.  However, wearing our usual backpacking garb, we weren't sure we'd be allowed to roam the premises or if we'd get chased off with garden rakes.  The whole hotel complex was dressed in a pristine white.  Very few people were about.  For sure there was a garden area where a few foreigners were sipping drinks, but Chris and I quickly passed on by after we had caught a glimpse of the prices.  We pretty much had the place to ourselves, to take pictures and crane our necks at the elegant balconies.  It very much reminded me of Ricky's Cafe in Casablanca, where we had spent £60 on drinks not too long ago.  It's the kind of place where you just want to sit down and listen to a man play a piano.  You could feel refined and dignified by just being there.  We hadn't gotten chased off with garden rakes, and for that I was thankful.

We perused a bookshop just across the road from the Raffles Hotel.  It was a treasure trove for both of us.  There were all types of books from my childhood, books I hadn't seen in absolute ages.  There were Archie comic books, Little Golden Book Classics, even Scholastic books.  What these were doing in a bookshop in Singapore I didn't know, but Chris and I spent a good hour there.  I walked away with several comic books, glowing with a nostalgia I haven't felt in years.

An Ethnic Mix

Our hostel was situated in Little India, a colourful section of the city with charming wooden buildings.  Lining the streets are shops with apartments perched above, sometimes three or four stories high.  The buildings are adorned with balconies and brightly painted shuttered doors.  Our hotel fit right.  Chris and I sat out on our balcony, listening to the traffic below.  A rat scurried past us in the dark, darting behind a potted plant.  Indeed, it felt as if we were in India.

On our second day in Singapore we visited temples, one Hindu, one Buddhist.  Walking through Little India (which is actually a sizeable neighbourhood) we came to the temple I had picked out from the others-the Temple of Kali.  There's too much to Hinduism to get my head around.  I'd really have to sit down and study the concepts, for that's what Hinduism is, mainly a philosophy.  To say that there are millions of gods and goddesses isn't exactly true.  Hindus believe in one god.  The countless dieties are merely manifestations of that god.  Still, in looking at Kali, I'm not sure what manifestation she's supposed to represent, with her human skull necklace and her vampire teeth.  She's a bloodthirsty demon.  Walking around the temple we saw several statues of her.  In each statue, she was severing someone with a spear, her tongue out and streams of blood shooting from her mouth.  How anyone could find peace in such a place is a mystery to me, but there were a few worshipers about.  A priest was handing out rice balls.  Incense and offerings were given.  Signs were posted not to pour milk over the statues.  This is all probably deep stuff.  Or maybe not.  I'd always like to think that religion is deeper than its traditions.  Hinduism is very ancient stuff, humans' ways of understanding the world.  Still, with the likes of Kali, I'm not sure I'd subscribe to such bizarreness.

We had to hop on the metro to get to Chinatown.  Having been to countless Chinatowns throughout Asia, we were pleased to find something quite different.  Instead of labyrinths of stalls and spitting women, Singapore's Chinatown was very clean and orderly.  The buildings were similiar in manner to those in Little India, with the balconies and shuttered doors.  Chinese characters were used as decoration along with strings of red lanterns.  It was all picturesque.  The only downfall was the rain, which had started as soon as we stepped out of the station.

The main temple in Chinatown is the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple.  With a name like that you'd expect a tooth on display.  For some reason I envisioned an elephant tusk gleaming in some golden light.  It turns out that the Buddha tooth only makes occassional appearances at the temple.  The tooth was not there when we visited.  This did not dampen our spirits.  The temple was like none other than I've ever seen.  In all the Buddhist temples we've walked into, there was little going on other than mats and golden statues and a few monks walking around.  I had trouble connecting to that kind of thing.  This temple was Chinese, and for this it differed from the temples we had visited in Thailand.  Thousands of tiny golden Buddhas adorned the wall, like some 3D type of wallpaper.  The alter area wasn't cluttered in the Thai fashion of statues.  There was only one Buddha, and he was smiling in his gold and peaceful way.  The outside of the temple was dark wood with layers upon layers roofs.  I don't know why this all impressed me the way it did, but I connected with this brand of Buddhism the way I had hoped.  Chris may connect with Thai Buddhism, but for me it's Chinese.  It's orderly and dark and somehow more meaningful.  It didn't hurt that there was some kind of service was going on.  Monks, at least half a dozen of them, were chanting into microphones infront of the alter.  Rows of women were sat behind them, chanting in a rapid pace, following Chinese characters from books.  The room was filled with sound.  It was theatrical.  It felt like something important was going on.  Why this strikes something in me, where nothing else has in my travels, I don't know.  I've always related to Taoism, even back in the day I was a raging Christian.  Perhaps this was the closest thing I experienced in the Taoist realm.  I actually had tears in my eyes.  Chris didn't feel a thing.  Funny what we each individually connect to.

After our temple visits we stopped for some food.  Prices were high in Chinatown.  The rain was really pouring down so we took shelter in a corner cafe where we hoped the prices were reasonable.  They weren't, but the food was amazing.  I had crab wontons.  One of the best dishes on this trip so far.

Good Night, Sleep Tight,...

We had asked to change rooms.  Two nights of the squeaky bunk bed had deprived us both of sleep.  We were moved to the dorm the next room down.  Chris and I felt we had hit the jackpot.  Even though there were 20 beds available, we had the room to ourselves.  Hitting the light at 11:00, we doubted anyone would be checking in later than that.  We tucked ourselves in, fully expected a good night's sleep.

I was somewhat aware that little creepy crawlies were dropping down on my face.  I wasn't sure if I was awake for this, or if I was feeling it in my sleep.  In any case, around 1:00 in the morning the light came flipping on.  The room was suddenly full of bodies.  They had all come in at once.  I flipped over on my pillow, realizing that my sleep had been short lived.  With the light now on, I noticed for the first time that there were several bugs on my pillow.  Without thinking I flipped a few of them off.  There was a fat one resting there, apparantly comfortable.  I looked at it for a short while before I realized what I was looking at.  I had been itchy in Singapore, it's true.  I had attributed any bites to the fleas that jumped around the walls.  It never occured to me that we were dealing with bedbugs.  But the fat bugger I was looking at on my pillow had bedbug written all over it.  I freaked out.

Seen as how we were all wide awake, I raised my head up Chris' level in the bunk above me.  'Look at this,' I said, thrusting my pillow near his face.  'I think that's a bedbug.'  'So?' was Chris' response.  'What do you want me to do about it?'  What he did do, without my suggestion, was flick it.  It exploded in a smear of blood on the pillowcase.  Oh, just lovely.  How on earth was I supposed to sleep now?  The beds were now full of Filipino workers.  The lights soon went out, but my eyes were wide open.  The bugs continued to drop down on my face.  How could I just lay here and be dinner for all this nasty creatures?  It was one of the hardest nights of my life.  I was pissed at Chris.  He wasn't bothered at all.  Every time he changed position above me, more bugs dropped down.  I could feel my skin crawling with them.  I still feel my skin crawling with them.

The bites didn't appear immediately.  Over the next few days they surfaced on my skin.  All in all I had over a hundered bites.  Easily.  My skin was all bites, all except areas that had been tightely covered (such as my groin, thankfully).  They had gotten my face, they had gotten my ears, they had even gotten my knuckles.  My body was one huge itch by the time we landed in Bali.  After a string of ailments, it only seemed proper.

Chris and I loved Singapore.  It came as a complete surprise.  The bedbugs were a hiccup, but it wasn't Singapore's fault.  Singapore is the cleanest city I've ever been in.  Recycling bins are ubiqutious and manners are encouraged in positive messages around the metro area.  We would be back in a month's time.  Pushing on below the equator, we were about to discover a completely different kind of place.