Day 51: Singapore to Setia Eco Gardens

Getting out of Singapore is hard!

We planned to be off and out early - and we did kind of make it. We were aiming to find a café on the way and stop for brekky. 

Initially everything was going well. Beautiful clear roads, no Sunday morning traffic and just a sprinkling of dog walkers and joggers. 

Then, somehow, we ended up a little off track on a mountain bike track.  

Mountain bikers looking at home.

The tandem doesn’t cope too well with mountain bike tracks. We tend to ground out on bumps we’re so long, and staying on a narrow track is tricky.  

We got there in the end though, riding up the expressway for the last few kilometres- it was just easier that way.  

That got us close  to the border with Malaysia, but still no sign of a café. Do Singaporeans not drink coffee!

Luckily we came across a slightly strange Chinese and Indian fast food place before we hit border control and they did some lovely iced coffee, banana pratas and little vada like doughnuts. That did the job.  

Just as we were about to head off we realised Tiger had a puncture. Bummer. Some thorns from the mountain bike park. All fixed and we were off.  

The Singapore border was fine (except Tiger had lost the bit of paper in his passport. Oops. They let him out though.) The Malaysian boreder was a very different matter. 

We waited in a queue of motor bikes for over an hour, through baking sun and one rain shower before finally getting cleared to enter the country.  

Finally we were going, although it was now well into the afternoon and we were needing lunch. However we didn’t have any Malaysian Ringots.

No problem- they’ll take cards. They didn’t. 

No proble, there’ll be an ATM. There wasn’t, for miles. How do these people get by without banks? 

Eventually we found a huge mall, and after a minor misunderstanding about where we should be parking we found n ATM and nice restaurant to fuel us the rest of the way.  

By this time we were never going to make it to Pontain as planned, so we stopped  at a little hotel in a weird “Eco” town. We never got to the bottom of its Eco credentials but it had a clean room and we ate good food. Job done.