We left Melaka to head down to Johor Bahru. It’s the border town with Singapore and it’s easy, but slow, to get across to Sing for a day trip. Sing is very expensive for hotels so to extend our visit to Sing we stayed in JB for two nights.

We had read about JB and we were not too surprised to see what a dreadful place it actually is……“a border town of extensive urban decay” would be a polite description. Take a look at the pics to see the area around our hotel. Finding any info about places to stay in JB wasn’t easy so when our cabby found it difficult to find our hotel we knew we were in for an “interesting” experience. Finally he found it. The area was very run down but the hotel reception was welcoming and the room clean but small. It wasn’t expensive, RM 60, and you could rent the room for 2 hours for RM30!!

Anyway, we used the hotel exactly as we had planned, as an overnight to have an extra day in Sing. It worked and the food we had at a nearby street stall was really good…..so not all of JB is that bad!!

Our day in Sing was to look for Netbook, a tiny computer mainly used for internet work and minor spreadsheets and documents. We have had so many problems with internet cafes, bugs on the camera sticks and memory sticks for our trip that we decided to buy one of our own and save all the hassle not to mention the noise in some of the cafes created by kids playing each other on “shoot ‘em up games”. Another advantage of the netbook, apart from portability, is that we can now use it for Skype and see as well as talk to people for free anywhere in the world……OK, so we’re late in getting there but we’ve made it…..we’re up to date with this new fangled techie stuff!

Next stop Sing!