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Well, we're really in SE Asia now. We're sitting on a balcony looking out onto a foreground of red-brown tiled rooftops with a background hillside of dense, green vegetation. There are coconut trees in the courtyard just beneath the balcony and a small Hindu shrine next to a breeze block style wall. Brown-horned cows are scavenging around in the field to the right of us ... and the rain is coming down! We're in Lombok, one of the eastern chain of Indonesian islands, having flown in last night from Singapore. As ever with such arrivals once we were through customs (how many people does it take to issue a visa?) we were winging our way through unlit streets in a taxi dodging horse-drawn carts and scooters. Thankfully the driver had less of a death wish than some we've known so we arrived at the Cafe Wayan guesthouse feeling reasonably relaxed.
Today we've run the gauntlet of hawkers and touts (who were all friendly and not too persistent) and started to sort out what we're going to do with our 30-day Indonesian visa. It looks as if we'll have another three days to discover a little more of Lombok before taking a four-day boat excursion to see the Komodo dragons (the giant monitor lizards that only live in this part of Indonesia). In an attempt to remember that we should be on a budget we've opted to spend our three nights camping out on the deck of the boat.
Our 24 hours in Singapore en route here was plain sailing, although it did get a little frenetic towards the end as we scurried to purchase the 'netbook' that we're currently typing on. The shops in Singapore don't open until 11am, so despite an early start we were twiddling our thumbs for a couple of hours. Then we only had one hour to hunt around a six-storey IT shopping centre trying to locate the best deal for the machine we'd decided to purchase. With quite a bit of sweating in the 30 degrees+ heat we are now the owners of a candyfloss pink and white MSI notebook! (Our colour choice was limited to what was in stock!)
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