As I came off the stunning East-West highway, having munched through Tom-boy Nor's mangoes, grinned like a Cheshire Cat at the simple fun to be had on the mountain roads and stopped by a bunch of Malaysian bikers on some very expensive machinery made by Ducati (they just wanted a chat), I descended into Kota Bahru where my instruction from Tom-boy Nor was to head for a school building and phone a guy called Chik Gu Mat who will come to find me.   Apparently his house is so remote it doesn’t have any phone signal (again) and the tracks don’t exist on Google maps or any Sat-nav mapping!  Sounds interesting …
Riding a big Adventure bike around Malaysia you get used to people randomly waving at you, talking to you and trying to help you by suggesting places to stay, eat, visit, photograph and so on.  It’s usually other bikers but that’s by no means a rule.  Route, time and distance questions, random advice and selfie requests can emanate from a wide variety of sources; truck drivers to kids on scooters to petrol pump attendants.  I pulled up to a stop light in a one-horse town devoid of merit or interest and a young guy in a car next to me in the queue for the lights became wildly excited.  Not hugely unusual but he was overdoing it a bit and gesticulating at his phone a lot.  I assumed he wanted a selfie so I suggested he just took a photo from where he was sitting.  “No, no Mr, I have you photo here” was the answer.  I probably looked a bit quizzical but I just put it down to his pigeon Minglish losing something in translation and assumed he wanted me to stop for a photo somewhere.  I duly followed him into a layby and the guy jumped out and ran over to show me a photo of me, taken by Tom-boy Nor two days and 600km ago.  It seems that I’m going viral around Malaysia and ‘Roop-spotting’ has become a national Facebook pastime, it’s like a nationwide game of Where’s Wally!
… Anyway, I digress, so I descended into Kota Bahru, looking for a school building landmark to stop and phone Chik Gu Mat when another random guy starts gesticulating at me from the other side of the road; another Roop-spotting perhaps?  The scooter rider ignores the traffic signals, races the wrong way across the carriageway and beckons me to follow him.  On enquiring as to why and what purpose it turns out this guy is the guy I’m looking for; Chik Gu Mat who has been scooting around for the last hour looking for me!  Amazing.  Chik Gu Mat escorts me to his parents’ house where another open-house buffet feast for Hari Raya is in full swing.  I am thoroughly fed, watered, maternally pampered, selfie-ed, family portrait-ed and quizzically interrogated about my crazy trip.  Malaysian hospitality continues all afternoon and evening with Chik Gu Mat and his wife who take me home and feed me some more, just in case I haven’t been stuffed enough at lunchtime.  The next morning, after much breakfasting, thanking and some more selfie-ing I head south to Singapore to visit my friend Sam, her boyfriend Paul and their new 5-month old baby Indie.  My main concern is the stories I’ve heard and web pages I’ve read about the nightmare of getting a foreign registered bike into Singapore.  Apparently it’s like trying to thread a needle wearing boxing gloves.
In terms of distance, the longest day for me in the last seven months was getting from Kota Bahru on the north east coast of Malaysia to Sentosa Island on the southern tip of Singapore.  Even the most direct route is over 700km and of course I rarely take the most direct route; that’s boring, you miss all the interesting bits.  So 770km (that’s nearly 500 miles) after leaving Chik Gu Mat’s family hospitality I arrived at the causeway border between southern Malaysia and northern Singapore.  The ride down had been mostly uneventful but thoroughly enjoyable; speeding effortlessly down almost empty coast roads with the South China Sea on my left and endless palm, coconut and rubber plantations on my right, blue sky above and perfect tarmac below, I am back in biking bliss.  It’s why I’m here, doing this trip my way on my bike.  It makes me smile even though 770km takes its toll on your bum cheeks!
The Woodlands causeway between Malaysia and Singapore is by far the busiest overland border crossing I’ve experienced in the last 40,000km.  Several thousand people cross by car and motorbike every day, commuting from the cheap accommodation in Malaysia to the higher wages in Singapore.  So the border crossing is very efficient, you don’t even need to get off the bike, you just pull up at a counter, a bit like the toll booths at the Dartford crossing and hand over your passport.  According to the online forums and travel advice you need a whole bunch of special documents from Singapore transport and insurance offices to get a foreign registered vehicle across the causeway; you have to leave your vehicle in Malaysia, get a bus across the causeway, spend hours (or days) traipsing around offices in Singapore getting permits.  Hmmm, I don't have the time or patience for that so I think I'll just chance my arm, turn up at the border, hope they don’t look too carefully at the number plate and see what happens … Keep the immigration officer talking about Brexit (probably the only good thing to come out of that idiotic vote is its usefulness as a diversion conversation).  Acting like I do this every day and it’s a typical formality and within minutes ... bingo, I’m riding my big British registered bike down the perfectly manicured boulevards of Singapore.  This was always my end goal, my final destination, to ride to the bottom of Asia.  It’s 35,000km from Mumbai if you take my scenic route, and a million miles from the Indian assault on the senses which I met 7 months ago.  I allow myself a bit of American-style fist-pumping celebration as I waft along past pristine floral displays (other countries would call them kerbs or ditches, but not here – they’re too immaculate).  I know other bikers have ridden for longer and further, but not many have ridden off the side of a mountain, or got stranded in a monsoon at the top of a mountain, or flipped their bike down a remote Indian road, rode across rivers, dropped it in rivers, smashed the front wheel a thousand clicks from anywhere, glued their screen mounts half a dozen times and found that the most useful tool to carry is indeed a Jeremy Clarkson hammer!
It turns out that whilst I can get the bike into Singapore, I’m not allowed to go onto Sam’s rather exclusive mariner island called Sentosa at the very south tip of Singapore.  I’m escorted off by an effusively polite policeman and have to leave the bike in a shopping centre multi-story and take a cab over to Sam’s idyllic little bit of flashy hedonism.  They live on a luxury boat, permanently moored in a private mariner with the usual accoutrements of pools, bars, coffee shops and BBQs.  This really is a million miles from where I’ve been since starting my tour of Asia in the sweating stink of Mumbai.  The world is a diverse place.  I’m more than happy to spend the next three days drinking Macchiatos and Margaritas, wandering around air conditioned shopping malls, lazing in the pool, cycling round the harbour and playing with 5-month old Indie – now there’s something I didn’t think I’d be saying … playing with a baby, that’s really not very “Rupert”, things have definitely changed since I left Surrey!

​Otres beach near Sihanoukville, on the southern coast of Cambodia is pretty close to an idyllic desert island resort – bamboo beach huts, quirky beach bars, white sand, sun and so on, but for the closest thing I’ve seen to the location and vibe of the film The Beach, you can’t get much better than Koh Ta Kiev.  It’s a mostly uninhabited island where there are a couple of hippy communes running beach bars with accommodation huts although there’s no electricity or running water and the cost of a drink is twice that on the mainland, but then you’re paying for the location.  The place is staffed by people who are mostly more interested in cannabis than customer service, but hey, what do you expect to find on a desert island?  It’s either going to be hippies listening to Bob Marley or the latest James Bond villain!  Possibly the most frustrating part of the excursion was being on a long tail boat with a few other tourists (no that’s not the annoying bit), we stopped to do some snorkelling and line fishing over the side of the boat.  Everyone else managed to catch a fish except me, my fish were far too clever and managed to eat the bait off my hook without getting hooked … very frustrating, but I consoled myself with the fact that I’m not depleting the local fish stocks unnecessarily!  Back on the mainland I met up with Critical Dave again who is mooching around Cambodia trying to work out how to get into Vietnam without an entry permit for his bike.  Dave had hooked up with two more motorbike overlanders; Norm and Maggie with Northern Irish accents but living in Hertfordshire!  Well, I say they’re living in Hertfordshire but they’ve been on the road for ages with no immediate plans to return and they’re still heading away from the UK.  I’m quite jealous, travelling together as a couple on two bikes gives you more impetus to just keep going and see where you get to.  Maybe, one day …
My front tyre is serious cause for concern now, it’s got almost no sign that there was ever any tread on it, and it’s starting to wear down the main body of the tyre, not long ‘til the steel belt starts showing, it’s a good thing I’m less than 700km from Bangkok, it’s a bad thing that the KTM service centre doesn’t have my tyre size in stock, and probably another three weeks until they get one.  With stress level rising again I ask them about other tyre dealers in the city.  There must be someone who’s got a 90/90-21 tyre, surely?  I could hug the helpful service manager at the KTM service centre in Bangkok, he sensed my stress and phoned round all the tyre dealers in Bangkok until he found a great little shop called ShowPow who had a whole selection from full-on knobbly off-roaders to street tyres.  I remind myself of the advice I gave a bunch of young KTM riders who I bumped into six months ago in the hills of Tamil Nadu in India … “always make sure you’ve got decent tyres; they’re the only thing holding you to the road”.  Time to adhere to my own advice and get some fresh rubber to keep me shiny side up.  You cannot imagine the feeling of relief when you take a totally shot tyre off and put a nice new grippy hoop on your front wheel.  The bike instantly felt more confident and better balanced, the handlebars stopped wobbling in corners and I no longer felt that I was going to slide into the ditch if I took a bend with a puddle.
The further through Thailand I travel the more secure I feel.  The stress of tyre failure has gone, as has the stress of bad / non-existent roads or flooded roads or roads without bridges or petrol stations or meeting death-wishing truck drivers.  After Bangkok I took a recommendation from Kasia to go to the Khao Sok national park on the way South through Thailand.  Great recommendation; riding up to the Khao Sok national park with lush green vegetation and near-perfect road surfaces is like being back in Western Europe, whether the UK are part of it or not.  Don’t get me started on that ridiculous debate, I’ll be here for hours!  In Khao Sok I left the bike at a friendly guesthouse and booked an overnight stay on a floating bungalow on the Cheow Lan lake.  The Cheow Lan lake is a manmade dammed reservoir stretching 165 square kilometres through the national park, filled with amazingly warm but ridiculously deep fresh water.  It looks for all the world like a Scottish loch, especially on the day I arrived which had black storm clouds brewing overhead, but Scottish lochs tend to be quite cold, whilst this lake is at bathwater temperature, even during the sudden Monsoon storm where the rain was so hard and heavy it bounced off the surface of the lake.  Over dinner on the floating restaurant, just down the gangplank from my floating bungalow I am struck by the irony that my crazy home nation has just voted to remove itself from Europe whilst I sit here with a selection of Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Belgian travellers whose only common Lingua Franca is English, and who all think that the British have gone mad.  I’m inclined to agree, I like being part of this little European community on a lake in Thailand.
Three hours south of Khao Sok the famous part of the Thai Southern peninsular starts; Phuket, Krabi, Phi Phi Islands and the like.  It really feels like I’m on holiday now, my only stress is figuring out how to book the bike on an air-freight out of Kuala Lumpur and whether I can get it in and out of Singapore in a few weeks’ time.  Whilst in Krabi I take another fantastic recommendation from Kasia, who’s stuck back in London, that is to do a SCUBA diving course.  The first and only time I’ve been diving in the past was not a good experience, I ran out of air in the Irish sea and was not fully briefed on the procedure!  So with some trepidation I signed up to do the Open Water PADI course having spent not an inconsiderable amount of time researching a decent dive school in Krabi.  The Kon-Tiki dive school, run by some British and Swedish guys is, thankfully, a super-professional, super-helpful and totally confidence-inspiring outfit.  All my previously found fears and misconceptions have been alleviated and I am now a fully-fledged convert to deep sea diving, and a certified Open Water Diver; how cool!  And how come I always manage to pick some of the most expensive and inaccessible of pursuits … skiing, diving, motorbike travelling … crazy fool!  Over the last couple of days I’ve seen the underwater world for real: Blue Sea Star and Crown of Thorns Starfish; Black Diamema Sea Urchins; various Sea Cucumbers; a Peacock Mantis Shrimp (which has the fastest, most powerful claw punch in the world), schools of Damsel fish and Yellowback Fusiliers; some Bannerfish; Trumpetfish; Tigertail Seahorses and an aggressively territorial little Tomato Clownfish!
Now I’m sitting in another idyllic beachside hostel bar looking at the Andaman sea on the island of Ko Lanta off the West coast of Thailand, it being low season I have the bar and most of the beach to myself and I’ve just met a crazy Thai guy who is supposed to be running this bar but has nothing to do due to the lack of tourists so he’s offered to take me on a guided bike tour of the island tomorrow.  He’s got an off-road scramble bike so this is going to be interesting … looks like I’m going to get at least one more crazy adventure on the bike before heading to the relative civilisation of Malaysia.