34 - 12.02.2010, Singapore

It is not a particularly impressive or large bridge, but crossing the Causeway connecting Malaysia and Singapore is nevertheless a very special moment for us. 397 days, 24.018,36 kilometres and 137.388 metres of altitude after leaving our home in the middle of the cold winter last year we have reached our final destination Singapore. It is a strange feeling to have aimed for this destination for more than a year without ever using another means of transport than the bicycle, but now it is clear: from here there is no going further south without the help of fins or wings. We receive a warm welcome from Amy and Mike who are so kind as to take us in on this last stop of our journey while offering a wonderful introduction into life in Singapore. In closing more than a year’s worth of travel experience we encourage everyone who carries a dream similar to ours within to live it - it is the first step that is the hardest, the rest is easy!

The Malaysian side of the border feels a bit like an obstacle course in a fun park. There is a separate lane for motorcycles and a small alley winds through the modern checkpoint. No need to get off the bike for passport control before after some more twists and turns we emerge at the edge of the sea. And there it is: for the first time we can see the island of Singapore connected to the mainland by the Causeway bridge.

As we cycle over it we realize that we had never really pictured what the actual arrival in Singapore would be like. And now this is it: WE HAVE MADE IT! We ARE in Singapore. It is an emotional moment to have aimed for this goal for 13 months and then to reach it. Precisely 13 months to the day have passed from our start on 03.01.2009 and exactly one year after entering Asia in Istanbul on 03.02.2009 we are at land’s end. We have travelled 24.018,36 kilometres from Klosterneuburg through 21 countries on our bicycles but from here on we would have to grow wings or fins to proceed. To get here we spent 1.469 hours 44 minutes and 10 seconds pedalling on our bikes, making the wheels turn 11.747.774 times and covering 137.388 metres of altitude, which meant we climbed to the top of Mount Everest fifteen and a half times from sea level!

As with climbing a mountain such as Mount Everest, the single most important element for the successful completion of our bike journey, apart from choosing reliable material and the stamina to pull it through, was to have a good ‘basecamp’. Our family and friends back home were indispensable when came to getting a hand from a known environment, sending those vital spare parts or delivering the moral support that kept us going. We are extremely thankful to our families based in Innsbruck and Klosterneuburg who were always quick to react when it was urgently necessary, such as when Kathi was admitted to Murghab hospital, when ethnic turmoil made the situation in Xingjiang unclear for us or when a spare passport needed urgently to be mailed to Bangkok. Even with the best planning it was impossible to think of everything and it lies in the nature of such a long journey that circumstances change. Without the strong support from our homebase it would have certainly been more difficult to solve some of these issues.

For us it is special to know that we have covered every single metre of the distance on the bike. It is that tiny fraction of the total distance that at some stage all other cyclists whom we have met on the journey covered with other means because the going seemed to be too difficult that makes the difference to us. Whether it is knee-deep water in the tunnel, the road disappearing in a river, sea of mud or lake, the highway tunnel that is absolutely forbidden for cyclists, the sudden appearance of a sandstorm or just the monotony of the road, we have dealt with every one of these unpleasant situations and never once loaded our bikes onto a bus or truck. Call it stubborn, we call it consistent.

How to capture THE moment of arrival? We decide not to do so and to keep it to ourselves only, imprinted in our memory. There are plenty of other symbolic pictures we take later on proving the feat.

The next thing we do is to find some photogenic place with a sign reading ‘Singapore’, the ‘Singapore Turf Club’ in the northern Woodland area of the island is just the right location for this. Later, we proceed towards the centre and as we enter Orchard Road we are in for some change of scenery! One extravagant shopping mall after the other lines this road - there could be no more visible sign of the materialism that Singapore stands for. Everyone had said so and now we see it with our own eyes: this city is all about shopping, shopping, shopping! For weeks we have been preparing for the culture-shock that we were expecting to hit us upon our return to the Western world in Austria. Nevertheless, we are not ready for the shock of the contrast between the futuristic and utopian city of Singapore and some of the countries we have travelled through, not even developed Malaysia comes close to this. Buildings defeating the laws physics, people wearing clothes as if straight from the catwalk, prices that dwarf New York’s Fifth Avenue and two sweaty cyclists lost amidst this seemingly perfect artificial world called Singapore.

A warm welcome is extended to us by Amy, Mikr and their two children Chloe and Dylan. The American couple has been living in Singapore for fifteen years and they open their house for us to stay during this last stop on our journey, offering a wonderful introduction into life in Singapore. A glass of bubbly and a piece of cake at the birthday party of a neighbour’s son, later a great home-cooked meal from Amy with a good wine to accompany it - we could not have been integrated into the local neighbourhood any quicker. A tiny bicycle model made from scrap metal awaits us on our bedside cabinet reminding us just how we got here.

In the following days we catch different glimpses of life in Singapore as we are integrated into family life just as if we had always been here, whether it is the burger birthday dinner of a working colleague or the Sunday outing to the entertainment parks of Sentosa Island. In Chinatown Mike takes us to their favourite Chinese restaurant where we encounter our good old friends from Xingjiang, hand-made ‘la mien’ noodles. We are invited to a dinner at Roopa’s house who cooks the best chicken marsala ever together with plenty of other Indian delicacies from her home country. We are invited to give a presentation to children at the school where Mike and Amy teach, the Singapore American School. It is when we see the large eyes of the children looking at some of our pictures that once more we realise that we have really been to some very unusual places in the course of our journey.

The area we are staying at is close to Singapore’s green central heart. Across the road is MacRitchie reservoir and a large forest surrounding it. A long hike takes us into the middle of the forest, making the busy city seem far away. There is a a beautiful boardwalk with a treetop bridge bringing us close to the jungle canopy. On the other side of the road is a large Chinese cemetery where many of the graves have been claimed back by the jungle. It is a place full of mysterious nooks and corners and does not feel like in the middle of a crowded island.

In the days in Singapore we get a fair amount of sightseeing done and we are always surprised how the city has so many distinctly different quarters set right next to each other. The Muslim quarter of Kampong Glam with the golden Sultan Mosque, Little India and Chinatown all remind us of the city centres of Georgetown and Melaka in Malaysia. The Esplanade and Marina Bay areas are full of futuristic-looking modern buildings. The new Marina Bay Sands Casino is still under construction but is due to open in a few weeks and the architect of the three unusual-looking towers connected by an immense garden platform on the top floor outdid himself with creating a unique landmark. Singapore’s Central Business District is the perfect night-time skyline backdrop for a picture of the city’s mascot, the Merlion in front of the Fullerton Hotel. The Singapore zoo is famous for its large areas of free-ranging animals, most notably the orang utans. Equally impressive is the incredible diversity in the Orchid Gardens, which are embedded in the wonderfully calm island that the Botanical Gardens form in the city.

It is probably one of the most famous hotels in the world, no visit to Singapore would be complete without sipping a Singapore Sling at the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel. We are utterly disappointed that the place has lost all of the style it once must have had, when we see fellow tourists walk into the bar in shorts and flip-flops. We had been lugging closed shoes, long trousers and a decent shirt around the city for the whole day but it seems the dress-code has fallen. The overpriced cocktails unfortunately also fail to impress, tasting more like a watered-down fruit juice, but we still take the picture.

We enjoyed meeting different friends of ours while here which gave us other angles to see life in Singapore from. Jutta, Sandro’s former German/French/Swedish working colleague from his time with Reuters, has been living here for five years already, Kathi’s Danish colleague Maja from the Euro 2008 has been here for one year. The Austrian Markus is in Singapore on an exchange from university. Sim and Maki are our friends and owners of ‘Sim’s Cozy Garden Hostel’ in Chengdu where we stayed more than five months ago. They are in the city on an extended Chinese New Year holiday. Each one of them has a different story to tell and gives us new insights into Singapore.

Singapore is, after all, not your normal city. In an attempt to create the perfect place the city fathers have gone very far, too far in some areas, we would say. Just as there is no light without darkness, something is strange if there is virtually no crime and homeless people are allegedly “offered a free place to stay” which is equal to being institutionalised. There are signs just about everywhere indicating all the things that are forbidden on the one hand and all the things that one has to do on the other hand. We particularly liked the one set up everywhere in the forest warning of the potential danger of branches breaking from trees and hitting pedestrians. You might as well put up signs telling you not to forget breathing.

Everyone seems happy but we are told that the means to achieve this lie somewhere between George Orwell’s ‘1984′ and ‘Animal Farm’ - just a bit more subtle. The most visible display that the government has chosen ‘management by fear’ as its way to control citizens is a video shown on the subway warning about the threat of terror attacks. A detailed video shows a ‘bad guy’ trying to place a bomb onto a train. In the first version of the video he succeeds, the train blowing up is shown and then footage of previous terror attacks on trains in Madrid, London and other cities is presented, special emphasis put on the bloody victims of the attacks. In the second version of the video attentive passengers notice the ’suspicious looking’ terrorist and everyone is saved. In regular intervals of a few minutes loudspeakers advise passengers to report ‘any suspicious person’ - whatever that is. The same principle of creating fear is applied when Singaporeans are told that other countries are dangerous, most notably Malaysia and Indonesia.

It takes us the best part of a day to wash and clean every piece of our equipment but the tropical sun and the beautiful garden help to get the job done quicker. As we go through all the things that we have used countless times during the trip we do not only jump back in our memories but also look forward to being back home again. As exciting as it is to discover and experience all the new things we have seen, it will also feel nice to be in a familiar environment again. Simple, everyday things from back home will suddenly be a luxury to us - how comfortable will it be not having to hand-wash our laundry. We will not have to drink water that we had previously filtered and that has heated up to 40ºC in our plastic drinking bottles but can simply turn on the tap and enjoy fresh, cold mountain water. As adventurous as it is to live a nomad’s life with all of its change it will be great to know where we will be sleeping in the evening without having to look for an adequate tent spot or a decent, clean hotel without cockroaches. It is thrilling to enjoy an endless variety of the foods that different regions offer, but there are also disappointments in not knowing what you get, while at home we can eat exactly what we want and when we want it. Haggling is fun, but if you have to do it for nearly every item you buy for more than a year it is great to return to fixed price territory, even if it has its price, quite literally, since everything will be much more expensive back home than in all countries, with the exception of Singapore maybe. But is the grass not always greener on the other side?

As we get ready to go back home it seems incredible that it can take 397 days to get here and then only 19 hours to fly back the same distance. A very long summer will also come to an end for us, it started with heat in Iran’s Teheran in April of last year, was shortly interrupted by snowstorms in Tajikistan’s Pamir and since then has never failed to keep us sweating.

We have incredible encounters and experiences to look back upon, have learned so much that no textbook will ever convey about the people and their different ways of life of the areas we have crossed and have seen more beautiful sights and landscapes than we could possibly imagine. We have certainly achieved the main goal of our journey - to get in touch with the people of the countries we were travelling through. It is funny how it seems wherever in the world you are, locals will always describe people in the next city, nearest region or the neighbouring country as ‘dangerous’. Not once on our journey have we been the victims of a crime and despite all warnings we were received in a friendly way nearly everywhere. Prejudice and the fear of the unknown so often lie at the bottom of these false warnings and it is refreshing to see that people everywhere are good in their heart and a smile will often pave the way to a new friendship. Thus, in closing more than a year’s worth of travel experience we encourage everyone who carries a dream similar to ours within to live it - it is the first step that is the hardest, the rest is easy!

„All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” (T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom)

For photos of this final part of our journey see the Singapore gallery.