Electronic Hell

Trying to communicate with anyone further away than Doug has turned out to be impossible. My handphone doesn't seem to work in Singapore - although Doug figured out that we might be able to make calls (and we assume receive them) if we make it a long distance call - from Singapore to Malaysia to Singapore. For the length of stay and the number of calls we will make it doesn't seem worthwhile to get a S'pore SIM card. (We had assumed we would pay roaming charges, but how to get things going seems to be a mystery - we tried the hotel concierge and he was as befuddled as we were)

The hotel charges in both Singapore (where we are now) and Kuching (our previous stop) for Internet seem high. Our Sincapore hotel charges S$.85 per minute (at roughly 1.46 US $ per Singapore dollar). We are now in Starbucks - no problem here but the NCSU server that hosts my e-mailo seems to be down. Tomorrow we are back in KL. The handphone will be back in business and accessing e-mail will be easier.

Here is a brief summary of what we have been up to. We arrived in Singapore o Saturday and have visited with friends that we have known for over 35 years. We went on the Singapore Night Safari last night - the crowds were unbelievable. Doug commented that it was the first time he saw poor crowd control in Singapore - a lot of pushing and shoving. We did the major things (show & tram ride. We decided to save walking along trails until another time.

We spent a week in Sarawak. Three days at the Mulu Caves. We spent Christmas in Kuching with friends who first encouraged us to come to Borneo - a valued friendship enriched by all the pleasures of East Malaysia.

Prior to going to Sarawak we had an unexpected dinner in KL celebrating the 20th anniversary of a communications academy topped off by visit to an impressive foundation building that had just opened and a search for a local dish that I hadn't tried.

Over the next few days I will fill in the details and catch up with prose and pictures.