singapore

Offices dominate the last old shop houses, now restaurants and bars for (financial) traders.

My last Asian stop.
And how different from Thailand. This is the Asian success story par excellence. If you like that sort of thing.

The bookshops are full of books about self imporvement and how to maximise your investments. there are whole universities devoted to business and MBAs.

Thailand is quietly successful in a funny sort of way - and without its peole losing their grounded sense of fun. Singapore, by contrast, is aggressively successful.

All managed by a government that has turned control freakery into an art form. Everyone has good housing; the streets are clean and tidy; the public transport is superb; and everyone is bored.

So, they have built an arts centre and a theme park and a zoo and an aquarium. But the people I spoke to have been once and then what?The fact is that no city state of 3 million people, with this little land, can really provide fulfillment in the wider sense to its people: this is why there is such an emphasis on material success, in my view.

I met up with Mo, who was with us at New Year in Bangkok and Bali, and he understands all this and gets on with life, liek everyone else I met, but with an underlying nagging feeling that there is more to life than this.

To be fair, it is a bit more buzzy than when I was here about 12 years ago, but only a bit. It does have a lot going for it - some of the things mentioned above. But I wouldn't want to live here.

From Sentosa, the 'pleasure island' just offshore, you can see a vast panorama of tower blocks and container port cranes. Finance and shipping are the backbones of the economy and as long as they thrive, Simgapore will thrive.

In the other direction across the strait you can see a vast array of smokestacks and huge factories on the near islands in Indonesia. All the 'dirty' industry controlled by Singapore and all moved offshore to the more lax regulatory climate of their neighbours.

Singapore is clean, tidy, sterile. They are thinking of removing the ban on chewing gum...

On the plus side, the journey to the airport is beautiful, tree and flower lined the whole way; not like the usual approach of catering factories and air freight sheds. The route to the promised land perhaps.