March 10th – Back on my feet again in Hong Kong

A day of recovery in bed meant that my first day in Hong Kong was a bit of a write off; but by the second day I felt sufficiently chipper to go to meet our lovely friends Tim and Jill, who live in Hong Kong. They first took me to the lively Wan Chai market, where we saw all sorts of exotic herbs, vegetables, dried remedies etc – Jill getting the stallholders to explain what was what. Having walked through the ultra-westernised Harbourfront Shopping Mall to get off the ship to the Star Ferry Terminal, visiting this market was a good reminder of the firm Chinese roots of Hong Kong, and a reminder that traditional Chinese ways of life continue in this most modern of cities.

After this, we went for lunch to a place that's a throwback to Colonial times – the stately Hong Kong Country Club. Although it's just a 15 minute drive from the claustrophobic streets and forest of skyscrapers of Central Hong Kong, here there was plenty of space and a laid back atmosphere to enjoy, where Hong Kong's great and good come to play tennis, swim, or just enjoy the Club's restaurants away from the masses.

We had a lovely lunch, catching up, gossiping and discussing the future of Hong Kong and China. Tim explained how, as a lawyer, thoughts are already turning to what's going to happen when the 50 year period of grace agreed between the British and Chinese at the handover in 1997 expires. Under the agreement, the Chinese guaranteed that Hong Kong's laws etc would remain the same for 50 years after the British left. In the 1980s, while Mrs Thatcher and Deng Xioaping were thrashing out the agreement, 2047 felt like a long way off, but there was no agreement on what would happen after those 50 years were up. The question is, in 2047, will Hong Kong revert to Chinese laws, or will there be an extension of the status quo? Things like that matter when you're agreeing a 30 year lease on a building, or getting a 30 year mortgage. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Anyway, the day passed all too quickly, and soon it was time to get back to the ship, as I had to go up to the bridge to give a narration as we sailed out of Hong Kong's dazzling harbour.

March 8th – Code Alpha on the Way to Hong Kong

As we sailed to Hong Kong, I'd been feeling a little peculiar all day. My head had been banging all day, so I drank loads of water in an attempt to clear it. It turns out that this combined with an upset stomach was not a good idea.

That evening in the restaurant, I really began to feel strange, so rather than risk being sick at the table I got up to go back to our cabin. That's about the last thing I remember – when I came to, I was on the floor surrounded by the Captain, the Cruise Director, the Hotel Director, various other officers, countless waiting staff, the doctor, a stretcher team and a very worried Tracy. It appears that I had blacked out and a "Code Alpha" medical emergency signal had been broadcast around the ship.

I don't know which was worse – feeling like death warmed up, or the mortal embarrassment of passing out in front of pretty much the entire ship. Anyway, I came to fairly quickly, and was wheeled out of the restaurant in a wheel chair, feeling like a right idiot.

March 6th – Cooking Class in HCMC

Today we had organised a cooking class at a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City. We met our teacher and our fellow students at the Ben Tanh Market, where we had a fascinating trip around the food stalls and were shown all the unfamiliar vegetables and herbs that are a staple of the Vietnamese diet.

Our time in the fish section was particularly memorable – our guide was talking away to us, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a little lady wielding a very big mallet. In her other hand she had a large fish which she'd just picked out of a tank on the ground. She laid the live fish on a chopping block and then proceeded to smash 7 bells out the wriggling fish's head with all her might. The violence of the assault on the head was only made more remarkable by the nonchalance with which she did it.

If that was stomach churning enough, the gross-out stakes were then turned up a notch at the fish stall. A lady was sitting on the ground with a plastic bag of wriggling fish and a pair of scissors. Before your eyes, she blithely snipped the heads off the live frogs, then cut the feet off the jerking frogs legs, before her piece de resistance – getting a pair of pliers and ripping the skin off what was left of the still moving frog carcass. At this point, one of the women on our tour almost passed out and ended up leaving the class.

Fortunately, we were told by our teacher that frogs legs weren't on today's menu, so we went off to the restaurant where we made a succession of delicious dishes – the best thing was that we then got to eat them straight after. We started with the fresh tastes of a mustard leaf roll, filled with crunchy vegetables and topped with a butterflied prawn - the sweet and sour chilli sauce we made for it was fantastic.

Then we made deep fried crispy noodles (my attempt at rolling up the noodles in the deep fryer didn't go so well), and wok-fried crispy vegetables – this was my favourite dish of the day. We were now pretty full, but we still had to make the final dish, a chicken stew in a Vietnamese clay pot, with ginger, fresh basil, cocoanut juice and steamed rice – again very tasty.

It was all excellent fun and hopefully has inspired us to be a bit more adventurous with our cooking in the future.

March 5th - Taxi Driver, Ho Chi Minh Style

This morning, I took the trip into the beautiful Mekong Delta, about a 2 hour drive (and a world away) from the frenetic streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Since I last went into the Mekong in 2008, a brand new expressway has been built to speed up the journey there, although the local drivers don't appear to have got totally used to it yet. Lane discipline certainly hasn't been grasped yet, so slow trucks plonk themselves in the fast lane and pay no attention to the car or bus that is about 3 inches from their back bumper, hooting and flashing furiously. Eventually the stuck car gets fed up and swerves manically into the slow lane, cutting up anyone unfortunate enough to be in his way (normally our minibus).

On our (thankfully safe) arrival, we did a fun boat trip along the widest part of the delta, and in amongst the little canals and tributaries lined with little villages. It was unbelievably hot, and whenever we did a little walk amongst the villages, we were soon drenched in sweat, but at least it made the beer at lunch time taste even better than normal.

We'd planned a big night out for the evening, so having cooled down in the shower, it was time to brave the heat outside again. Unfortunately, it wasn't the relaxing start to the evening we were hoping for...........

It started well enough – we quickly found a cab, and were happily surprised to find that he was willing to put it on the metre (something they don't normally do without a bit of a struggle). The alarm bells started to ring when the meter suddenly started to go up really quickly (three-quarters of the way into our journey, it suddenly doubled). Then, when we got to our destination, we decided not to dispute the amount (which at 220,000 Dong, $10, was probably 2 or 3 times what it should be. I then handed the driver a 500,000 note – he turned away for a second and brandished a 20,000 note, saying that I owed him 200,000 more! Not only was he massively overcharging us, but he was also attempting a fairly unsubtle con – I only had two 500,000 notes on me, so there was no room for doubt.

I don't think he'd reckoned on the response he got from us. We demanded our 500,000 back in fairly forthright terms – the most printable version is Tracy telling him, "You're a very bad man", to which he replied, "no, you bad man". He then got some notes out of his shirt pocket as if to prove that he didn't have a 500,000 on him. Tracy promptly snatched them out of his hand, as the first instalment of our change. She then snatched his car radio and his mobile phone and continued to demand our money. Meanwhile, I opened all the doors, and lent across him and sounded the car horn non-stop for about 3 minutes demanding our money back. He began to freak out, and the shouting from all three of us got ever louder.

We weren't budging though, and eventually he gave us 200,000 back, plus another 100,000 Tracy had quickly pocketed from his wodge of notes. We've taken a picture of him – so you can avoid this horrible man if you're ever in HCMC.

Anyway, with our stress levels to the max, it was now time to de-stress with a drink, at where he'd dropped us off – a roof top bar on the 26th floor of the AVB Tower. The irony of it all, is that the beers in this uber-trendy bar are extremely pricey, and cost more than he was trying to diddle us out of. But, at least we knew the prices upfront, and were aware that we were being overcharged.

Of course, we were paying for the location, and what a great location it was – the lights of HCMC's ever-expanding skyline twinkling away in front of us, with the sounds of the chaotic traffic on the streets below occasionally being wafted up to us on the warm air – it was a great place to chill out, which was just as well!

Much as we loved it, we couldn't bring ourselves to pay so far over the odds for more than one drink, so we caught a cab to go to dinner. Fortunately, this guy was as pure as the driven snow and the cab cost a much more palatable $1.50.

Dinner was at our favourite HCMC restaurant, Quan An Ngon, where we gorged on a delicious array of dishes washed down by cheap beer. A much better end to a bizarre evening.

March 3rd – Singapore

Since we were last in Singapore in 2010, this dynamic city state has been busy turning itself into a major gambling centre, in a bid to capture some of the rapidly expanding Chinese tourist market. As you'd expect of somewhere with as relentless a business focus as Singapore, they've been massively successful in this. So, in the past year and a half, Singapore has now overtaken Las Vegas in terms of money gambled (it's now second only to Macau in the world gambling league table).

Central to this, an enormous area of re-claimed land on the edge of the CBD is being turned into a gleaming holiday and gambling resort, with the distinctive design of the Marina Bay Sands complex being its showpiece building. The building consists of three adjacent skyscrapers topped with a boat-shaped structure that spans the three of them – with a hotel, a massive infinity pool and an observation deck up the top.

Our mission today was to explore this remarkable addition to Singapore's skyline.
So, we caught the super-efficient metro system to Marina Bay Sands, and emerged into one of the most luxurious shopping malls I've ever been to. I'd have thought that if there was one thing that Singapore didn't need, it was any more shopping malls; but the developers here obviously have confidence in the capacity of the locals and the tourists to spend ever large amounts of money on luxury goods.

As you walked around these sparklingly opulent new developments, there really were no indications that the world was in the grip of a global recession – Singapore seems to be doing very nicely on the back of the expanding Chinese economy. We bought our tickets and caught the lift up to the top, and emerged onto a wide viewing deck with some fabulous views over Singapore's impressive skyline. It was a cloudy day, so we couldn't see as far Indonesia, but the views over the expanding city below us were excellent.

From here, we walked along the impressive new Helix Bridge across the Singapore River which gave plenty of photo opportunities of the building we'd just scaled, and along the waterfront, there were more examples of the city's imaginative space-age buildings, interspersed with the odd colonial building to remind us of times gone by.

After this, we went on a trip to Orchard Road to visit the Tangs department store there, stopping on the way at a huge food court with a bewildering array of food stalls to choose from. Tracy's choice was the slimiest noodle dish ever, which was utterly impossible to eat with chopsticks as the noodles kept on sliding off – no wonder the Chinese are so slim.

On our way back to the ship, we stopped at the enormous Vivo City Mall next to the terminal – on a busy Saturday afternoon, it was absolutely packed with shoppers, and most particularly, packed with screaming kids who all seemed to be having simultaneous tantrums. For a non-shopper, it was my idea of hell, and even Tracy's shopping list got truncated pretty quickly when faced with this sensory overload.

Judging by the packed shops and the expanding skyline, Singapore is in pretty good health.

March 1st – Phuket By Speedboat

In the last few decades, the Thai island of Phuket has changed massively, as a huge amount tourist developments have turned this into one of the most popular holiday destinations in South East Asia. However, one part of the area that hasn't changed, are the timeless and haunting landscapes of the beautiful Phang-Nga National Park. Here, nature has created a bizarre array of odd-shaped limestone islands, jutting up vertically from the green seas, and weathered into all sorts of strange craggy shapes.

It's a landscape that's very reminiscent of Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, although this one is less mysteriously misty than its more northern counterpart. However, they do both share a similar geological history – the islands we see are just the tops of ancient mountains that were left stranded and sticking out of the water, when a rise in sea levels about 12,000 years ago drowned the rest of the mountains.

On an incredibly hot day, we were glad to have the wind in our hair as we caught our speedboat from Phuket's port, and sped towards this amazing natural sight. From a distance, the green islands dotted around the bay looked like they could have come from a Chinese watercolour, and they just got more spectacular the closer up we got. The boat slowed down so that we could appreciate the islands from close-up – huge stalactites the size of buses dripped down the side of the islands like melting wax, and mysterious semi-submerged caves pocked the waterline of the islands, waiting to be explored by adventurous kayakers.

We got off at Koh Phing Kan, also known as "James Bond Island", because it starred as Scaramanga's lair in the 1974 film, "The Man With the Golden Gun". If I were an evil three-nippled megalomaniac I don't think I could have selected a more enigmatic place to be my hideaway than this – it was absolutely stunning. In fact, it was so perfectly exotic, it really felt like it was created in a film studio rather than by nature – you expected the stunning rock formations plonked precariously in the water just to be made out of foam.

From here, we continued our journey through the islands to the island of Koh Panyi, where a community of Muslim fishermen have created a picturesque village on stilts in the shallow waters around the island. By the looks of it, tourism seems to have taken over from fishing as the main money-earner here, and as you explore the village, you enter a dark labyrinth of touristy stalls selling T-shirts and sarongs, and restaurants catering for the boat parties who call in every day of life. But the place is a genuine community that isn't just for show for the tourists – we walked around the island's school, where the immaculately uniformed children somehow managed to ignore the ranks of camera-toting tourists and carry on with their schoolwork. I guess that when your playground overlooks such an incredibly breathtaking natural landscape, a few gawping tourists pale into insignificance.

From here, it was a bumpy hour and a half ride back to the port, as we now started to get blasé about the fabulous sights we were passing.

A really enjoyable trip with some unforgettable sights, but I have to admit that getting back to the cool air-conditioning on board has never felt so good.

February 28th – Exploring the Colonial Legacy in the Andaman Islands

It's taken us 2 days sailing to get to the furthest reaches of India, the remote Andaman Islands. These islands are firmly off the beaten track, which meant that there was a refreshingly innocent atmosphere out on the streets of the capital Port Blair – so, no hassle from beggars or vendors, and the prices weren't vastly inflated just because we're tourists.

The main attraction here is the haunting Cellular Jail – a place of exile set up by the British in the 1890s to imprison Indian political prisoners who challenged British rule in India. The Jail was a kind of a cross-between a Siberian Gulag, a Robben Island, and a Devil's Island all rolled in to one, and it has huge resonances in the Indian National Consciousness, even if most people outside of the country had never heard of it.

On a stinking hot day, we explored its evocative rows of cells where the prisoners were held in solitary confinement in brutal conditions, a thousand miles from home and with no hope of escape. It was sobering to look at the gallows where the prisoners were executed three at a time, and to reflect that the legacy of the Days of the Raj isn't all about railways, Indian bureaucracy and grand colonial buildings.

Given the history, our guide and the displays there were surprisingly even-handed, and we sensed no bitterness out on the busy streets of Port Blair, where people were generally very friendly. In fact, most of the people who live here, have arrived since the war, after Independence, when the political strife caused by the Partition of India caused thousands of displaced people to seek a new life out here in the Andamans. In the process, the indigenous people are under severe threat of being swamped by modernity, as their primitive cultures are unable to adjust to the realities of modern life. A quick visit to the excellent little Anthropological Museum gave us an insight into these endangered cultures, where numbers of some peoples have shrunk to well below 100.

Our trip also took us to the town's beach at Corbyn's Cove, where the only creatures on the beach, a few slumbering cows, seemed not to care about the signs that warned us to keep away, because a crocodile had been spotted here last week. Elsewhere in the Andaman Islands, there are beaches that regularly feature in the "World's Best Beaches" polls – this one wasn't a challenger.

So, a very pleasant day in a place that's so far avoided being spoilt by tourism, or by its bitter history.