I am spending a few months in Thailand on a basic tourist visa, which means that after one month I have to leave and reenter to start a new visa. The previous month I went to Myanmar for 3 weeks. This time around I had not planned for a new country visit, so a short trip was ok for me.

In Thailand there is the option of doing a minivan day trip to the nearest border, but I prefer to make a mini break out of this situation, so I do one of my favourite travel pastimes and start playing with the destination maps on airline websites.

[AirAsia destinations from Bangkok]

In the end I chose Singapore on the strength of a super cheap flight sale on Tiger Airways on top of a craving for good Indian food.

Indian would have to be in my top 5 foods, so I tend to find myself in Little India every day I am in Singapore. Little India is also an interesting place to wander, though everytime I go there the sound of loud Bollywood music and the smell of spices makes me want to go back to India proper.

[Masala Dosa feast in Little India - Singapore]

While walking around Singapore I realised that there is a serious lack of bubble tea merchants in Chiang Mai. Bubble tea is everywhere here so I was happy to be back on the bubbles (if you can say such a thing?)

[Things I love about Asia: Bubble tea and peace sign photo posing.]

Another reason I came to Singapore was to meet up with one of my friends who lives here. I found out after booking my flight that he was working in London this month. No problem. I got on the Facebook and Twitter to see if anyone was going to be around, and I saw that Dan from Tropical MBA was passing through Singapore as well.

Dan is a fellow online business guy who I have been following online for a while, so we arranged to meet up for lunch and a cafe/internet session.

[Dan @Tropicalmba - all smiles while he checks his Paypal account]

Travel is large chunk of my business life, and one of the joys of travel for me is to be able to meet up with like minded people that I may not have met otherwise. I realised afterwards that I had way more fun hanging out in a cafe with wifi (and a chain cafe at that!) talking shop and swapping ideas than I would have had walking around seeing the sites.

So I now go back to Chiang Mai, ready to tackle some online projects with my wanderlust sated for another month. After that I will be heading off to my first new country of the year: the Philippines.