By the time we publish this we will be less than 30 miles from the bright lights of Singapore. That is quite hard to believe, when we are still passing through endless small islands and remote fishing communities.

We are heading for the north of Batam where we will complete our check out from Indonesia and head over to Johor in southern Malaysia, bypassing Singapore. But we hope to visit Singapore by ferry once we get to the other side.

The realisation is dawning on us that we are down to our last few days in Indonesia. To be honest, the latter stage of this journey has been a bit of a hot and sweaty slog. We knew, after Belitung, that there was little left of great interest on our track. We have hopped from remote island to remote island, avoided countless fishing boats, kept out of the way of massive cargo ships on their way to China and tried to not get struck by lightning in electrical storms, but otherwise, we have just been by ourselves, grimly heading north-west. The day time temperature and humidity are now very uncomfortable, and with hardly any wind we have been motoring for hours on end for the last four days, just chewing up the miles. That is only going to get worse as we head into Malaysia (or so we are told). Our plan is to stop for a few days at Nongsa Point marina on Batam whilst we complete our departure formalities, which should provide a nice break.

It has been nearly four months since we arrived in Indonesia and well over six months since the journey started in Australia. We have travelled nearly 5000 miles in that time which gives some sense of the scale of these two countries.