Through my porthole I could see a multitude of small lights – yellow, orange, white – glittering and shimmering in the evening mist. A Summer wonderland perhaps? As the landing speed reduced, I noticed the lights were spread over undulating ground on either side of the runway. A few years later I would walk amongst that myriad of tiny lights, to realise it wasn’t evening mist, but smoke from a thousand small cooking fires, that I saw on my first arrival in India. The runway was in effect a long flat valley, between crowded slums.

I had stumbled on Waffles - the best backpacker’s in Singapore – and after a few weeks graduated to a room with a scenic view of Bugis Mall. The place was a comfort zone after a hot day’s work, and the long-stay inmates became my family. They belonged to one of two clans: teachers or deep-sea divers. Each night teachers swapped stories of classroom mayhem, while divers weighed in with near escapes from the deep; always with their early-model mobiles close by, waiting for the call out, to some distant oil rig.

“Melaka! Melaka!” It was the second time I had passed the moustachioed tout, as I wandered up and down the multitude of ticket offices in this overgrown warehouse, otherwise known as Johor Bahru (or JB to locals) Bus Terminus. On the first run past, his call had not really caught my attention, but on this second time round he added: ‘’Bus leaving, three o’clock’’. I checked my watch....

His English was not too bad, but it had still taken a considerable number of hand signals to establish that the taxi man’s son lived just a few streets away from me, in my hometown. He was ferrying me to the government station at Lake Gardens, on the outskirts of Taiping, Malaysia, from where I planned to catch the Land Rover shuttle, up to the hill station of Bukit Larut ...

The story goes that the original owners of this rather inconspicuous little hostel - perched above a 24-hour Indian on North Bridge Road, opposite Bugis Junction - had been taking-the-micky when they named the place ‘Raffles’. Then, the power and might of Raffles megahotel (a few blocks down the road) came to bear ... and so the name was discretely changed to Waffles.

Half the fun of travelling to far away places and intermixing with different cultures is to be found in the simple - but most essential – daily task of eating and drinking. We think all the answers are at home … until we go abroad. Often, as well as new foods that unlock new taste buds, it’s the setting that provides extra divergence from our norms.