WORLD OF WILL

Welcome back ! We had a very busy few days when we returned from the European leg of our ' World Tou r', emptying the van, catching up with a few friends and trying to streamline and decant our belongings into two ruckacks for leg two : Asia . We have just spent the last week in Singa p ore and it has been monumentally brilliant . For a s tart , Singapore is just a wonderful city to be in. We arrived midw ee k and spent a couple of days exploring the city like bewildered k i ds , pointing a nd cooing at every futuristic high - rise , colonial hotel or tatty little street market we came across . Singapore just does everything so well , w hether it ' s the clean , efficien t MRT system ( like the tu be, only better ) o r the spotless streets , chea p hawker markets and food stalls . We spent a lot of time sampling some of the exotic fare from the latter . I managed t o p

Imagine Strasbourg as a pretty little girl with pigtails (bear with me) and the border between Germany and France as a skipping rope. Now imagine two bigger girls, who don't get on, spinning this rope and making poor little Strasbourg jump from one side to the other. Since 1870 it has had to skip this border at least four times – the poor sausage must be very confused. She currently resides in France, right on the border, but there are still plenty of German road signs and place names to be spotted. I think, due to it being so hotly contested over the centuries, I was expecting a sort of war-scarred, 1960 s concrete rebuild of a city, a bit like Coventry. Thankfully the years have been kind to Strasbourg and it has somehow survived almost like a 17th century time capsule. There are still pretty canals criss-crossed by adorable lit t l e bridges and narrow streets lined with original half-timbered buildings – it's so picturesque th at you feel like you're actually in a 500-

We have spent the last few days travelling along Germany's Romantische Straβe – the Romantic Road – a tourist route from Füssen in the very south of Germany up to Würzburg, near Frankfurt. It is 385km long and links unspoilt villages, quaint towns, old castles and amazing churches down the middle of southern Germany. The traditional way to do this route is to start at Würzburg and work your way down so that it gets more beautiful and more impressive as you reach the mountains and the mighty Schloss Neuschwanstein. We, of course, aren't traditional and w ere coming from Austria so we so rt of started at the "grand finale"… That finale, as mentioned, is Schloss Neuschwanstein. This epic castle is the one you se e on the front of all the German tourist guides. It's the one that Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland is based on. It is a living, breathing cliché of a fairytale castle. And it is teeming with herds of annoying tourists. Like us. It is, of cours