Ride Across The River

Before we started looking into how we would spend six or seven days in Singapore, I had this vision of the whole place just being one giant, continuous city with no breaks from buildings or roads or sidewalks or anything. I imagined something like Coruscant in the Star Wars movies, a planet covered entirely by city, although in this case just a tiny, 283.5 square mile portion of our particular planet. I'm not sure why I had this impression. Maybe it's the fact that Singapore is both a city and a country unto itself and it's supposed to be super modern? I know...it doesn't make complete sense. Or any sense really.

So understandably, when we started scratching the surface on Signapore, we found out there was a lot more to the place than just man-made stuff. There often is in cities. I mean, I've been to New York City I don't know how many times and for sure there's more to that place than just built stuff, and I'm not just referring to the giant park in the middle of Manhattan. That place is dotted with little green oases all over Manhattan and beyond.

Singapore is no different than New York City in that regard. Like I said, my initial attitude on this sort of stuff didn't make any sense at all. As we started adding must sees to our Singapore itinerary and to break up our "city time", we started adding some parks to the list.

We ultimately planned a lot of park time, including excursions on the main island of Singapore to their Botanic Gardens (largest collection of orchids in the world!); the TreeTop Walk in MacRitchie Park (very long and mostly disappointing); and their iconic Gardens By The Bay (feeling a post dedicated to just that park coming on soon). But despite all that we also felt an urge to go someplace wilder and maybe even leave the main island and get onto one of the smaller islands that dot the perimeter of Singapore Island. We settled on a place called Pulau Ubin.

On the Sensory Trail.

Pulau Ubin is an island located in the strait between Singapore and the mainland of Malaysia to the north. It's a former granite quarry site that supplied the stone that built a lot of old Singapore. Today, it is mostly devoted to public use as a green space. The majority of the island is covered in jungle and other natural landscapes that provide a home for birds, mammals, reptiles and other sorts of creatures. 

Oh, and there are some humans that live there too. 

 

The people on the island are a bit of throwback community, living in houses using somewhat traditional construction methods (although admittedly mixed with modern materials) with no running water or hard wired electricity (power is provided by generators). By throwback I mean 1960s throwback, not centuries-old throwback. 

The main settlement on Pulau Ubin is on the south side of the island near the jetty where tourists like us and folks that have business with the community are dropped off every day. If you visit, you'll find stores, restaurants, some taxis, lots of bicycles for rent as well as houses and temples used by the local population.

The major appeal for us to get to Pulau Ubin was natural and specifically wildlife and (surprise, surprise) a little birdwatching. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to see how people were living there and building shelter for themselves. I am still an architect, after all. 

Bumboats (top) and the jetty and gateway to Pulau Ubin.

We hit Pulau Ubin first thing in the morning. We figured we'd get in and out before it got really hot. And by the time the day came to visit this island, we knew that it gets hot every day in Singapore in February. And I do mean every day. It's not quite like Cambodia, but it the heat is still oppressive without you even having to do anything at all. It just melts you while you stand there. The sun doesn't matter. It's just hot in a way that I've never experienced before. 

An early rise. A quick breakfast at what became our usual breakfast spot in the underground mall attached to the Andaz Singapore. Found a car on the Grab app (Singapore's version of Lyft) that we used to get pretty much everywhere in Singapore that had decent cell service. And we were off. Changi Ferry Terminal to catch a bumboat (apparently it comes from the Dutch word for boat added to the word in English for boat, which is "boat" so it means boat boat) to take us over to Pulau Ubin.

The process to get on one of these bumboats isn't at first exactly clear. There's a ferry terminal that (despite the complete lack of signage that tells you where to actually find the boats) looks super official. It appears organized and there's what appears to be a customs clearing facility on site. There's also a line that we dutifully stood in and waited for an attendant or government official or boat captain or whomever to summon us towards the next bumboat departing for the island.

It doesn't work like that. Basically each boat captain comes to the line and takes a boatload of people. But not always from the front. The first boat that got to the dock after we eventually found the line took a group of 10 or 12 people from about six deep in the line. There weren't enough people there other than the large group to fill his boat so he just took the big group, regardless of their place in line. I guess they have to fill their boat to maximize their earnings which I can understand. 

Ultimately, the wait wasn't that bad. We got on the next boat, handed over our $4 SG per person and we were on our way.

Local Pulau Ubin architecture.

Our agenda for the day was to start with the island's Sensory Trail, a brief walk through some jungle adjacent to the jetty, followed by a tour through the town to get an idea of how the locals live. We figured if things were going OK (meaning we were seeing things that interested us) that we'd keep going and maybe take a ride out to the Chek Jawa Wetlands on the east side of the island. That seemed to be a popular spot to spend some time.

One of the main attractions of the Sensory Trail was a series of planted exhibits featuring local fruits and vegetables grown in that part of the world and used in traditional food dishes. Jackfruit. Durian. Bananas. That sort of thing. It was sort of a miniature version of the spice farm we visited in Zanzibar in the early part of 2023 but with way, way fewer species and actual plants. This sort of stuff is always a little fascinating because we can't possibly see these kinds of crops at home. I think the highlight was a pandan plant, sometimes called the Asian vanilla because of its resemblance to that bean as a flavoring agent. Ordinarily, this might not have been a serious source of intrigue but we had fallen in love with pandan in Cambodia earlier in our trip to Southeast Asia. Our hotel served a pandan sticky rice with mango. We were only in Cambodia for three nights and we managed to order that dish at four separate meals. Good stuff!!!

Pandan. Some good stuff in these leaves.

We expected that beyond the sensory part of the Sensory Trail that we'd get a great look at a lot of exotic looking birds. Emphasis on great! And here our sights may have been set unreasonably high because there just weren't that many around. Yes, we got a good look at some blue-tailed bee-eaters (below) and what I believe was a purple heron (also below) and there were one or two kingfishers spotted but by and large, the jungle part of the trail was empty of birds. We only found these species near the couple of spots of water on the Trail.

Sure, we did manage to see a very, very large water monitor on the path in front of us walking to the water and that was about enough to make us believe that going elsewhere on the island might be valuable. So after strolling through the town and finding mostly houses, restaurants (not hungry when we were in the village) and one temple, we decided we'd find a way out to Chek Jawa. Now I don't know about everyone else looking at these bicycles for the 5 or 7 kilometer ride out to the Wetlands, but we had no interest in pedaling our way there in high 80s temperatures with low 90s humidity. Taxi for us. $15 SG each way. Let's roll.

If the Sensory Trail left us satisfied with the flora but a little let down on the fauna side of things, Chek Jawa was the Sensory Trail amplified by a factor of four or five. Tons and tons of plants and trees everywhere over a couple of different ecosystems but just nothing in terms of wildlife at all. True, we did see a sea eagle flying overhead but that was about it. It was super disappointing because the promise of this trail is huge. There's actually an extended section of boardwalk that goes out into the strait between Singapore and Malaysia which would seem to offer a great look at something out there that's alive. We got nothing.

Chek Jawa boardwalk; bee-eaters; purple heron; and a very large water monitor (top to bottom).

Were we disappointed in our time on Palau Ubin? Yeah...maybe a little. But you don't think I'd be writing about this place if all we got was a look at a few birds, a tasty plant that we ate in Cambodia and a couple of buildings, do you? We had a quest on Palau Ubin. And we found what we were looking for. Only just. But we did.

Not all birds are created equal. I don't mean that on a survivability scale or anything like that. I mean, clearly, some birds (the dodo comes to mind, here) weren't created to last long once people started colonizing the world and brought with them predators that could easily kill local winged creatures. No...by equal, I mean in my eyes (it's all about me, after all). There's a pecking order, here. Flamingoes are better than robins. Herons are better than cuckoos. Birds of prey are better than sparrows and finches. Towards the top of my list right now are toucans. I'm still itching based on our mostly misses in Costa Rica looking for those things. But slightly below toucans, there are species like kingfishers and bee-eaters and hornbills. We went to Pulau Ubin because they have hornbills.

There is one species of hornbill on Pulau Ubin: the oriental pied hornbill. They are medium-ish sized hornbills colored black-blue and really pale yellow with an added piece (not sure how else to describe it) on top of the horn-shaped bill that all hornbills sport and which give these birds their name.

And so we were done with the Sensory Trail and headed back to the town when we stopped to look at some sort of dwelling or other building made by the island's occupants. And in the time it took us to stop and check out the construction of that building as so often happens in birdwatching, the object of our search showed up in our (and by our, I mean my wife's) peripheral vision. Hornbill!!!

There was only one. And lest you think this is headed to a whole flock or something like that, it ain't. One hornbill is all we got here. We tracked him (I'm assuming it was a male) for maybe 20 minutes or so as he flew and hopped between trees and tree branches. The photos are not amazing. They are in no way as good as the bee-eater or heron pictures. They aren't probably even as good as the sea eagle picture which I decided wasn't good enough to put on this blog post.

But it's what we came for. And there's something about finding the object of your search that makes everything else that wasn't what you hoped for in a day out on vacation melt away into irrelevance. Or maybe less relevance, because I do believe a lot of what we saw and found and encountered in our half day over to and on Palau Ubin was extremely worthwhile. 

This was our first live sighting of this species of hornbill ever and it was special. I'd trade the two pictures above for the pose in the upper picture at the range of the second picture but sometimes we don't get our pick on those kinds of details in nature. We are at its mercy most always. It's both frustrating and rewarding at the same time. You can spend the better part of a day looking for wildlife finding not much at all only for the whole day to be salvaged by a single encounter. This one hornbill did that for us here.

It took a lot of looking and a lot of luck for us to find this hornbill. It would not be our last on this trip. We'd see one later in the week at the Singapore Botanic Gardens (the one with the spectacular orchids) and one after we left Singapore towards the west coast of Malaysia. Both of those hornbills were in flight, which is an incredible thing to see because they look way more put together on the wing than in a tree. This was the only one we got a sustained look (of all of five minutes total maybe) at to take in. Pulau Ubin. That's why we went there. I love it when a plan comes together. 

Just.