Pulau Ubin

Just to the north of Singapore is Pulau Ubin, a small island which once best known for its commercial granite quarries. The name literally means Granite Island, although today the quarries have filled with water and the island is now a nature reserve. At one stage several thousand people lived here, hewing the stone out of the ground to help build Singapore’s impressive skyline or working on one of the rubber, mango, or coconut plantations or prawn farms. Today about 100 locals live in primitive conditions on the island, serving a flourishing tourist industry of about 300,000 visitors – mostly locals - per year.
Getting to Pulau Ubin is half the fun of the visit. First you need to go to Changi Village (the town lends its name to the nearby Changi International Airport), on the north of the mainland. Then you jump in a ‘bumboat’, a small vessel originally designed for coastal fishing now used to ferry 12 visitors per trip to the island. There are no queues and no tickets. Once 12 people have gathered at the departure jetty a wizened captain in flip flops and tatty shorts will wave you over to his boat and departure with a roar of the engine and a cloud of diesel fumes. His cheerful wife will then collect the money, the entire transaction being conducted with nods and smiles and without a word of English. About 12 minutes later you arrive at Pulau Ubin. The captain swings his boat around to approach the jetty backwards and at a great rate of knots, with everybody clinging on for dear life and expecting half of the jetty to end up in splinters on the beach. At the very last second he cuts power, and the boat bumps ever so gently up against the buffer. Journey over.
While there are a few vehicles on the island for use by the locals, and in particular by the police and rangers, there is basically one mode of transport on Pulau Ubin: bicycle. For as little as $2 per day you can rent bikes, many of dubious quality, to trundle around the island and work up a sweat in the 30°+ heat. This weekend we had my mother in law Mieke and her partner Jan Willem with us who, in good Dutch style, are excellent cyclists and were keen to try their hand at a tropical ‘fiets tocht’. The point of cycling on Pulau Ubin is not so much to go anywhere, but just to enjoy the novelty of doing it. We always see plenty of wild life, particularly very large monitor lizards, impressively scary monster sized bugs and a range of birds. The island is known for being home to the only colony of Pied Crested Hornbills, and this weekend we were lucky enough to see three of these rather strange yet quite beautiful birds up close, feasting in a banana tree. To see a good photo of a hornbill check out this link to an earlier posting: http://thesingaporesling.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-for-birds.html

A half hours gentle cycling followed by a walk on the beach looking at Malaysia’s coastline just a couple of hundred metres away was followed by a more sweaty uphill ride back to the only village. On the way we stopped to drink from fresh coconuts and let the kids run around. Back in town the only real diversion is lunch at one of the excellent live seafood restaurants, where the food is so fresh it’s practically still moving on your plate and yet only cost $34 for the six of us.
For anyone who plans to spend more than a couple of days in Singapore this is a lovely way to see what it must have been like living here 50 years ago, although without the mosquitoes and swarms of bugs which are now controlled, thankfully. While the locals seem perfectly adapted to life with generators for electricity and water pumped from their own wells, I have to admit it was lovely to get back to the air conditioning. How we take the little things for granted, and how spoilt we have become!