But there wasn’t a soul in sight, only a dozing dog that roused itself, momentarily, at my presence. Such are the simple, solitary pleasures of Pulau Ubin.
This four-square-mile island, formerly thrumming with granite quarries (Pulau Ubin is Malay for Granite Island), is only a 10-minute boat ride from its motherland, Singapore, but the gulf between the two couldn’t be more pronounced. While the Lion City, which marked its 48th year of independence last month, has grown rapidly in the last five decades — outward more than 20 percent (through land reclamation), upward (via the endless construction of office and condo towers), financially (it’s the world’s third-richest country in gross domestic product terms), and in crowdedness (it has the second-highest country population density after Monaco) — Pulau Ubin, which has no electricity or running water, is like a land that time forgot, stuck in the 1960s, when newly independent Singapore was a scattering of low-slung, stilt-housed villages. And for that, many Singaporeans are thankful.
According to folklore, hilly Ubin was formed when an elephant, a pig and a frog challenged one another to cross the waters to Johor, across the Straits of Johor. Whichever failed — and all three did — was turned to stone. The pig and elephant became Pulau Ubin, and the frog Pulau Sekudu (Frog Island), visible off Ubin’s southern coast. The stone, granite, was the island’s sole industry from the 1800s up to 1999, when the last quarry closed, and in its heyday thousands called Ubin home. Today fewer than 50 Singaporeans live here, and nature is very much in control, reason for the government to categorize Ubin as “open space and reserve land” in 2001.
Compared with the glass-clad skyscrapers, air-conditioned shopping malls and rush-hour-traffic-choked roadways of Singapore, Pulau Ubin is a grounding antidote to urban existence. This quality is its attraction, judging by the arrivals — about 2,000 each weekend, and a handful of French families, British backpackers and Singaporean youths looking to temporarily change scenery on weekdays — who come to experience a long-forgotten Singapore.
From Ubin’s jetty, reached by bare-bones wooden vessels called bumboats, and tiny main village, a few paved roads fan out to coastal campsites, dirt paths, lotus ponds or beautiful wetlands. The most striking constant is the lack of noise. Apart from the odd muted roar of a 777 landing in Singapore, sounds are limited to the crowing of red junglefowl, the chirps of the scaly-breasted munias, straw-headed bulbuls, Oriental magpies and collared kingfishers, or the wind rattling candlenut, jambu bol and nipah palm leaves.
But despite the unspoiled character of Pulau Ubin, there are ripples of concern among the holdout residents who doggedly champion the island’s anachronistic lifestyle. In January, the government published “The Population White Paper: A Sustainable Population for a Dynamic Singapore,” projecting that the city-state’s populace could hit 6.9 million by 2030 (it is currently 5.3 million), requiring 25 square miles of additional land in a country only three and a half times the size of Washington, D.C., possibly through developing “some of our reserve land.”
Two months later, the island’s householders received a letter from the government’s public housing body, ominously titled “Clearance Scheme: Clearance of Structures Previously Acquired for Development of Adventure Park on Pulau Ubin,” again raising the specter of development. In July the government quashed any rumors, stating, “There is currently no development plan for Pulau Ubin. Our intention is to keep Pulau Ubin in its rustic state for as long as possible, and as an outdoor playground for Singaporeans,” and that the earlier letter was notification of a census survey, not an eviction notice, and “could have been more carefully worded. ”
Near Singapore"s Concrete, an Oasis of Nature
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