CHAPTER 4
Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) train system is the finest in the world. It is cheap, efficient and inexpensive and never suffers from the union problems that dogged the London Underground when I was growing up. The MRT is a public transport network that Singaporeans are rightfully proud of. It has only one minor fault. What happens if the curry you consumed the night before suddenly decides to bid your bowels a fond farewell while you are waiting on the station platform? Has that thought ever crossed your mind? It certainly crossed mine as I dashed off the train at HarbourFront Station, making more noise than the brass section of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. When there is too much broccoli and cauliflower in my vegetable curry, I can usually mimic the trumpet on “All You Need Is Love” the following morning.
But there were no toilets on the platform. Opened in June 2003, HarbourFront is part of the ultra-modern, $5-billion North-East Line (NEL) operated by SBS Transit. NEL takes Singaporeans from the new towns of Sengkang and Punggol into the business district and transports tourists to Little India, Chinatown and Sentosa (via HarbourFront). The trains are futuristic, fully automated and driverless contraptions with TV screens and bright bucket seats in every carriage. But if you need to pee, you are buggered.
Of course, most MRT stations have toilets above ground and I only made the HarbourFront’s public amenities with seconds to spare. Any longer and I might have left a trail. Like most of the MRT toilets, this particular one had just been cleaned. The floors were still wet (I had been in the country for months before I finally realised that most public toilets are cleaned every few hours. I thought Singaporeans were peeing all over the floor). The cleaners were busying themselves around the sink. I closed the door and ruined all their hard work in an instant. Then I listened in on the conversation. There is nothing like eavesdropping while you are sitting on the throne.
“Cannot tahan already, the chee bye,” one of the cleaners said. Do not hold back, mate. Say what you really think.
“Yah, I know. What to do?”
“He take any small thing and make it into a big thing. I tell you, any small thing, he want to make it into a big thing. So I fuck him, lah.”
They were criticising their supervisor, I believe, but the dialogue could equally have detailed a gay romp they had enjoyed the previous night. I opened the cubicle door cautiously, hoping not to find them both smiling and pulling up their trousers. But they were still cleaning their taps so I left them cursing and headed for the tourist attraction I have visited more times than any other in Singapore.
The prevailing attitude towards Sentosa in this country has always intrigued me. Say to most Singaporeans that you are off to the island at the weekend and it is usually greeted with a hollow laugh followed by a litany of reasons why the place is “so boring”. Some are almost embarrassed by the fact that next to one of the world’s busiest and most famous ports is a resort that is not Disneyland, or Universal Studios, or Dream World or Genting Highlands. It is not even close.
But therein lies its charm. The island won me over when we first met in 1997, precisely because it was so schizophrenic and difficult to categorise. Sentosa had beaches, but it was not a beach resort and Bali certainly had nothing to worry about. There was rainforest and nature trails, but it was hardly a walk on the wild side of Borneo. There was a water slide park and the odd simulator, but it was not a theme park. There was Images of Singapore, but the place was not a metropolis of museums to rival New York. There were golf courses, but these only appealed to a minority. And there were food courts and restaurants, but both were more expensive and less plentiful than on the mainland. In essence, many Singaporeans felt it was everything to nobody.
For a few bucks, however, the island provided a bit of nature, some greenery, decent beaches, a couple of football pitches, an escape from the millions swarming around Orchard Road and a half decent light-and-laser show to round off the evening; that is all I am really looking for from these kinds of places. But it was not enough. Unlike the Singapore Zoo, many of Sentosa’s visitors were tourists and attracting locals back to the place was proving difficult. So a theme-park specialist who had worked on setting up Tokyo Disneyland was hired. Shortly afterwards in 2002, an ambitious $8-billion revamp was unveiled to drag Sentosa into the 21st century before destinations such as Hong Kong Disneyland swallowed it up altogether. By 2010, the island aims to attract eight million visitors a year. Take a moment to process that extraordinary figure. It is double the population of the entire country, and Sentosa is only a 500-hectare resort.
That explains why my wife’s parents found the quaint island rather enchanting in 1998 and why my mother was none too impressed when she visited it in 2004. By that stage, Sentosa was nothing more than a glorified building site, with the Merlion offering panoramic views of half-naked Indian construction workers hanging out their washing. Indeed, my favourite attraction, the water-based theme park Fantasy Island, had been transformed into a car park. So many attractions were being closed and new ones opened that it was difficult to keep up. But Singapore can rebuild an entire island quicker than Londoners can rebuild Wembley Stadium and I was eager to see Sentosa’s progress and find out why over five million people were still flocking to the incomplete resort every year.
I returned to the island the same way I had first visited it in 1997. On foot. This proved to be an infuriating experience. Turning right out of HarbourFront (which was not even there in 1997, we had taken the No. 143 bus from Toa Payoh), I headed down Gateway Avenue to walk across the bridge. The area was a mess. The spectacular VivoCity project, which will be the country’s largest shopping centre (because Singapore really needs another one) with over 350 retailers when it opens at the end of 2006, was not finished and I was beginning to think I was being pursued across the country by a team of deep sea drillers. Overhead, the Sentosa Express, a $140-million light rail system, was also being hammered into shape. When it is completed, the Express will run along the top of the bridge above the cars and coaches. But I could not even get onto the bridge. A security guard checked my path.
“Where you going?” he asked, none too pleasantly.
“I’ll hazard a guess and say Sentosa.”
“Cannot.”
“I cannot go to Sentosa?”
“No, you cannot walk across the bridge. It’s closed to the public. They’re doing upgrading work. Take the bus.”
I muttered my consent, but I had no intention of taking the bus. A Singaporean cyclist had just whizzed past, taking the very bridge that was supposedly closed, followed by a Singaporean jogger. And the security guard had stopped neither. The bridge to Sentosa was not closed. It just was not open to those fresh-faced tourists from Changi Airport. Taking them from the HarbourFront Bus Interchange directly to the island’s arrival centre meant they could bypass the dusty building site and all those scary construction workers and head for the sanitised world of Sentosa.
But I sneaked over the bridge and immediately regretted it. I saw at the counter that there was only a combined bus and entrance ticket. But I had not taken the bus. Indignant, I approached a member of staff at the turnstile.
“Excuse me, how much should I pay because I didn’t take the bus. I walked over.”
“You walked over. Are you sure?” He spoke to me like I was dribbling and wearing a bib.
“Yeah, I think so. I was there.”
“But how did that happen? Who allowed you to cross the bridge? Who allowed you to get through?”
I felt like Papillon on Devil’s Island. The corrugated iron fences dotted around the ferry terminal reinforced the feeling. A quick makan at the Sentosa Food Centre would have cheered me up but that was boarded up, too. Oh, this trip was turning into a barrel of laughs. There were a few construction workers hanging around outside the place and I asked what had happened to the food court.
“Must close. Gonna build casino here. Make more money than a food court,” one of them said, laughing.
It was true. After months of deliberating over what the entire country already knew to be a foregone conclusion, the government gave the green light to an “integrated resort” (the government avoids using the word “casino” for fear of offending religious sensibilities). The family-oriented integrated resort will be sold to the highest bidder and then coach parties will come from across the continent for a bit of blackjack. I had only been on the island 15 minutes and I already wanted to leave.
So I got on my bike, a rented one, that is, from the northern corner of the island and made a valiant attempt to circumnavigate Sentosa by pedal power. After speeding past the rather artificial and rather lame Lost Civilisation and Ruined City, I savoured some splendid scenery as the trail ran along the edge of the island with the sea immediately beneath me. Labrador Park stuck out in the far corner of the mainland and passenger ferries bound for Indonesia’s Batam Island sped up and down Keppel Harbour. I praised the island’s planners for building such a picturesque bicycle trail. Then I cursed them when the trail ended abruptly behind Underwater World and I nearly went over the handlebars and headlong into a bloody fence.
As I got off the bike, there was a rustling in the undergrowth. Not the rustling of a skink or a gecko, but the rustling of something that eats cyclists’ feet for breakfast. Taking three tentative steps, backwards, I spotted the head of a monitor lizard sticking up above the grass. As reptiles go, it was a big old brute. From forked tongue to tail, it was around 1.3 metres in length. Indeed, it was only a couple of metres from my feet, and stumbling upon it so abruptly had clearly made us both nervous. Then something extraordinary happened. Something I will tell my grandchildren in a pitiful attempt to sound like an intrepid explorer. The beast edged cautiously down the rocks and then slipped into the sea. The sea! Not some pond, lake or reservoir at a nature park but the open sea. A day trip to Sentosa had turned into a National Geographic documentary. The water was quite choppy, but the lizard swam beautifully, keeping its bobbing head above the waves. It drifted out about 20 metres and, as it turned left, it dawned on me what the clever little bugger was doing. There was a tiny beach to my left, no more than 10 metres across, which was adequate for a fleeing lizard. After swimming an arc of about 50 metres, the cunning reptile stopped about 2 metres from the shore to check that the coast was clear. Satisfied, it effortlessly paddled the rest of the way before slinking off up the beach and back into the undergrowth.
It was a beautiful moment, more so for its irony. The wild encounter occurred behind the entrance of Underwater World, an adequate, if expensive, attraction with an 83-metre-long tunnel for visitors to stroll along while sharks and stingrays swim overhead. I had visited Underwater World three times, but not one of those occasions compared to my close encounter with Godzilla. No artificial environment, no matter how realistic, can ever compete with observing wild animals in their natural habitat.
I headed into the optimistically titled Jungle Trail. Sentosa is no jungle, but the secondary rainforest has proven to be remarkably resilient, considering the British military and then Japan’s occupying forces cleared most of it, using the wood for fuel in the 1940s. According to an information board, Sentosa is part of a regional archipelago that is home to one of the richest plant communities on Earth, with over 2,300 species. I had no time to count them all, so I took their word for it. Snakes with fancy names like the oriental whip snake and the paradise tree snake also hang out along the nature trail, but it is those buzzed winged beasts you have got to look out for in the equatorial rainforest. A sign warned: “Watch out for the giant black bees and the orange hornets, they may hurt you, but only if offended.” How do you offend an orange hornet? Do you go up to it and say, “I’m not being funny, but orange really isn’t your colour. When it rains, and my God it never stops in this place, you look rusty.”
I passed a rain shelter and noticed a young Indian chap and a Malay woman engaging in a little jungle boogie. Their hands were all over each other and their tongues were more active than the monitor lizard’s. They thought they were alone until an infantile ang moh went racing past singing Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On”. About 15 minutes later, I paused for a drink and allowed the mosquitoes around my thighs to do likewise. As I sat under a rain shelter, the young couple sauntered past holding hands. They were both smiling and he was smoking a cigarette. It was good to know Sentosa still offers some attractions not found on the island map.
From young lovers to married couples, the island catered for all. At Siloso Beach, a bride and groom posed for their wedding photographer at the water’s edge. They were not the only newly-weds having their pictures taken at Sentosa that day and I have often found their choice of venue slightly surprising. No matter how skilled the photographer, certain photos will inevitably feature some 50 container ships queuing up on the horizon. Unless your husband is Popeye, it is difficult to understand why a bride might favour such a cluttered backdrop.
Siloso Beach provided a clear indication of Sentosa’s future direction. There were more eateries and the introduction of “surfer, dude”-type beach bars, something I do not recall the island having 10 years ago. There was the obligatory 7-Eleven, naturally, which is housed under the new Beach Station, one of the stops on the Sentosa Express. As much as I miss the quaint, discontinued monorail, the new station was impressive. Stopping just metres away from the beach means pampered travellers will step into their air-conditioned bubble at the bridge leading to Sentosa, trundle across Keppel Harbour, cut through the island and alight at the water’s edge. I suppose that is a good thing.
The beach had been transformed. It still had that animal show, the one in which the domesticated monkey cleans up all the rubbish (a tad annoying as long-tailed macaques are native to the island and belong in the trees behind the amphitheatre, not picking up Coke cans for applauding tourists), but the beach and lagoon had clearly been spruced up. They were packed with teenagers of all ages playing various sports. Of all races too. Watching a beach volleyball match, it suddenly dawned on me that there were Chinese, Malay, Indian and Caucasian teenagers playing together. It is rare to see such natural integration (rather than integration gently enforced by schools, the church or the workplace or even the product of some patronising racial harmony campaign). After a while, though, I was not sure if I was watching the match to celebrate its racial harmony or to ogle at the thongs that some of the young women had opted to wear. A trifle concerned, I got back on the bike and pedalled off to Tanjong Beach.
I wanted to see Tanjong Beach simply because I had never been there. Hidden in the southern corner of Sentosa, Tanjong Beach comes after Siloso and Palawan beaches and is therefore the least crowded. If Tanjong and Siloso represented the “before” and “after” stages of redevelopment, then Palawan was the “during” stage. Portaloos and piles of sand greeted me as I hurried through. Other than that, there was nothing to see.
Tanjong Beach provided the perfect getaway, not only from bustling Singapore, but from the Palawan Beach building site. Being further off the beaten track, the beach hosted just a handful of Singaporean teenagers playing football. Otherwise the beach was deserted. Currently a peaceful, beautiful retreat, Tanjong Beach awaits redevelopment with baited breath. Until then, enjoy the soft sand, the clearish lagoon and the gentle sea breeze before the coach parties that currently stop at Dolphin Lagoon move a little further along the coastline.
CHAPTER 5
After biking around Sentosa, I wanted to explore Pulau Blakang Mati. I came across the obscure island when I met the inimitable Cliff. It was mid-November 2004 and I was standing outside the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, waiting for it to open. I was there on a writing assignment and had some time to kill. Cliff was there because he needed to pee. A jovial, ruddy-cheeked elderly chap, he ambled up and asked, “Are you English? Because I really need to pee.”
“Are the two related?”
“No, I asked another chap where the nearest toilet was
and he didn’t speak any English and I really do need to pee.”
“Well, I think there’s one in the museum, which opens in a couple of minutes.”
Not a moment too soon for poor old Cliff. With the cold wind exacerbating matters, he appeared to be turning blue. To take his mind off his sprinkler, I enquired why an elderly Englishman was travelling alone around Washington. His story was both amazing and humbling. After his wife died, he signed up for the Heroes Return programme, a noble travel package financed by British lottery money that allowed World War II veterans to revisit the countries where they had once served, some 60 years after VE Day. Cliff had never served in Washington, but he had family there and was recharging his batteries before heading for Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Asia. The brave, resolute man was 81 years old and still eager to conquer the world. I praised his fortitude and wished him bon voyage. Six months later, the phone rang in my Toa Payoh apartment. The voice was initially hesitant. Then it boomed down the line.
“Hello? That you, Neil? I’m standing in some place called Clifford Centre and I really need to pee.”
It was Cliff. In the flesh, in Singapore and still in urgent need of a urinal. I had given him my business card in Washington and thought no more about it. From the American capital to a food court beneath Raffles Place, Cliff had tracked down one man but could not locate a public toilet.
Final Notes From a Great Island Page 4
