Return to a Sexy Island

by Neil Humphreys

  In many respects, the underground tunnels are little different to Labrador Nature Reserve. No longer secret, they remain somewhat hidden and cut off from public view. Labrador is a little tranquil gem. As well as the war relics, with improved information panels and interactive displays from what I remember, the quiet coastal corner boasts the only rocky sea-cliff on the mainland, offering corals, sea grasses, horseshoe crabs and the common hairy crab. I spotted a monitor lizard, my first since returning to Singapore. It was like catching up with an old friend. About 1 metre in length, it dipped in and out of the sea, making the most of the high tide to navigate its way along the shoreline (and mostly to get away from me following it).

  Dragon’s Teeth Gate (or Long Ya Men) was another pleasant discovery. The craggy granite outcrop, along with another outcrop, once stood imperiously at the entrance to Keppel Harbour. Dragon’s Teeth Gate was a geological signpost for travellers, with ancient mariners documenting the rocks in the 1300s. I was awed by the presence of such an imposing, historical, natural Asian landmark, until I read the small print. Sadly, like many of Singapore’s heritage sites, it was artificial, a replica of the original Dragon’s Teeth Gate. But modern Singapore cannot take the hit for this one. Blame the British. Straits Settlements Surveyor John Thomson had the rock outcrops blown up in August 1848 to widen the entrance to the new harbour. A joint collaboration in July 2005 led to the high stone replica of Long Ya Men, which is better than nothing.

  I continued through Comchest Green, which was opened in 2008 to provide a comely seafront garden location for retirees to hang out and ponder their 4D numbers, and headed for the Bukit Chermin View Harbour Walk, which follows the shoreline along Keppel Bay. It was also closed. A theme was developing. Construction workers were applying the final touches to the flooring so the harbour walk will be open by the time you read this sentence. Go visit. Keppel Harbour and the Southern Islands had never looked better from an entirely new vantage point and I should know. I was hanging off the construction site fence and clinging to a Keep Out sign at the time. I had to jump down. A foreman in a hard hat had spotted me and I really needed to pee.

  Among its many accolades, new Singapore has the world’s best toilet within its borders. I had never serviced the planet’s most luxurious lavatory before. I might have once made use of the world’s worst—a dustbin on the deserted platform of Wanstead Park Station (and in a pitiful plea for forgiveness, I was 13 years old, stricken with gastroenteritis, and as my nan’s house was too far away, I might have left an incriminating trail to the poor woman’s property). Indeed, my enthusiasm was matched only by my bladder. I had prepared meticulously for the world’s best toilet, drinking continuously around Labrador Park and resisting the urge to relieve myself through the gate leading to the underground tunnel. No one samples the delights of a five-star restaurant on a full stomach. I intended to fully savour the experience.

  Five years on the Aussie long drop can do that to a man. Having been a regular trekker around the splendid offerings of Parks Victoria (and few public authorities in the world manage their flora and fauna better than Victoria), I grew accustomed to their long drop toilets. The clue is in the title. The toilet is nothing more than a long drop. Australians do no-nonsense common nouns better than anyone else. The drinking receptacle for beer is shaped like a pot. So Aussies go with “pot”. When my daughter was born, she was chauffeured around in a buggy, pram or pushchair, depending on where we were or who we were with. My Australian aunties called it a “pusher”. They have no time for any of those fancy nouns like buggy or pram. When a stranger once asked if my daughter needed a “pusher”, I nearly throttled him for trying to sell her drugs.

  Getting back to the Aussie long drop, it was a wonder of plumbing and environmental sensitivity. Rather than bulldoze forests to create an elaborate sewage and drainage system so a foreign tourist had somewhere pleasant to blow her nose after a five-minute stroll along a boardwalk, a single hole was dug and the long drop went in. Sometimes the actual toilets were made from stainless steel, or they were nothing more elaborate than wide plastic tubes, but the end result was the same—down the tunnel and onto the mound deep beneath the toilet block to be disposed of or treated and recycled later. So if you plan to visit Australia’s great outdoors, be prepared. There is nothing more disconcerting than emptying your bowels and not hearing the comforting plop afterwards. That plop is the crashing cymbal at the end of a rousing performance from a symphony orchestra, an empathic conclusion to proceedings. Without that reassuring splash of water, you’re not quite sure if you’ve finished. At times, you’re not even sure that you’ve started.

  So I intended to hear every tinkle inside The Jewel Box.

  Located at the summit of Mount Faber, The Jewel Box replaced the old cable car station, which was always the most pointless of buildings. Apart from offering cable car travellers a bird’s eye view of Keppel Harbour as they made their way across the skyline, Mount Faber Station was nothing more than a bit of a joke. It was a hilltop ghost town offering tourists little else than the chance to spot a randy couple getting it on in a nearby car park. On the few occasions that I made it to Mount Faber Park, I used to get a perverse kick out of watching overseas visitors step out from their cable cars and take cursory looks around the empty, gloomy summit with confused, slightly cross expressions that always said, “What the fuck are we doing here?”

  Well, they now have The Jewel Box. With several upmarket eateries and the obligatory retail shop for any miniature Merlions missed on the other side, Mount Faber offers more creative outlets for the credit card while being fixated with being first in the most bizarre categories. Among the more surreal successes were the world’s tallest artificial Christmas trees (at 61 metres), the first Santa sleigh ride by air and the first company to be presented with the world’s only life-size cable car cabin by LEGO. I do not wish to mock these achievements. Indeed, I spent several fruitless minutes trying to find the LEGO cable car. I just struggle to imagine many other CEOs haranguing their subordinates for failing to get hold of a cable car made out of LEGO.

  But everyone wants a clean toilet and The Jewel Box was awarded “Best Toilet in The World” by a French International Website. A strangely vague accolade, in all honesty, with details a little sketchy. The capital letters of the French website were provided not by me, but by The Jewel Box. I presumed that was the proper name of the site. If it was, then I failed to track it down. If it wasn’t, why be so secretive? The lovely woman working for The Jewel Box was certainly not secretive about the toilet. Bearing in mind the lavatory was the property of a premium establishment, and my sweat-soaked ah pek attire suggested I had little intention of dining there, she might have been forgiven for any reticence. Yet she was most accommodating about her comely commodious commodes.

  “Yes, the toilets are this way,” she replied, gesturing towards a tinted glass door that automatically slid open as we approached.

  “And is it true they were chosen as the world’s best toilets?” I asked.

  “Yes, that is true. It was according to a French website. It’s just down that corridor. Will there be anything else, sir?”

  An unusual query from a young woman when being led to a toilet but I declined the unexpected offer of assistance and followed her directions.

  There are multi-million-dollar show flats in Singapore that are less inviting than The Jewel Box’s bogs. I followed a narrow carpet-lined corridor, which gave the impression of being wider thanks to the floor-to-ceiling mirror on my right. Such elaborate mirrors in a toilet usually say pervert, rather than panache, but the sheer grandiosity of The Jewel Box overcompensated and, I hope, prevented curious men from shaking off any drips in front of the mirror. The temptation was certainly there. I turned left and another sensor-operated tinted glass door opened. I was half expecting to find Captain Kirk sitting on the throne of the Starship Enterprise. Instead there were cable cars, dozens of cable cars. The extraordinary floor-to-ceiling window at t
he far side of the toilets framed much of Keppel Harbour. Sentosa, Fort Siloso, Universal Studios, Labrador Park, a docking cruise ship and the Southern Islands were all captured in one unforgettable living picture frame from inside a public lavatory. Visitors hand over a few bucks for a similar view, albeit a revolving one, on Sentosa’s Sky Tower, but at The Jewel Box, it comes free with every pee.

  I stood in front of three individual, elegantly mounted marble wash basins and stared at the encroaching cable cars as they carried families of tourists towards me. I could see their faces. I started giggling childishly. My puerile streak momentarily contemplated whipping out the little fella and shouting, “Never mind your cable cars, how about this for a cable? You didn’t know they had a sky tower at Mount Faber, did you eh?”

  But I refrained. Besides, from that distance, there really would have been nothing to see. Being alone in the lavatory, I peered into each of the cubicles. The toilet bowels were marble and sculpted like white eggs, the artistic symbolism of which seemed ironic. When I grew up, my mother always referred to constipation as being “egg-bound”.

  “He’s having trouble going again,” she’d tell my classmates’ parents. “He’s egg-bound. The turtle’s head keeps popping out to say ‘hello’, then it goes back in again. Definitely egg-bound.”

  Beside the cubicles was the soothing presence of a built-in fish tank. Fortunately, the tank was entirely enclosed. Otherwise, drunks might have been inclined to add to its water level on Saturday nights. I toyed with the idea of crowning one of the eggs, but the strategic location of the urinals offered greater appeal. Standing over the first urinal, I tilted my head to the left and savoured the sights of Keppel Harbour. Ordinarily, the only distractions offered by a Singaporean urinal are stained tiles and hilariously broken English graffiti saying things like “Cheng Hong suck you, give $10”.

  Holding various limbs and appendages, I carefully pulled out my smartphone with my left hand and captured a picture postcard of the cable cars dotted along Keppel Harbour whilst taking care of business with my right. I concentrated on not swapping hands and confusing the two.

  In all honesty, I was in no hurry to leave. The view from the toilet was quite intoxicating. But there is only so long a man should loiter in a public lavatory holding a phone camera.

  Twelve

  WHEN I left Singapore in 2006, the island was a garden city. Within days of returning in August 2011, the nation declared its intentions of becoming a city in a garden. NParks tried to sell the vision of a seamless green infrastructure within an urban landscape, with parks, connectors, nature reserves and gardens tended by volunteers all knitted together. There was talk of a green road map, a 10-year development plan to cultivate an islandwide garden allowing residents to step beyond the concrete confines and into more natural surroundings.

  Letter writers complained that a city in a garden might attract more snakes and frogs.

  Who would handle all these malignant mammals and repugnant reptiles was the common concern. I strongly suspect the answer will be the same poor sods who currently maintain the public gardens and lawns in the heartlands. The invisible people who also sweep up leaflets and junk mail because residents, probably those same letter writers, had earlier succumbed to the strain of carrying a flyer to the nearest void deck dustbin.

  Bloggers suggested that the green concept was the latest cynical government initiative to draw attention away from its poorest showing yet in the 2011 general election, the “gahmen” naively hoping a cluster of garden beds and some pretty bird-singing trees might somehow pacify the restless masses seeking political change. Even if such conspiracy theories were true (and they’re not), so what? Would you rather live in a society that aspires to create a city in a garden or a shit hole? I’ve lived in shit holes. Gardens smell better.

  Surrounding a country’s citizenry with such biodiversity is no mean feat. I struggled for five years to surround my Australian house with the relevant greenery. When I was handed the keys to my Geelong home, I was also presented with a stunning garden, a dazzling array of seasonal colour, fruit trees and rose bushes.

  I killed the lot in six months.

  Planted, raised and nurtured by the loving hands of a full-time gardening pensioner, her horticultural highlights stood no chance once I got hold of a pair of clippers. Between the soil-leaching drought and my incompetence, our garden withered and perished. For the next five years, I swapped every dead tree and shrub with indigenous flora, many of which also failed to make the cut. There wasn’t a hardy, resilient drought-tolerant native in Australia that I could not kill.

  With every frustrating weekend that was spent digging, watering, pruning, weeding, mulching and replacing the natives, my deep admiration for dedicated, committed gardeners grew. Anyone willing to spend time successfully covering a space with something green, pretty and living deserves respect and gratitude. Singapore plans to fill and link every nook and cranny in the future and the Southern Ridges provides a glimpse of what a city in a garden might eventually look like.

  So I strode rather energetically through Mount Faber Park on the first leg of a 9-kilometre walk through lush rolling hills that did not exist when I last lived in Singapore. Thanks to eight trails, three parks and two bridges, the Southern Ridges join the green dots between Mount Faber and Kent Ridge Park in the southwest (and it’s not too much of a diversion to continue on to West Coast Park). To satisfy my bridge fetish, I was particularly keen to surf the Henderson Waves, which opened in May 2008 and completed the unification of the Southern Ridges.

  After admiring some old, decommissioned cable cars being used as forest furniture (a terrifically daft idea), I reached Henderson Waves. As I was reading the information panel, thunderclaps announced that a downpour was imminent. Of course it was. I was about to walk across the exposed, unsheltered and heighest pedestrian bridge in Singapore. Rain was never in doubt. God was about to start crying. That was a popular one when I was growing up in England. Rain was Mother Nature’s way of informing sinners that God was sad, his tears falling on us all. Of course England made him sad. It was always pissing down.

  Feeling a bit like Bear Grylls, I sought cover beneath an overhanging tree above the information panel. It worked for five minutes. That was when the absence of raindrops gave way to giant globs of water that had accumulated and joined forces as they fell through the layers of leaves before smacking me on the head. At that moment, I noticed a Chinese couple pointing at me animatedly beneath a shelter on the other side of the bridge’s entrance. I dashed over to beat the deluge.

  “Why you wait under tree?” the husband asked.

  They were tourists from China. The accent and clothes gave them away. They were attired for the Arctic but still didn’t think to bring an umbrella.

  “I thought I was covered from the rain,” I replied, shaking my damp clothes.

  “We wonder why you wait under tree,” he continued, “when it is raining.”

  “Well, like I said, I didn’t realise it was going to get so heavy.”

  “Yeah, we wonder why you wait under tree when there is shelter here.”

  Yes, all right, mate. I needed this guy like I needed damp underpants. At that moment, I was eager to get rid of both. Thankfully, the monsoonal clouds parted with typical seasonal speed, and I had the cool Henderson Waves all to myself. I left the Chinese couple to point out the bleeding obvious to the next passing stranger.

  Websites and guidebooks mention that Henderson Waves is the tallest pedestrian bridge in Singapore, but that means very little until you stand on the bloody thing. The stylish structure soars. Designed, I am chuffed to say, by architects in both London and Singapore, the unique crossing is 274 metres long and 36 metres above Henderson Road. Peering over the edge, the vehicles passing below appeared awfully small. The post-storm breeze was a trifle unnerving. And that’s when I realised that new Singapore, just like its predecessor, is still “heightist”. Unless you are a victim of heightism, you have no i
dea the prejudice that one suffers daily at the hands of ignorant town planners, engineers and designers. When I leant ever so slightly over the bridge, I noticed that the guard rail stopped at my groin. More of my gangly frame was unprotected above than protected below. Ponder if you will the position of your groin. Have a quick peek below the waist and picture standing on viewing platforms, hilltops, balconies, sky gardens, in HDB corridors and the like and imagine that that’s where all the safety fences and walls stopped. That was me on Henderson Waves, 36 metres above the cars and leaning over just above the groin. One gusty blow and my groin would have been a goner.

  For anyone who does struggle with acrophobia, the bridge designers kindly remind visitors how high they are at regular intervals, having carved the height above sea level into yellow balau timber boards. (To give an indication of its size, there are said to be 5,000 timber boards placed across the bridge.) The highest point that I registered was 77 metres above sea level, at a spot where Henderson Waves looked down grandly at the neighbouring HDB blocks.

  The bridge’s name derives from its splendid architecture—a waveform of seven curved steel ribs that are lit up after 7 p.m. Each of the ribs provides an alcove that serves as a shelter. There are seats inside each rib, but the ribs provide better shelter from the sun than they do the rain. And even then, I suspect that if anyone sat for long enough beneath one of the ribs in the midday sun, they might leave Henderson Waves looking like a zebra. Take a hat or an umbrella when visiting Singapore’s curviest bridge.