Return to a Sexy Island

by Neil Humphreys

  I was staggered by its foresight and the overriding fact that the waterway was such a damn fine family-friendly park. Plus, the Punggol Waterway was a brilliant bus stop. I crossed Kelong Bridge, its stilt structures a nod to the town’s heritage as a fishing village, and sat at a bus stop from old Punggol Road. A new bridge link was built across the waterway to join Punggol Road but the developers retained a portion of the old track within the park complete with bus stop. I love kitschy stuff like that. I sat down and waited for a couple of amblers, a father and son, to approach, whereupon I asked what time the next bus was coming. I said I had been waiting for an hour. I perfected my confused, puzzled stare as they explained matters. I did enjoy myself.

  Not far from where I sat, a 7-metre crocodile had been spotted in the Punggol swamp in 1960, according to a Straits Times report, three times the length of the estuarine croc I had tracked down in Sungei Buloh Nature Reserve six years ago. The eyewitness’s name was not mentioned but he broke the national 100-metre record the same day.

  I followed the meandering waterway, nodding to cyclists and sidestepping children on scooters, and realised I was beginning to envy the residents. Some 21,000 public and private homes will rise up along the waterfront and by the time I had reached the children’s water play area, I was ready to see show flats. Instead, I jealously watched children running in and out of the fountains and soaking themselves. I was itching to peel off my clammy clothes, run through the cooling fountains and shoot the kids with the water cannons. But my access-all-areas pass, my daughter, wasn’t with me and I suspected that I was already on wanted posters around Woodlands Waterfront Park after my sky walk so I trudged on, read the superb heritage murals at Heartwave Wall and then decided to do a little trespassing to reach the island that made Punggol Waterway possible.

  Passengers on the No. 84 loop service feel isolated if they are not holding something tall and erect between their legs. The bus to Punggol Point is the fisherman’s charter. I was the only one on board without a fishing rod. I was also the only passenger who alighted at the penultimate bus stop. The street directory indicated a Punggol Track 22, but when the dust from the departing bus had settled, I was alone in front of a closed-off muddy path blocked by a barrier. Still, I presumed that was to keep out vehicles so I happily ducked underneath a Keep Out sign and sampled a little of Punggol’s rural farming past.

  With dusk approaching, the swampy setting proved unsettling. Established trees on both sides of the boggy track afforded the farms on my left some privacy, but they also blocked out the sunlight. Every movement in the long grass had me twitching. Ordinarily, the rare sight of a purple heron rising from a stream beside me and soaring effortlessly for the treetops would have been something to savour. Instead, I found myself producing that sudden yelping noise a small dog makes when you accidentally tread on it.

  I hurried ahead and stumbled upon an empty construction site. Large muscular vehicles surrounded me, and the diggers and trucks left tilted atop piles of sand and the area’s desolation left me feeling strangely lonely. Finally, I reached a clearing and found what I was looking for—the dam that joined the mainland to Coney Island (or Pulau Serangoon). By damming Sungei Punggol near Marina Country Club and Sungei Serangoon at Coney Island, Singapore created two new reservoirs in July 2011. The island’s 16th and 17th reservoirs are linked by the Punggol Waterway that I had just left. These two reservoirs alone will supply 5 per cent of Singapore’s water needs. Honestly, if there were another country that took such a profound long-term view of supplementing the supplies in its larder ... well, there isn’t, is there?

  I planned to break into Coney Island. Fishermen do it all the time. The 45-hectare island is a popular hideaway for intrepid anglers, but one not without risk. In November 2011, lightning struck two fishermen on Coney Island, killing one and severely injuring the other. Clouds loomed overhead, but not enough to pose a threat. Aside from a couple of guys playing with their fishing rods on the Punggol side, I was alone and quickly jogged across the dam. I was greeted by a perimeter fence with barbed wire on top and an SLA warning against trespassing that was too prominent to ignore, even for me. I contemplated a hole in the fence by my feet and had crouched down to gauge its width when a stray dog bolted through and almost sent me into the reservoir. I gave the female stray a wide berth for fear of stumbling upon any pups and losing several toes. A month before I visited, a 20-year-old female jogger was attacked by a pack of nine stray dogs at Punggol Waterway. She barely had time for a tetanus shot before hysterical letter writers and blog posters were demanding death to all dogs. On this tour of Singapore’s quirkier corners, I have learnt to walk slowly in the opposite direction. Run away in a frenzied fashion and they will give chase and clamp onto anything dangly. Just leave them be. The dogs were there first.

  Having wisely decided not to break in and enter Coney Island and disturb its wolf packs, my day was just about done. I made for the usually dull, dozing Punggol Point. But the old fishing jetty wasn’t sleeping, she was alive and kicking. The northeastern point had been sharpened in my absence, the park packed with picnickers, fishing families and cyclists. It was like stumbling upon an old folks’ home and finding all the residents twisting their melons to hip hop, swigging cider and groping each other on the sofa.

  I had inadvertently discovered the new Punggol Promenade, a 4.9-kilometre-long waterfront trail that started at Sengkang Riverside Park. I had come full circle. Punggol Point Park itself had only opened in November 2011. With a new viewing deck and children’s playground, the area was crammed with picnic mats. I peered over the spruced-up jetty and it was almost reassuring to note that the sea remained appallingly polluted, the one constant from my last visit. The sun was setting and the sky glowed in glorious pinks and purples as children ran alongside dogs on the beach while their parents poured out drinks beneath the viewing deck. I was rather thirsty myself and realised I had no change for the vending machine on the promenade.

  “Excuse me, do you have change for $2?” I asked a Malay family stretched out across various blankets in front of the police post. “The vending machine only takes coins.”

  “Yeah, sure, no problem,” said an uncle. “But I don’t think the machine is working.”

  He was right. The machine rejected my coins. Someone touched me on the shoulder. A young policeman had ventured from his post.

  “Ah, the machine’s not working yet, sir,” he said, emphasising the bleeding obvious, no doubt while a dozen illegal immigrants snuck into the country over his shoulder.

  “Oh well, looks like I’ll be going thirsty until I get back to Punggol,” I replied.

  I was heading for the bus stop when the police officer called me back.

  “The family wants to speak to you,” he said, pointing to the picnickers who had changed my $2 note.

  A cross-legged sixty-something Malay auntie waved me over.

  “Come here,” she said.

  She opened a cool box and handed me a can of Coke.

  “Take, take,” she ordered.

  “No, please, there’s no need, thanks anyway,” I mumbled.

  She brushed aside my garbled mutterings with an indifferent wave and returned to serving up food for her family.

  “Ah, just take, lah.”

  “Well, please let me pay you at least.”

  “It’s $2,” shouted the uncle who had just given me change.

  Everyone laughed. I giggled and raised the can of Coke, acknowledging my gratitude. The uncle winked back at me.

  No drink had ever tasted better.

  Twenty

  BUYING or hiring bikes has always had its problems. When I was 13, I agreed to buy a Muddyfox mountain bike from an East End drug dealer who occasionally popped into my family’s cafe to steal the spoons. When it comes to buying bicycles, drug dealers are seldom considered the go-to people. No one in Singapore ever says, “Oh, you want a new bike for your daughter? No, forget the shops in East Coast Road. I must give you th
e number of this drug dealer I know.”

  But I was poor. He was cheap. I needed a bike and agreed to buy his Muddyfox (a trendy brand when I was a teenager), unseen, for £60. He believed that I was good for the money. It’s always comforting to have one’s honesty validated by a drug dealer. When the cafe had closed one Saturday, I waited expectantly with my uncle for my new purchase to be pedalled along Gillender Street. With the sun reflecting gloriously off Canary Wharf in the background, two silhouettes headed towards us pushing ... something. The drug dealer had brought a friend along, equally scrawny, equally pasty-faced, equally unscrupulous, and the pair of them presented me with my Muddyfox bicycle. Had they handed me an actual muddy fox, I could not have been more underwhelmed. The reason they pushed the bike, rather than pedalled it, was immediately obvious. The bike’s rusty frame had long lost the strength to bear the weight of anyone old enough or smart enough to write their own name (which possibly spared the drug dealers). A cheap can of black spray paint had been applied recently, but randomly, covering the chain, the wheels and spokes, in an improvised effort to mask the bike’s decrepit state while the tyres clearly belonged to another bike (and probably had done a day earlier).

  “There you go, one Muddyfox,” said the cheery drug dealer. “That’ll be 60 quid then, mate.”

  I peered across at my uncle uneasily.

  “Er, it’s not really in the best condition,” I mumbled.

  “But it’s a Muddyfox, mate,” he continued, even more upbeat.

  “Where exactly? It just looks like a spray-painted old bike.”

  “Nah, mate. I wouldn’t mess you about. That’s a Muddyfox frame. That’s a 350 quid frame easy.”

  Eager to own a Muddyfox bike and knowing I lacked the financial means to buy a new one, I accepted and my uncle kindly loaned me the money. (He didn’t ask me to pay it back. He knew I’d been lumbered with a heap. Still, I hope he doesn’t read this and tap me for £60 now.) I spent weeks and all of my part-time earnings returning the wreck to a roadworthy state. No sooner had I restored the bike, someone climbed over our back fence and nicked it. The Muddyfox was stolen under the cloak of darkness, which made sense. No one would have gone near the bloody thing in daylight.

  And I now required pedal power to explore new terrain in Tampines, preferably without the assistance of a drug dealer.

  I crossed Tampines Avenue 7 and poked my head in the bicycle hire kiosk in front of Sunplaza Park. A helpful woman pointed me towards some bikes. They were rusty and they were too small. I could hear my uncle’s wallet faintly squealing.

  “That bike is too small for me, surely,” I queried, staring down at the standard-sized bike frame.

  “No, no, it’s OK, come, see,” the woman insisted, calling her repairs guy to adjust the frame to suit my long frame. He raised the seat so high I risked looking like a clown on a unicycle. With an oily spanner in hand, he gestured for me to test the circus vehicle. The seat was indeed just about high enough from the ground, but I was elevated so far above the rest of the bicycle that I expected passers-by to throw me some skittles to start juggling.

  “See, it’s OK, right? That bike fits,” said the proprietor triumphantly. “Actually these bikes can buy, if you want, second-hand, only $60.”

  I gave the bike a polite examination, picking at the rust on the handlebars with my fingers.

  “This bike is not made by Muddyfox, is it?”

  “Muddy who?”

  “It doesn’t matter ... No, I have a bike. I’ll just take this one to get around Tampines for now.”

  With my gangly frame balanced precariously on the ridiculously raised seat, I pedalled slowly through the welcome drizzle of the quiet Sunplaza Park as I made my way towards the Tampines Mountain Biking Trail. To my surprise, I had to sign in with a security guy to use the trail, giving my name, contact details and the time I arrived. A rugged course for the reckless rider surely beckoned at the Tampines Mountain Biking Trail, a mighty mountain for the muscular biker.

  It was a hillock.

  Or perhaps even a grassy knoll. Either way, it was obviously man-made, manufactured, manicured and micro-managed in that uniquely Singaporean way. There were popular biking courses near my Geelong home within the quite wonderful You Yangs mountain range, where Mad Max, Ghost Rider and The Pacific were filmed. Course rules and regulations usually consisted of a park ranger pointing to the Flinders Peak summit of the You Yangs and saying, “That’s the top. When you get there ... cycle to the bottom again. Is that too complicated for a Pom?”

  At the Tampines Hillock Biking Trail, on the other hand, there was a long-winded list of dos, don’ts, definitely-do-nots and expect-to-die-if-you-dos. There were 21 trails, colour coded to indicate their level of difficulty, with marvellous extravagant names like Sideways, Cadaver and Slingshot. It all sounded rather X Games until I glimpsed the highest point of the trail. My daughter has rolled down steeper grassy inclines at public parks.

  Still, Tampines offered the island a mountain biking trail more than it did the last time I lived here. The trail has been around for enthusiasts since around 2008, if not earlier, but was extensively improved in early 2010, with a BMX dirt track added next door for the Youth Olympic Games held in August 2010. It was better than nothing. And the track exceeded my cynical expectations. Aware of my rusty circus bike’s limitations, I meandered along a green trail for beginners, which was flat and had some traction. It was called the Bunny Loop. Flanked by trees and cooled by the drizzle, I essentially pedalled around the outside perimeter of the entire course, a sensible introduction, but I fancied something tougher and moved inwards and upwards via the blue square trails. These blue bad boys combined steep slopes, narrow tracks and poor traction. They certainly got the blood pumping, not to mention the sphincter.

  I took out Deep Purple, The Eel and Sideways before having a crack at the Upper Hamburger. The muddy paths were little wider than my tyres, bordered by jagged rocks that my cheap hired bike was ill-equipped to handle. I left the path on more than one occasion, finding myself in a muddy ditch or long grass. But I never left the bike. I was proud of maintaining that idiotic tradition. As I struggled to stay with the narrow, sludgy zigzags of the Upper Hamburger trail, I thought of my younger self trying to stay with gravity behind the Dagenham Heathway shopping mall. There was a long, steady descent from the mall beside the public footpath, which offered BMX bandits both a shortcut and an adrenaline rush. It gave me neither. As my friends successfully navigated the slope, my pedals got away from my feet. As I slalomed my way between trees like an Olympic skier, I left the shopping centre, flew through council estate streets for the next five miles, ran over dogs and sent dithering old ladies into their shopping trolleys. But I never left the bike.

  I wasn’t in a hurry to leave the biking trail. I bounced around, on and off rocks, paths, trenches, ditches and divots for at least an hour. The track was no mountain but it was no molehill either, and Singapore’s older towns need such quirky outdoor diversions. Space may not always permit, but Tampines is proving to be something of an environmental pioneer in its ability to incorporate new interactive spaces within its already bustling borders. Sengkang and Punggol have an easier task. They have carte blanche. Entire eco-friendly, sustainable towns can mushroom around new waterways. But Tampines is providing solutions for a more intriguing dilemma for new Singapore— finding ways to sex up an older estate.

  The Tampines Mountain Biking Trail provided the workout. Tampines Eco Green provided the warm-down. Just the other side of Tampines Avenue 12, the Eco Green was opened in April 2011 and is another of those enterprising environmental projects often rewarded with a shrug. So rather than explain what it is, I’ll point out where it is. To the north of Tampines Eco Green are more than 30 apartment blocks nestled around Paris Ris Drive 1. To the northeast lie at least another 50 blocks while the housing estates around Tampines Avenue 9 dominate to the south. Beyond the biking trail in the west are the heavy industries and retail giants a
round Tampines Link. At the quiet centre of all that lot is a non-intrusive 36.5-hectare park showcasing the natural habitats of secondary rainforest, freshwater ponds and marshes, which have encouraged more than 70 bird species and other wildlife to the park. Wildlife is protected, nothing is lit after dark, the park furniture is recycled and, best of all, the eco-toilet is a close cousin of the Aussie long drop. All of this is across the road, literally, from tens of thousands of families and apartments.

  Existing spaces are being turned green in new Singapore. When I last returned to my childhood town of Dagenham, former green spaces at the end of streets and terraced rows had been turned into one- and two-bedroomed apartments. When I was young, those greens were invaluable. They provided boys with a venue to kiss girls. If a Dagenham guy wants to get it on now, he’s got to buy a two-bedroomed apartment first (which is what Singaporean guys have been doing for years). The roles have reversed. The sex-starved have nowhere to go in Dagenham (and yet, strangely, those pregnancy rates refuse to stagnate) while couples now have Tampines Eco Green. Singapore’s government will stop at nothing to massage those fertility figures.