Pulau Ubin is ten square kilometres of forest and old plantation ten minutes off Singapore, and it still runs on well water and its own generators. The crossing is made in a low diesel bumboat, open at the sides, which leaves Changi Point when about a dozen passengers have gathered rather than at any set time. The mainland skyline drops away astern, tin roofs and forested shore come up ahead, and you step onto a jetty with no car behind it. Bicycle stalls line that jetty, and the red laterite tracks run past rubber trees and coconut palms to both ends of the island. Monitor lizards cross ahead of your wheels. Wild boar are common enough that you will meet a sow with piglets rooting through the leaf litter. The quarry lakes you pass are the reason the place exists at all. The granite cut here went into Singapore's public works, and when the last pit closed in 1999 the rain filled the workings and the forest grew over them.
Weathered wooden houses still stand on stilts along parts of the shore, a few of them lived in by villagers who simply never left. No piped water, no mains grid: the last kampong life anywhere in the country. At the eastern tip a boardwalk loops just over a kilometre out across mangrove, sandbar and seagrass at Chek Jawa, with a seven-storey tower above the canopy looking down on it. When the tide pulls right back, the flats give up carpet anemones, sea stars, sand dollars and the occasional seahorse. The birds are the other half. Oriental pied hornbills vanished from Singapore in the 1800s and reappeared here in 1994. The island is their stronghold now, and from December the female seals herself into a tree cavity while the male shuttles food to her through a slit for weeks. The loud, liquid singer in the scrub is rarer still. The straw-headed bulbul has been trapped out of Thailand, Myanmar and Java for exactly that song, and roughly half of Singapore's remaining birds are on this one island.