Camping in Pulau Ubin

Last Feb 11, we were invited to spend Mark’s birthday on an overnight camping party at Pulau Ubin island. Apparently it’s his thing to go camping and fishing and grilling. I’ve always wanted to try camping, so I immediately accepted Anne’s invite. We met up at the Changi Point Ferry Terminal where we rode a bumboat to get to the island.

We rode a van to the camp site, a strip of beach. We don’t have any gear, so it was lucky for us that Mark’s friends have enough tents to accomodate us. They set up seven tents. My tentmate was Wilma.

 

Mark quickly got to work setting up a small fire over which he grilled some barbecues and shrimp kebabs.

When it grew dark, he strapped on a flashlight around his forehead and since that wasn’t enough,  they also tied up a battery-powered lamp over the grill to help him see the cooking, and Ervyn also shone my flashlight’s beam on the grill.

When Mark was done grilling the first two batches of food, he called us to dinner. Before we dug in, though, Anne played some videos that she got from Mark’s family members. How sweet.

The food was really delicious. I loved the rich barbecue sauce especially. I told Mark it tasted like the one from RVY, my favorite barbeque place when I was a student.

I lost count of how many sticks of meat and seafood I ate. After that we had Wilma’s leche flan for dessert. She said it was her first time to make it, but it tasted really good.

After dinner, Mark and his friends headed to towards the ocean to try to reel in some fish. They caught quite a few throughout the night – catfishes, eels, and stingrays. They cooked all these and ate them with their liquors.

Meanwhile, the rest of us non-fishers stayed on the beach. Some played cards, others danced, and me? I sat by the light of the battery-powered lamp and read Tina Fey’s nonfiction book Bossypants on my kindle. Nerd alert!

They invited me to dance but I was not in the mood for it because I was so sluggish from all the food I had eaten. I only put away my kindle when they (the dancers group) decided that they wanted to shoot a horror film.

Around two years ago, when Ervyn, Cate and I were jogging in a park which looked like a forest, it gave us the crazy idea to make a Blair Witch-esque “short film.” They wanted to do it again this time.

So we sat on the sand in a circle around a lamp and batted around ideas for our supposed storyline. I wanted one this time, because the first time, we did didn’t actually have any, it was all just improv hence there really wasn’t a plot, just a lot of running and screaming.

Slowly, a story took form, and we decided to run with it. Here is the finished product. It took me a while to find the right music for it. It really is an essential part of a film, I have to say.

After wrapping up the shoot we sat around and talked before we turned in for the night. I thought the sand would be soft to sleep on but I was wrong. No wonder Anne brought a folding mattress.

Also I thought it would be very cold and there would be mosquitoes so I brought a turtleneck sweater and a thick blanket, but it was actually warm inside the tent (thought the wind was pretty cold outside) and there were no mosquitoes at all.

After struggling to find a comfortable position, I managed to fall asleep.

The next morning I woke up to the sound of people talking outside. I stumbled out of my tent and found them preparing breakfast. We had noodles, milk tea, leftover barbeques and grilled freshly caught catfish. The fish tasted really great when paired with soy sauce, calamansi, tomatoes and onions.

It drizzled a bit, but then it stopped. Once again feeling sluggish from the food I ate, I crawled into one of the tents and had a very refreshing sleep because we had opened all the flaps this time, letting the wind in.

We left at around noon, riding a van back to the jetty where we boarded a bumboat back to the mainland.

I really enjoyed myself. I’m glad we were invited! 🙂