Camping in Pulau Ubin (Again)

Singapore is a very high tech, modern first world country, but it has one island that has been untouched by urban development, and that is Pulau Ubin, hailed to be the last “kampong” village in Singapore. People sometimes visit the place to ride bicycles or camp out. A couple of Saturdays ago, we did the latter.

My friend Mark decided to do a camping trip as a farewell party for his wife Anne, who is leaving Singapore soon. Unfortunately, most of our common friends couldn’t go, so I asked Anne if it was okay if I brought along three of my friends to take their place. These friends of mine had gotten very excited when I told them about my weekend plans. Anne said they would love to have them.

So on the morning of the day, my friend Jemma went into a sports gear shop and found some sleeping bags for 25 bucks apiece and bought one each for us. I had told them that the ground would be very hard and we would need foam of some kind.

Then we met up at a nearby mall at around 4pm, bought some snacks, and rode a cab to the Changi Point Ferry Terminal.

There was a funny moment in the cab. The driver had forgotten to turn on his taxi meter and only noticed it about 3/4 of the way there. We said we would pay him the usual fare, but he insisted that it was his treat, and wouldn’t accept our money. Only in Singapore! 😀

When we got to the terminal, we rode a bum boat. The fare for an entire boat is S$30 and it can hold a maximum of 12 passengers. You can wait for it to be filled up or just pay for the entire fee. It’s only about 10-15 minutes to get to the island.

We then rode a van and paid around S$10 for the driver to take us to the camping site, which was on the seaside.

Some other people had already set up tents in our usual spot, so we had to find another. We excitedly offered to help put up our tent, which we had borrowed from Mark.

Our newfound friend Kiko instructed us how to so, and we were so giddy when we managed to erect it correctly. Kiko had to hammer in the pegs to hold the tent in place, though, because he probably thought we would accidentally pound on our own fingers instead of the pegs.

The boys looked for big rocks they can use to form a circle to make a makeshift stove on. They gathered twigs and dry leaves and then set fire to it. I was half expecting them to rub the twigs together ala Survivor, but no, they had this amazing fire breathing canister thingie. (Don’t quote me on that, I am 100% sure that is not what it’s supposed to be called.)

Once they got a fire going, they put a wire grill on top of it and Mark, a professional chef, started cooking our barbecue dinner.

There was a lot of food – pork barbecue, grilled squid, pan-fried shrimp, rice. Everything was delicious because of the wonderful sauce that Mark made. He even bought banana leaves and asked us to spread them on the foil plates before placing the food. Talk about presentation!

We also had some dessert, cassava cake and biko, thanks to Cate’s cousin who had just arrived from the Philippines and brought them with him.

Later on, we brought out the marshmallows that I had bought, stuck them on sticks, and toasted them over the fire. I wanted to make Smores and put them on graham crackers with chocolate, but we ended up just eating the marshmallows alone. Yum yum! ^_^

At one point we lay down on the grown and looked up at the stars. I think we saw big dipper, but I can’t really be sure because none of us knows constellations pretty well.

Then all the girls decided to spread a paper tablecloth on the ground and sit around in a circle and talk about ghost stories.

Well at least that was how it started, at first. Then when we ran out of ghost stories, and I told my favourite kind of scary story, Sidney Sheldon’s Tell Me Your Dreams, and used my friends’ names as the main characters. In the end, Anne got scared of Maybelle and couldn’t shake off the thought that she was a murderer, which was her role in my story.

Much later, the stories turned to real life stories about encounters with perverts, and everyone got even more scared. Honestly, aren’t real people scarier than supernatural ones, because they can cause real harm?

We eventually stopped gabbing at around 2am and decided to get ready to sleep.

There was a real toilet, but it stank so bad that we decided to get changed inside our tents instead. We slept with our tent flap open because it was warm.

It got cold later on, though, and I had to take out my scarf and cover my legs with it because I had slept outside my sleeping bag. I didn’t get much sleep, because the ground was hard and I couldn’t move around much because there were four of us in the tent.

Nevertheless, when I woke up the next morning, I felt energetic. We had breakfast and asked the boys if they caught anything with their fishing rods during the night. They had a measly haul – just a stingray and a couple of small crabs. We ate some noodles, bread, and leftover dinner for breakfast.

Then we packed up our stuff and called the van driver to come pick us up. It took him over an hour to come get us. >.<

When we got back to the terminal, my roomie and I had lunch at the famous hawker stall before heading home. I had some of the famous nasi lemak and she tried their chicken rice.

Once home, I realised how tired I was. So I crawled into bed, intending to take an afternoon nap, and ended up sleeping for 19 hours straight! I was THAT tired! The next day my roomie said that she had been a bit worried if I was still alive, and checked if I was still moving. LOL.

But even though it was tiring (cough signs of aging cough), it was extremely fun! We all really enjoyed ourselves that night, and in fact, my friends loved it so much that they want to go camping on top of a mountain soon!