Sungei Buloh

Sungei Buloh means River of Bamboo.  It is an area of Northwest Singapore that had been mangrove shoreline an swamps until about the 1970's when it was cleared for prawn farms.  The prawn farms only lasted a couple of decades and since the late 1990s the area has been designated a national park and transformed back into a wetlands reserve, and a staging region for migratory birds.

A small part of it has a walking track and hides for watching wildlife.  Hopefully that keeps humans, largely, out of the rest of it. While getting there by public transport is something of an expedition in itself, the walk around it is not and can be made in flipflops - on a paved walking track, and an elevated boardwalk through mangrove tidal areas.  It is however an opportunity to see specimens of wildlife in more or less their natural environments; a flash of a kingfisher (there are 5 different kinds), storks striding purposefully along tidal streams, an array of fish (I love the patterns on archer fish), and perhaps more exotically, crocodiles, monitor lizards, and otters.

One family clearly focused on something interesting, pointed out to me a monitor lizard snacking on a tree crab. We watched, and chatted for ages. The father told me that monitor lizards are also found in even the most built up parts of town - raiding rubbish bins, scaring the locals.  Are they really that scary? I asked.  He laughed.  Some people think they should only exist in zoos, he replied

The lizard meanwhile had finished his snack, checked the remaining crab legs for nutrition and whipped out his extra long tongue to clean around his face, wiped his chops a few times on a branch to make sure all the debris of his refreshment had been cleared away, and then waggled off in search of whatever it is that monitor lizards do after a mid-morning snack.

Four more monitor lizards brightened my day and I managed to film one doing the 'waggle'.  Don't you just love the way lizards walk?

A juvenile crocodile of about 4 feet long was the biggest of its kind that I saw (and was pleased for that - we felt safe lingering to watch it haul itself out of the water onto a semi-submerged log).  Lots of signs advise staying away from the water's edge but frankly the water's edge is only a few feet from both sides of the path for most of its length so if an estuarine crocodile did develop a sudden taste for humans it wouldn't take much of an excursion outside its watery environment to encounter them.  More signs did advise not to approach any croc encountered on the path but to retreat and report it to park rangers on.....phone number.

Somewhere in there is a cheap horror film theme on crocs that work out they can cut people off from retreat by working together - ahead and behind.  Cheap horror with very bad special effects seems to be popular on some TV channels.  Do people really watch that stuff?

I guess one could try to climb a tree, there were plenty of those but someone did try to point out to me a snake in one of the trees and I swear it must have been branch coloured; I couldn't see it.

No otters today.  We could hear them splashing about in the mangroves on the other side of a body of water but no glimpse of them.

Johor in Malaysia is only a few 100 metres away across the narrow Johor Straits.  I could hear the midday call to prayer from one of the mosques.  Honestly it is about the distance of Hampshire to the Isle of Wight (Lymington to Yarmouth) - ok maybe a little further but the high rise makes it look close.  I took a picture that doesn't do justice to the contrasts between high rise apartments, and the floating cottages on fish farms in the strait.

Out here in the Northwest, Singapore is a strange mix of 'green' and 'crumbling industrial'.  High rise residential is far enough away to be out of sight, but there must be accommodation and employment for migrants here as it was a public holiday and the footpaths and parks were full of groups of young men taking picnics.  Singapore's Turf Club (racecourse) is out this way too - the area between the club and the station that serves it being one of the most popular places for these picnics.