The last bumboat back to Changi Point departs at 7:00 PM. As the boat pulls away, you look back. The island is already dissolving into shadow, a green memory on the edge of the world’s most successful city-state.
Ah Huat points to a wild boar snuffling under a durian tree. "That's my neighbour," he laughs. While the elderly residents provide the soul, it is the volunteers and eco-tourists who provide the island’s modern purpose. Ubin is now Singapore’s most important biodiversity hotspot. The Chek Jawa Wetlands at the island’s eastern tip is the crown jewel. For decades, the government planned to reclaim Chek Jawa for military housing. But when a survey in 2001 revealed an astonishing diversity of marine life—carpets of sea squirts, rare seahorses, and the elusive dugong—a public outcry froze the plans.
For most visitors, the first order of business is transport. You rent a rusty bicycle from one of the elderly shopkeepers—$8 to $12 SGD for the day, helmet optional, prayers recommended. The bikes are battered, the gears often stripped, but they are the only passport you need to explore the island’s 1,020 hectares of secondary forest, abandoned quarries, and weathered wooden houses on stilts. Ubin’s modern story begins not with nature, but with rock. "Pulau Ubin" means "Granite Island" in Malay. For much of the 20th century, this was a working-class paradise. Thousands of Chinese and Malay laborers quarried granite here, sending massive boulders by barge to build Singapore’s old roads, harbors, and even the causeway to Malaysia. singapore pulau ubin
"People ask me why I don't move to the mainland," he says, spitting a stream of red betel nut juice onto the dirt. "I say: Why would I? My son is in a HDB flat. He locks his door. He doesn't know his neighbour. Here, my door is always open. The jungle is my air-conditioner."
Meet , 74, a retired fisherman whose family has lived on Ubin for four generations. He sits on the porch of his wooden house, repairing a shrimp net. The last bumboat back to Changi Point departs at 7:00 PM
Today, at low tide, visitors walk on a wooden boardwalk over a living carpet of starfish, fiddler crabs waving their single giant claw, and mudskippers that look like fish attempting to evolve into amphibians. It is one of the few places on the planet where you can see a coastal ecosystem that has remained virtually untouched for a millennium.
Step off the wooden jetty at Ubin Village, and you’ve left the "Fine City" behind. There are no traffic lights, no air-conditioned malls, no MRT trains rattling beneath your feet. Instead, there is the crunch of laterite gravel, the lazy flap of a stray dog’s tail, and the distant, rhythmic thwack of a parang chopping coconut husks. Ah Huat points to a wild boar snuffling under a durian tree
For now, however, the island endures. As dusk falls, the shophouses in Ubin Village light up with kerosene lamps. A group of backpackers from Europe share a table of ikan bakar (grilled fish) and coconut water. A Chinese uncle plays a scratchy Hokkien ballad on a transistor radio. A hornbill—black and yellow, prehistoric-looking—perches on a power line, watching.