Scribbles from the Same Island Page 4

  But you must put it into context. I grew up in Dagenham. A tiny London borough full of endless, monotonous rows of red-bricked council houses. The only exotic wildlife I ever saw was on the BBC, which showed documentaries often made in South-east Asia. That could have been 10 miles from Jupiter for all I cared. The only wild animal that I ever saw was my mother when I was 17. My girlfriend’s extremely forgiving parents brought my drunk body home to my mother one night and she turned into some sort of chimera and proceeded to batter me for the next two hours for embarrassing her in front of strangers.

  In Dagenham, a stray dog could stop the traffic. Drivers would stare at the beast in the same way that village idiots of medieval times used to come out of their huts and take their dunce caps off to point at the moon. But my apathy towards animals came about after living with two of the stupidest animals since the dinosaurs looked up at the meteors, nudged each other and said: “It’s all right, John. It’s just a passing shower.” My first dog, Duke, enjoyed pissing on the legs of fellow dog owners at my local park. On one occasion, a burly man with a urine-soaked trouser leg chased me in retaliation. It’s probably the only time a 12-year-old boy has outrun a Doberman.

  My second dog, Bruno, went blind at a very young age, which was tragic. What is far more tragic, however, is the perverse sense of fun the family still has from watching my mad mother throw sticks for the poor dog, who then spends the next 15 minutes not finding any of them.

  So, before I came to Singapore, my appreciation and recognition of my fellow species never went beyond the odd nature programme and tying Duke to the garden fence and forcing him to play goalkeeper. The bastard dog still won most of the penalty shootouts.

  Therefore, my transformation has been nothing short of remarkable. I now think I’m Southeast Asia’s answer to David Attenborough. And yet, of course, there is a certain irony to all of this. Outsiders, and insiders for that matter, perceive this tiny city-state to be the archetypal concrete jungle. Like Dagenham, Singapore’s skyline is punctuated with unremarkable municipal housing blocks. There is little variety in terms of shape, design and colour and they have largely swallowed up the greenery that once covered the land. The town planners of the London County Council dug up the peaceful farmlands of Dagenham in the ’20s. Forty years later, the HDB planners were cutting down the Asian rainforests here. The only difference was, once the bulldozing had finished, Dagenham didn’t continue to breed lizards, monkeys, lemurs, pythons, cobras, the odd wild boar, the occasional crocodile and, last but not least, kites, herons, eagles and egrets.

  Unfortunately, my first encounter with a wild mammal was an underwhelming experience, to say the least. Having been in Singapore for about a week, I went to the bottom of the HDB block to make a call. Not only did I arrive in the country without the customary expatriate package (condo, car, maid, Singapore Cricket Club membership), I didn’t even have a phone. It was around midnight and I was chatting to my girlfriend when I abruptly interrupted her with the gentle cry of: “FUCK ME! IT’S A RAT.”

  Believe it or not, it was the first rat I’d ever seen. Despite growing up near the London Underground tube lines (a popular holiday destination for the little bastards), we had never had a formal introduction. But my phobia of rodents is primal. It goes right to my soul, or arsehole if you will. It’s hereditary and the fear comes from my mother, reinforced by a couple of incidents that will have you screaming in your sleep tonight. Just listen to this. When I was 11, I returned from the cub scouts, starving as usual, and my mother informed me that there was some soup in a saucepan on the cooker. As I touched the handle, a gluttonous mouse jumped out of the saucepan, having consumed its weight in soup first, ran along the sideboard and disappeared. That was terrifying enough. But the soup was tomato. The rodent, which was more Fat Bastard than Stuart Little, jumped out of the pan drenched in soup and staggered away like a hairy tomato, leaving little blood-red footprints along the way.

  But there’s more. And this one will put you off your dinner. About a year later, my mother cooked us roast potatoes one night and kept cooking oil, or lard, in the baking tray and left it to solidify overnight. This was a common way of recycling the oil and saving a few pennies. However, the next day my mother opened the oven, lifted out the baking tray, screamed and, then, promptly dropped it. You see, an adventurous young mouse allowed greed to supercede his common sense. Nipping through the back of the oven for a little tipple of lard, the obese bugger didn’t take the hint when the temperature started to cool. Consequently, the oil solidified and he inadvertently got trapped. And my mother found him the next day: suffocated, extremely stiff and trying to perfect the spreadeagled pose in death.

  Unsurprisingly, I seriously contemplated leaving Singapore that night. Living among mice in London was horrifying enough, living with their Asian big brother was a different gang of rodents altogether. I actually made enquiries about the extent of the rat population here. Such as which parts of the country they favoured, what their dietary habits were and whether or not I could be arrested for firebombing every sewer in Toa Payoh. However, they actually bother me far less now and I seldom see them. When I first moved here, there was upgrading work everywhere and now that’s finished, many have had to relocate to some of the condos being constructed out in the East Coast.

  But my run-in with king rat was, admittedly, an inauspicious start to my wildlife expeditions in Southeast Asia. Fortunately, I stumbled upon the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve after about three months and watched, transfixed, for hours as a long-tailed macaque skillfully cleaned its offspring of fleas, in a tender, maternal fashion. And I was hooked. Sublime incidents like that had a profound effect on me and the missus, who actually became a vegetarian as a result.

  At the risk of sounding like an anally retentive presenter from the Discovery Channel, I have to admit that living here has forced me to develop a greater respect for the various ecosystems and all of their components, having seen many of them in action.

  At Bukit Timah, I sat for 15 minutes and watched intensely as a monitor lizard burrowed its snout deep into the soil in a rhythmic fashion, not quite sure whether it was searching for food or merely picking his nose using an obscure prehistoric method. But then, the reptile snapped its head back sharply, pulling a worm from the ground and throwing it into the air in one fluid motion. Within milliseconds, it had caught its dinner and was chewing away quite happily. I waited patiently for another few minutes, but crocodile hunter Steve Irwin never jumped out and shouted: “Did you see that? What a beauty. Woo!”

  At Sungei Buloh, I saw a monitor lizard swim for the first time. This was a rather hair-raising incident for three reasons. Firstly, I didn’t know monitor lizards could swim. Yes, I know I’m ignorant. Didn’t you hear where I grew up? Secondly, I assumed it must have been a crocodile because I know they can swim. Thirdly, crocodiles eat people. When I was a kid, I used to watch the James Bond movie Live And Let Die endlessly. There’s a famous scene in the film where Roger Moore has to run across the backs of several crocodiles to escape. I thought I was going to have to do the same at Sungei Buloh. That’s no way to die. Can you imagine the headlines? “ANG MOH WRITER DIES AFTER USING MIDGET CROCODILE AS A SURFBOARD” — there’s no disgrace in dying at the jaws of a beast that has been around since the age of dinosaurs, but it can be a trifle embarrassing to go down to a crocodile that suffered from stunted growth.

  But the real wildlife highlight was catching two lizards shagging. The young reptiles couldn’t have been more than 25 centimetres long, but length isn’t everything. They didn’t need any patronising government campaign on love and romance, I can assure you. Playing tennis at the time, I went to the back of the court to collect some balls and found a couple more than I expected. Right on the doubles line were two little love-makers going through the lizard Kama Sutra.

  It was spectacular. I dropped my racket and sat beside them and watched, fascinated. My only regret was I didn’t have popcorn for the matinee performance.
I called my tennis partner over to have a look, but he muttered something like “Fuck me, it’ll be farmyard animals next, the filthy bastard,” and then said he had to stop by the local police post to report some pervert.

  I don’t know what he was going on about. But I was mesmerised. I’d seen plenty of stray dogs having sex on the way home from school. And I caught a few bare arses going up and down in the back seats of Ford Cortinas over my local park after late football matches. But the only fucking reptiles I’d ever seen in England sat in Parliament in Westminster. So I hope you can appreciate how truly happy I was sitting on the floor of a sun-baked tennis court observing two lizards performing an act that often requires a night out, copious amounts of alcohol and three hours of begging before two humans have a bash at it.

  After that life-altering experience, I’ve become an eco-tourism addict. I won’t go anywhere now unless there is wildlife involved. Trekking in Langkawi’s rainforests in Malaysia, we witnessed a full-scale monkey brawl as two sides fought viciously before retreating to opposite sides of the path to check their injuries. It was like a monkey audition for West Side Story.

  In Western Australia, we got up close to southern right whales who were heading up the coast of the country towards their annual breeding grounds. In an isolated spot in Indonesia’s Bintan Island, I spotted a family of wild boars out for a pint at a deserted stream.

  On another occasion, in Bintan, I was sitting on a bus when an elephant walked past the window. Admittedly, it wasn’t wild. But think about it. How often does Dumbo go past your window when you’re sitting in a traffic jam?

  In England, the only mammals that approach your windows at traffic lights are the human kind, who wash your windscreen, whether it needs cleaning or not, and demand payment when they are finished. Give me a cumbersome elephant every time. I wouldn’t have been impersonating Daft Attenborough in any of these places had it not been for the tiny, so-called concrete jungle that I’m now living in.

  And then, the little-known village of Chek Jawa made the headlines and I wanted to punch every kiasu, small-minded, short-sighted politician and prick in Singapore. Tucked away in the far-eastern corner of Pulau Ubin were the rich sand and mud flats of Chek Jawa. It was hidden behind an old British bungalow and was largely ignored by nature lovers and tourists because of high tides. Then, in late 2000, old homes of the island’s villagers were destroyed in preparation for land reclamation. And the path was open for intrepid wildlife explorers to find, well, everything. This mini-coastal forest had mangroves, a lagoon, coral rubble and hitherto rarely discovered marine and wildlife. The Nodular Sea Star, flower crabs, hornbills, the hairy Heavy Jumper spider (it looks a bit like a tarantula and I just love the name), the dog-toothed cat snake (again, what a name), the Banded Bullfrog and the good old wild boar are just some of the residents of Chek Jawa. Believe me, there are dozens more.

  The discoveries of so many wonderfully varied ecosystems (six, in fact) seemed almost too good to be true. Singapore had found a new Eden within its narrow borders. But they were to lose it again. The bulldozers were ready to go in and rip it up. The government, via the Urban Redevelopment Authority, had decided in the revised Concept Plan of 2001 that the eastern coastline could be spared for land reclamation. Do you know what the land was going to be used for? New HDB flats? Schools? Hospitals perhaps? Of course not. The plan was to create land for military training. That’s right. Either experienced soldiers would run around the place shooting things and blowing other things up. Or inexperienced teenagers, performing their National Service duties, would miss targets and such things initially, before blowing things up at the second attempt. And then the government has the audacity to brand people “quitters” for seeking, in many cases, to give their children a more wholesome, varied upbringing in another country.

  Can you imagine taking your grandchild to Chek Jawa in 20 years and the young boy saying: “Granddad, what are all those explosions banging over there? And why are there huge fences and ‘KEEP OUT OR WE’LL BLOW YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF’ signs everywhere?” What could you say to that? Perhaps you could sit the innocent boy on your knee and say: “Well, this was once a paradise, son, full of the kind of wildlife you now only see in zoos. Animals, fish, trees and seagrasses everywhere. It was stunning. Now, there are teenagers dressed in green camouflage, running around with machine guns shooting, er, things.”

  “I think I prefer it the way before, Granddad.” We should fill parliaments with children. They don’t bullshit each other. They haven’t been engulfed by cynicism and, in their simplicity, they speak, at times, with a profound wisdom. But we don’t. So we’re stuck with the middle-aged cynics. However with the Chek Jawa issue, they came unstuck. This one couldn’t be swept under the mud flats, as it were. There was considerable protest.

  In England, this would involve 100,000 nature lovers marching around the streets of Westminster with placards. Here, that is not allowed, so there were several strongly worded letters to the Forum pages instead. Sometimes, politicians here forget who elects whom. Fortunately, on this occasion, there was not a shortage of wonderful Singaporeans eager to remind them. The researchers and volunteers from the outstanding Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research and the Nature Society of Singapore just refused to go away. They undertook surveys and, despite limited resources, recorded an impressive list of species that could be lost forever. It was a death list.

  In the wake of such vehement protest, the government relented, albeit temporarily. In late December 2001, just days before the bulldozers were about to go in, the official reprieve came. The Chek Jawa beach would be left intact — for 10 years. But the fact remains that if the government then decides that land is needed, then that will take priority, of course, over some daft multi-coloured fish and some crabs with silly names that would look much better on a plate with a bit of chilli anyway, right?

  Forgive me if I don’t shit myself with excitement at the news that Chek Jawa has been spared. You see, when the news broke that the rural haven was about to be destroyed, Singaporeans were encouraged to see for themselves just what they would be taking away from their children. Many turned up, in their thousands, in fact, which was truly amazing for a so-called apathetic nation.

  But some brought carrier bags. This wasn’t a nature expedition. It was a treasure hunt. Seriously distressed guides tried in vain to stop many taking sea urchins, sea cucumbers, starfish, seagrasses and even fish as souvenirs. Ridiculous trinkets from Chek Jawa. Marine life was actually taken out of the sea and suffocated just so it could pose for a family snapshot. When the carrier-bag brigade left, the beach was strewn with dead species. Ironically, these fuckwits were killing the very eco-systems that more sensible people were fighting to save. In the current age of environmental awareness and appreciation, this ignorance is not just exasperating; it’s bloody terrifying.

  And you know, you just know, that these are the same kiasus who sit around and whine that “Singapore is so boring” and they have to pay thousands to take their children to Sea World to watch a dolphin jump through a hoop. And they tell me to visit Malaysia and Indonesia if I want wildlife. Why? It’s here in abundance. For a country so small and urbanised, it is remarkable how much wildlife the Republic still has. But how much more needs to be wiped out, before Singaporeans say: “Shit, maybe this country really will be soulless and boring if all we have left are people, handphones, golf courses and concrete.” The tiger has already gone, which is probably just as well because some kiasu cab driver would knock him down in Orchard Road. The beast’s testicles would be removed before you could say: “You know, there is Viagra for that medical condition now. Those bloody testicles you are holding would work much better on the tiger, don’t you think? You prick.”

  Of course, Singapore isn’t Brazil. It’s not Yellowstone Park, the Serengeti or even Sarawak or Borneo, but it’s the wildest city I’ve ever known and not just because of the availability of hookers. Just recently, for instance, I was at the Lower
Pierce Reservoir at dusk, my favourite time of the day in Singapore. Walking along the water’s edge, we came across members of the nature society. There were around 20 of them, all pointing and gesturing frantically towards a tree opposite them. It was a barn owl. A huge bugger, in fact. I almost wet myself with excitement. One of the society’s members lent me his binoculars so I could see right into the owl’s eyes. I started jumping around like a big kid. That’s when the missus decided to pipe up: “You really are a wanker, aren’t you?”

  And she’s right. In Dagenham-speak, I am a sad wanker and proud of it. You should be too. So put this book down, grab a pair of binoculars and explore the island for yourself. There’s plenty to see in Singapore, more than enough to go around. It’s bloody marvellous.

  THE TOILET

  USUALLY, I would not resort to toilet humour, but on this occasion I believe I have found the answer to one of Mr. Goh Chok Tong’s problems. The Singapore Prime Minister knows that his residents are migrating in droves to Australia — that financial oasis with cut-price suburban houses, cheap cars and kangaroo poo everywhere. He is trying to convince the “quitters” to remain with the loyal “stayers”, but this is no easy task.

  The brain drain is a real headache for the Prime Minister. But, fear not, because I have found the answer — Australian public toilets. These “amenities” are the most irritating, most expensive and most bewildering on the planet. Collectively, they should provide a deterrent to all Singaporeans who are considering settling Down Under.

  Having just returned from Australia, I speak from bitter experience on this one. The reason why properties there are so cheap is because you have to take out a second mortgage to use a public toilet. Every trip costs a whopping 50 cents. Only 50 cents, you say? This is the middle of the Alice Springs desert, where large quantities of water are essential to stay alive.