Today I go camping on an island in Singapore, for free!
I had a lazy morning, and got all my stuff together, ensuring I had a good breakfast from the Little Red Dot hostel before I left. The rest of the morning involved booking flights and accomodation for Jakarta.
I had decided by this point to go to Indonesia next, possibly for 3 months or so, and then Malaysia for 3 months, as the government website stated that I could get 3 months visa free in both countries. By this time I was being concious of the fact I had spent quite a bit more money in Australia than I had originally intended! I had made arrangements with the hostel that I could leave my guitar there, with a view of picking it up when I me back from Indonesia.
After I checked out, I made my way towards Bedok to meet up with Raine, and then we both headed to the ferry point to get on the boat to Pulau Ubin.
There had been much discussion previously to going, as it was possible to get the boat if we chartered the whole boat, but normally 14 people get on the boat at a time - if it was too late, it would be 7 times more expensive!
When we got to the ferry location, enough people were there for us to get the normal price, and we heaved my bags on to the boat, which thankfully didn't sink!
The first thing we did when we arrived, was to look for the police department, so that we could announce our arrival to them, which had been advised for safety reasons. We did this, and were given advice to watch out for the feral dogs and wild boars mostly.
We decided that we would camp fairly close to the port, and ocated the campsite after a few false starts and going the wrong way.
Setting up the tent was fairly uneventful, and we loaded the bags inside and locked the tent with my padlock, before going back to look for some bikes to hire. By the time we had done this though we were pretty hungry, so we found a nice place to get some seafood and rice, and watched the singapore mainland from the restaurant.
We went back in to the main part of the Kampung, and around this point, a thunderstorm arrived and it looked like it was fairly determined to set in, so we stopped by the square and grabbed a beer, wathing everyone running around trying to stay dry. The storm was right overhead and some of the thunderclaps were very loud as a result, but nobody got hit by lightening!
Once the rain had died down, we hired a couple of bikes, and decided to head to the temple hat I had found on my map.
On our way, we had to avoid some dogs as warned, and then we came to a junction, where we had to turn left, but a wild boar was stood in the road blocking our way. We decided to wait until it went on in to the forest before continuing!
Further along the way, on the last bridge that I had determined as the landmark for the temple junction, we came across some monkeys on the bridge, who seemed to be determined to try and find out if we had food!
By the time we made it to the temple itself, it was starting to get dark, and there were some more dogs on the steps of some of the buildings, which were determined to guard the area.
We explored the temples on the other side of the road then, and decided to head back to the tent. At this point, we could see another wild boar blocking the road, so we had to wait again before we could proceed.
Once we got back to the tent, we took out the sparklers that we hadn't been able to enjoy, and used about 1/3 of them taking photos , getting more extravagent with each set - some using four sparklers at a time for drawing the different shapes.
We made sure we were well covered in mosquito repellant before retiring to the tent, and went to bed after a quick game of chess.