Sunday, September 23, 2007

Island getaway

We had some stuff to do in Singapore, so we decided to take a little extra time and make a trip of it. Chad convinced me to go out to a lovely little island just off the mainland, called Ubin.

Bikes, too, come in "regular" and "good" versions

It takes about ten minutes to get to Ubin on a motorboat, and then you rent a bike. There's a whole network of paved and dirt roads to ride on, and plenty of places to buy cold drinks. You'll need those, because the island is as hot and humid as a greenhouse.


Then you can park the bike, stroll around a nature preserve, and climb a tower to look out over the rain forest.


A boardwalk brings you along mangrove forests and then out to the beach.

It's really a lovely place, and a perfect antidote to the intense urban-ness of Jakarta. I've been a little lukewarm on Singapore in the past, because it's mainly marketed as a shopping destination, but Ubin is great - I'd go back anytime, and I hope we will soon.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So did you guys get the old, the normal or the new bikes?

Anonymous said...

that was my question too!

ubin looks just gorgeous. sounds like a great getaway from city life.

Trish said...

I'm not sure! Chad rented them. They seemed pretty normal -- they maybe had half the gears they were supposed to, and the chains were a little rusty, but they worked.

Unknown said...

I wanna go. It looks dreamy. So, is English a language spoken by many in Singapore? Or by many tourists? I notice that all the signs are in English.
There was a woman in law school with me from there, but, I know very little of that country. She spoke English very well, so, I assume she grew up learning it.

Trish said...

Singapore is an amazing stew of languages including Hindi, Tamil, Malay and several Chinese dialects. But English is used by the goverment and in schools, and pretty much everyone speaks it, especially the younger generation. It's an impressive place -- clean, orderly, easy to get around, with a high standard of living, although perhaps a little too enthusiastic about wiping out its past in order to adopt a sort of 21st century business culture.

But when you come we'll just go to Bali, where we can do all the same things and more!