Long yet fulfilling day at Ubin

It has been ages since I've ever explored the terrestrial side of Ubin. The last trip was with Ron, July, Ivan and Justin more than 1.5 years ago.


Finally, I kicked myself out of the bed with sleepy heads to get to Ubin early in the morning before 9am. For what? It is to cycle with Pamela and Ben.

Sharing about our shores at NIE Learning Festival

July invited me earlier on to give a talk about our shores in Singapore for NIE Learning Festival 2009. I readily agreed since I thought it's a good opportunity to share about our lovely as well as secret-filled shores to friends in NIE.


The title is "Secret shores of Singapore", as adapted from Ria's original talk. I also made use of many of her slides for the talk as well as I can't resist not using her colourful slides.

Tuas: Journey to the west

Tuas is home to an array of beautiful gardens at differents parts of the shore. It is also the only shore in the west that I've ever visited. Considering almost all of our western coastline have been urbanised or reclaimed, it makes me all the more think that Tuas is a very special shore.


At Merawang beacon off Tuas, we spent a short 20 minutes exploring marine life around there because the tide was already quickly coming back.

Lovely marine garden at Tuas

Schering Plough is very fortunate to have a lovely marine garden at their very own backyard. With their dedicated volunteers who monitors the seagrassers at this garden, a team of us joined along to take a look at this fascinating shore that escaped reclamation.


The furthest and also the nicest part of the garden is marked by the green beacon on the rocky outcrop. In order to get there, one has to cross the deeper waters that is usually below knee deep if we know when the tide timings are.

Charming Chek Jawa

Chek Jawa is very charming to me. After working many times on it from 2007 to 2008 for the Chek Jawa mortality and recruitment project, this shore has earned a special place in my heart.

In what way is it special and charming? It is both the ecosystems as well as the spectacular landscapes you get when you are there. Seldom you get places in Singapore where one can escape from sights of civilisation or urbanisation. It's just peaceful to immense myself in the serenity and tranquility of Chek Jawa.


Yesterday I was back at CJ to do a followup on my check of the shore and I caught this special sunrise scene where the sky seems to be divided clearly into half! I did not doctor this photograph to get this effect.

Back to Little Sisters after two years

After two years of absence, I'm finally back to Little Sisters with a bunch of friends. I still remember the totally black frogfish found back then.


After three consecutive trips with no sunrise to look at, today's trip was splendid for its sunrise and good weather.

More living corals at Tanah Merah

After getting distracted by the new stretch of sandy shore, we finally set foot to where the living corals can be found. As previously blogged, Tanah Merah is probably the best shore to find corals in mainland Singapore.


And we are amazed at the number of corals and their growth size found on this shore! At the beginning, there were quite a number of different types of the Pore corals (Porites sp.). They can come in boulder shape and branching forms.