Right then – bearing in mind all the caveats outlined here, let’s get back to the beforetimes when the world was a little bit larger than our little Norwich flat. Needless to say, writing about what we were up to in mid-February has a surreal feel to it- can it really only have been a couple of months ago? How can the world be so different? Pandemic reflection aside, however, let’s get back to Singapore…
As spectacular as the Gardens in the Bay were, I didn’t want to leave Singapore without getting out there to try to see some of its wilder spots. Browsing through our travel guide it quickly became apparent that some of the remaining pockets of jungle were accessible by public transport, and MacRitchie Reservoir had me at ‘long-tailed macaques’. We hopped on an MRT and headed out to the man-made reservoir – aware that most of the surrounding forest was secondary, but with the enticing knowledge that if you stuck to the trails for long enough you could get to some of the last remaining pieces of primary forest in the country.
As soon as we stepped under the canopy, I knew it was going to be my kind of place. The heat, the humidity, and the hum of the cicadas surrounding us took me straight back to days spent doing phenology surveys in the Amazon. Taking a deep breath and drinking in how good it felt to be back in tropical jungle, we picked a path and set off to see what we could find.
The answer turned out to be a lot. The sides of the trails were veiled with webs from huge Nephila spiders, and in amongst some seriously spiky trees rustling leaves revealed common sun skinks on the hunt for insects. I’d have been quite happy if this was as charismatic mega-fauna-y as our visit got (the skink’s metallic shinyness was someone to behold), but an hour into our walk a familiar sound of crashing branches alerted us to the fact that the macaques were near.
Initially I was worried that we were about to come across a group of animals that had become over-habituated, but that wasn’t the case at all. We made no moves to interact with them and they made no attempt to interact with us, instead allowing us to watch them for a glorious 15 minutes at close quarters. They foraged, they groomed each other, the youngest in the group chased each other in and out of the trees, and we got to see two babies clinging to their mums. It was the icing on the cake of a very good day, and provided some very nice reminiscing material five hours into our New Zealand-bound night flight, when I couldn’t fall asleep. It’s very much top of our list to return to if we’re lucky enough to go back.
That’s it from South-East Asia for this time! Onwards to the Southern Hemisphere.
