Pulau Ubin

The bumboat crossing from Changi Point Ferry Terminal takes about ten minutes and the island appears gradually as a low green ridge on the horizon, the kind of approach that makes you aware you are leaving the city behind.

Pulau Ubin is Malay for Granite Island, and the evidence of its geological purpose is visible everywhere: the disused quarries filled with still water, their stepped sides overgrown with secondary forest, are the most dramatic landscape features and the ones that most clearly connect the island to its 19th-century history when granite from here built Horsburgh Lighthouse and the Singapore-Johor Causeway.

The village centre at Ubin Town near the jetty is small enough to walk across in five minutes but functions as a complete service settlement with bicycle rental shops, provision shops and a Chinese temple whose opera stage is one of only three surviving in Singapore, a living cultural presence rather than a museum piece.

Most visitors arrive by bicycle and the network of dirt paths through the island's interior rewards the effort: the rides range from the flat gravel paths near the village to the more demanding trails through secondary forest that lead to Ketam Mountain Bike Park in the island's north-west.

Chek Jawa at the island's south-eastern tip is the destination that most clearly illustrates why the island was saved from development: the 100-hectare wetlands include a coral reef that was a reef 5,000 years ago, a mangrove boardwalk, tidal flats and a seagrass lagoon, an unusual concentration of marine ecosystems that supports sea hares, octopuses, starfishes, cuttlefishes and nudibranchs.

The debate over Chek Jawa's fate in 2001 — when the government postponed reclamation after a public outcry and a volunteer biodiversity survey — became a defining moment in Singapore's environmental movement and is still cited as evidence that the island occupies a special place in the country's environmental consciousness.

The Hornbill Conservation Project has successfully re-established the Oriental pied hornbill on the island after the species was declared extinct in Singapore, using artificial nest boxes monitored by cameras to track breeding success, a quiet conservation achievement that visitors to the island's forested areas may witness firsthand.

The island receives an estimated 300,000 visitors per year according to the National Parks Board, which manages the island today — a number that would have been unthinkable during the quarrying era when the island held thousands of residents but is now the measure of how thoroughly the island has been reimagined as a nature and heritage destination.

There is no public transport on the island; the only way to get around is by bicycle rented from the village, on foot, or by hiring one of the small local coach buses that serve the scenic spots, an absence of infrastructure that is itself part of the appeal — the island moves at the pace of a bicycle wheel.

Chek Jawa's combination of coral reef, mangrove, tidal flats and seagrass lagoon within a single accessible site is ecologically unusual and the boardwalk makes it possible to observe multiple marine ecosystems without specialist equipment.

The island is one of the last places in Singapore where a pre-urban landscape — disused quarries, secondary forest, traditional kampung — can be experienced without significant modification, a living counterpoint to the city that surrounds it.

The Hornbill Conservation Project demonstrates successful species recovery in an urban context and the hornbills themselves are visible to patient observers in the island's forest areas.