Pulau Ubin is the last piece of Singapore that still runs on well water and its own power supply: ten square kilometres of forest and old plantation ten minutes by boat from Changi, where a few dozen villagers remain of the roughly 2,000 counted here in 1970. The name comes from the rock. Malay quarrymen called it Pulau Batu Jubin, the island of floor-tile stone, and the granite cut here went into the causeway to Malaysia and the Horsburgh Lighthouse. When the last quarry closed in 1999 the abandoned pits filled with rainwater and settled into still, jade-green lakes, and the forest grew back over the workings. So did the birds. Oriental pied hornbills, absent from Singapore for a century, reappeared on Ubin in 1994 and were first seen breeding here in 1997; the island is now the species' stronghold, and it also carries about half the country's straw-headed bulbuls, a songbird trapped out of most of Southeast Asia for its voice.
Bumboats leave Changi Point once about a dozen passengers have gathered — there is no timetable — and drop you at a jetty lined with bicycle stalls. From there red laterite tracks run past rubber trees and coconut palms, monitor lizards crossing ahead of your wheels and wild boar rooting through the leaf litter, and end at Chek Jawa, where six habitats crowd into a hundred hectares: mangrove, seagrass lagoon, sandbar, coral rubble, rocky and sandy shore. That shore was scheduled for reclamation until volunteers surveyed it in 2000 and the government deferred the plan; a boardwalk and a seven-storey viewing tower opened in 2007. NParks now runs the whole island, deliberately unmodernised — no cars, no piped water, and stilt houses still lived in along the water.