Pulau Ubin is an island of ten square kilometres of forest, old plantation and flooded granite quarries ten minutes by bumboat from Changi in Singapore, still on well water and generators, the last village of stilted houses in a country of towers, and it is cycled on red dirt tracks, walked on a boardwalk over mangrove and seagrass at Chek Jawa and visited for the hornbills that came back to it. The island supplied the granite that built the city, and when the quarries closed the pits filled with water and the forest grew over them, while the villagers who never left stayed in their wooden houses on stilts along the shore, a kampong that the state has let stand as the rest of the country was rebuilt; the crossing from Changi Point takes ten minutes in an old diesel bumboat, low and open at the sides, and the bicycle stalls line the jetty for the laterite tracks that run past rubber trees, coconut palms and the quarry lakes to the far ends of the island, with wild boar on the paths. At the eastern tip a boardwalk of 1.1 kilometres loops out over mangrove, sandbar and seagrass at Chek Jawa, with a tower of seven storeys climbing above the canopy for the view down onto it.
Oriental pied hornbills vanished from Singapore in the 1800s and reappeared on Ubin in 1994, and the island is now their stronghold, the female sealing herself inside a tree cavity or nest box from December to April while the male shuttles food to her through a slit, the months when the birds are loudest; the loud, liquid dawn singer in the scrub is the straw-headed bulbul, one of the rarest birds in Southeast Asia, trapped almost out of existence across the region for the song that gives it away, and safe here. From September the waders of the flyway drop onto the Chek Jawa flats to feed through the winter. Pulau Ubin is the Singapore that was, kept on purpose, and the birds have moved back in.