Getting Lost on Singapore's Wild Side

Singapore is an oasis of calm in an otherwise chaotic corner of the world. But all that order can also make a place not all that… well… exciting.

"It's so boring here," Jeroen Chew, a feng shui consultant, told me. "There are too many rules!"

So where can Singaporeans go to get a taste of the wild side? I'm not talking about the shopping mall crowds of Orchard Road, or even the down-heel charm of the city-state's only red light district, Geylang. I'm talking about the wild of the wilderness. Does Singapore even have a countryside anymore?

Turns out it does, as long as you know where to look. Kranji, a neighborhood all the way out on the north western edge of Singapore, is about as rural as it gets in this urbanized city-state. I was rolling down the neighborhood's well-maintained roads in an old black minivan with Ong Lian Beng, a 60-year-old beekeeper who was eager to show me his farm. Or what was left of it at least.

Ong had to move most of his bees and honey production to the Malaysian side of the Strait of Johor after Singapore made the law too difficult to work under. Today, his farm is little more than an educational center that's on the verge of being forgotten. He lamented the city-state's lost countryside as we drove through the farmlands of Kranji—all of them always in danger of being sold-off or seized for development.

"I think we're very pathetic," he remarked. "Sure young Singaporeans are educated. But do you know that some children don't even have the chance to see a live hen or duck? Just imagine that! They don't even know where rice comes from. Probably they read it in a book, but some of them really don't have chance to actually see it."

Ong's bee farm is located in an area called D'Kranji Resort—a name that appeared to be more than a bit aspirational. We arrived to find a complex of mostly empty restaurants. We walked out through an empty garden area so that Ong could show me some of his bees.

"It's OK, these are stingless bees," he said as we approached the boxy bee hive. "They won't hurt you. The bees for my product are different. They build a different kind of honeycomb than usual bees. The honey tastes more sour."

As we spoke, I glanced around the complex, taking in the vast openness of the place. It's unlike anywhere else I've been in Singapore. Ong took me around the complex, showing me the giant greenhouses that were as big as six badminton courts, but mostly vacant.

"This green house stopped operating but the owner keeps paying the rent," he told me. "Because if you try dismantle the compartments it would cost more money so the owners left it that way."

There's an uncertainty to farming in an urban environment. The creep of development could eventually hit Kranji as well, as it has for much of the rest of Singapore. It costs so much to own land in Singapore that running a farm isn't exactly high on anyone's list of potential careers.

Eventually Ong had to get back to work so we parted ways. I was pretty excited about the beauty and rawness of the neighborhood, so I wandered off to the Kranji Marshes, a vast swath of preserved land that's home to more than 170 species of migratory birds. The entire area is some 58.6 hectares big, about the size of 60 football pitches, but only eight hectares of it is open to the public. But even eight hectares is more than enough to feel completely cut-off from the city.

Inside the marshland, the sounds of bird chirping rode on the winds. I could even hear the sound of my own breath. It's weird how city life makes you forget something as simple as your own lungs filling with air. The only reminder of civilization that day was the rumble of fighter jets passing overhead. There's a military base somewhere nearby and the jets were out on routine maneuvers.

After about a kilometer of wandering, I found the Rapter Tower, 20-meter-tall structure rising above the marsh. I climbed the tower and looked out over the beauty of the scene, occasionally catching sight of a fighter jet making a low approach. It was the most perfect moment I ever had in Singapore. Out there, amid the old farmers, birds, and bees I found a contentment I couldn't find in the concrete jungle of downtown Singapore.

I spent about a half an hour on the tower and then started to make my way back to the marshland's entrance. Sitting there, near the path, was a monitor lizard that—I swear—was as big as a komodo dragon. I stared at the lizard, the most wild thing I've ever seen in Singapore and then took off on a sprint. My heart was pounding. Who says Singapore isn't exciting?

We teamed up with Uber and Canon because we know that even when the desire for foreign adventure is strong, it's so hard to break from the familiar back home. Uber's passenger data showed that young urbanites revisit the same places over and over again.

So what happens when you break out of this rut and head out for a photowalk? That's exactly what we were interested in finding out. Check out our stories behind some of the best, but least visited, spots in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.