Remembering – This little island on the Straits of Johor is accessible from Changi Jetty via a short 15 minutes boat ride back in time to an island jetty, and village beachhead preserved for its laid back past and less than ideal maintenance. Countless school boys, civic groups, curious city-slickers and committed adventurers have spent time on the island in one guise or another. Here we see a deliberate attempt to preserve our not-so-distant past rural, and for the individuals to retrace their our timelines to the past. This would have been 40 years since I first stepped onto Pulau Ubin.
Arrival – A sense of anticipation and arrival is perhaps the outstanding which recalls this sense of timelessness and nostalgia – very little has changed in the way the boats usher would be travelers back in time to the bum-boats – little features like a strict limit to the number of passengers and the somewhat nonchalant contentment of the ageing weathered boatmen. It was as if, their lot was not an enforced one, but a comfortable and almost idyllic choice.
Vestiges of the past – the real island life
We will not know what the real island-life of Ubin was, except for the select few who lived, worked, loved and made it their home, willingly or otherwise. Even those of us who made school-boy forages to its northern beaches at Kampong Noordin would have but tasted a glimpse of the inner workings of a community who chose to live apart.
Nature – The natural gentrified beauty of Ubin today, like Chek Jawa and the working ponds and pools brought to idyllic fallow, is unlikely to be the reason why we return to Ubin. Instead, we will return to remind ourselves of a time when the country was young, when simple was not contrived but a way of living, when frugality was fraught with self-denials, compromises and postponed dreams, and resilience was a hope for a better tommorow.
Well, tommorow is here. What say we?