MacRitchie Reservoir Park

On Sunday, I was in an awful cranky mood, so Eoin crowbar-ed me off the couch, stuck me on a bus, and rolled me off at the MacRitchie Reservoir Park, to do some of the walks I have been wanting to do the last few weeks. We only really intended to do a few km (just the first bits around the reservoir) but we got a bit enthusiastic and walked 14.6 km - all the way around! The enthusiasm lasted until roughly the point-of-no-return, by the way, past about 9 km my feet were starting to drag a bit.

Our 14.6 km walk took nearly 4 hours.

Part of the reason I was so excited I wanted to keep walking after the first few kilometres was that we saw some awesome wildlife - monkeys being the prim(at)e example (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha). We saw a family of macaques, a common sun skink, a heap of butterflies, an interesting caterpillar, some turtles, squirrels, damselflies and dragonflies.

Monkeys! (long tail macaques)

Turtles! (not pictured: Donatello)

The trails were really well maintained, varied a fair bit on the way around, but not too overcrowded. It was nice to get away from people a bit, and breathe some nice fresh air. It was an interesting contrast at points through the walk to look to our left and see rainforest filled with macaques, then to the right to see the manicured lawns of a golf club. Singapore, hey? The path is obviously fairly well walked, and not kind to shoes. Eoin and I counted 167 shoe fragments by the end of our walk - either Singaporeans are really into cheap Chinese knock off shoes, or just find this trail really sole destroying. Maybe I should stop typing now and put more photos here...

Lovely path with BAMBOO

Star flowers in flight. Afternoon delight. Aaaa-aaaa-aaaaaa. Fternoon delight.

One of the reasons we decided to push on and keep walking was that we spotted signs for a treetop walk, around in one of the less accessible parts of the park. It turned out to be a really worthwhile thing to do, despite the lying signs fudging distances to the suspension bridge like personal trainers fudge the number of crunches left in the set. It was a 250 m long, 25 m high steel bridge that wobbled in an interesting was as we wobbled over it. Not at all scary, just a lovely view over another reservoir to the north, and some worrying signs about what to do on the one-way bridge if you met a snake coming the other way.

View from the highest point of the bridge (well, lowest part of the valley)

After the bridge, we climbed a lookout tower accompanied by another (angrier) family of macaques, then made our way through some swampy land, through a golf course, and back to the reservoir. We found some Clouded Monitor Lizard skin, spiders, tiny fishies with shiny heads, more damselflies and some giant leaves.

By the time we got back to the bus stop, I was pretty footsore (thats a long way to walk to break in new shoes) but happy to have seen some real, non-grass green in Singapore. And happy to be heading back to a couch as well :) Saw some promising new hawker markets from the bus window (I'm looking at you, Bukit Timah!), so future excursions to the north-ish are definitely on the cards. Next adventure is the Perhentian Islands this weekend, more about that next week.