Over the hill

After 4 days of doing very little apart from sit around the house, I was getting stir-crazy, so this morning we went out to Kent Ridge. It was a blazingly hot day; as soon as we got off the bus we were hot and sweaty, and that was before we had to walk up the hill, on a road that seemed lacking in shade or flatness. I'm not sure how smart this was for me to do, coming off the back of a week without exercise, but I made it up without collapsing into a heap and expiring.

Once you're on top of Kent Ridge, it's fairly flat. That shouldn't be a surprise, but labouring under the weight of my camera, I was already baffled by the world and everything in it. Away from the glare of the sun, it was cool and leafy, and full of wildlife. There were tiny brown butterflies, the size of a fingernail. Bright blue birds flew between the trees. Enormous ants crawled along branches. Presiding over all of this was an enormous lizard, clinging to a tree trunk and incredibly camera-shy. Every time we took a photo it would scurry up and around the trunk a bit more, until it vanished skyward in the foliage.

There is a canopy walk in the park, which was the main reason I wanted to go to Kent Ridge. It's a slightly wobbly wooden platform, ten or so metres above the ground, wending between the trees. There's some fairly good views of Singapore (although the vistas that open up before you aren't so attractive, being mainly HDB apartment blocks or flat greenness) and there are some more chances to see animals - like a curious blue lizard with what appeared to be a dewlap. They're odd down on the west coast.

The walk took us an hour, which was frankly embarassing as it's only two kilometres from the bottom of the hill to the top and down the other side, and perhaps we didn't fully deserve to go to Fat Boys burger joint before getting the bus home and passing out for two hours, but it was hot, and in our defence we had picked up four pieces of litter on the way down the hill, and carrying some empty Pepsi cans to a bin is utterly exhausting. (It certainly must have been for whatever numpty threw them in a bush by the side of the road.)