Waterworld

The people of Pohnpei, an eastern Pacific member of the Federated States of Micronesia, tell this of how their island home was created. A powerful man gathered his companions and, in a canoe, sought for new lands where the sea met the sky. He was directed towards a tiny sliver of land, hardly large enough for habitation. They summoned rock and earth to build their new abode, but barely did the island grow than the sea gnawed away at it. Dismayed, they turned to Katengenior, Stabiliser of the Shore, who raised a reef around the island to keep out the ocean's clawing fingers. Still, the earth was loose. The men sought the succour of Katenanik, who fastened mangroves to the shoreline. The earth held, and thus was Pohnpei born.

Below: Waterworld, if ever there was one.

The enduring qualities of mangroves do not diminish over the countless blue leagues between Pohnpei and Singapore. But other waves approach more formidably than Neptune's. Men call these powers Progress and Development. In the shadow of their imminent landfall, we hurried to visit that northern stretch of mangroves known as Khatib Bongsu.

I first got to know about Khatib Bongsu while looking up park connectors on the NParks website. A couple of weeks ago, another fortuitous search online led me to the Kayak Asia page. We quickly booked ourselves on the Paddle Sungei Khatib Bongsu 1 trip, abbreviated (in age-old Singaporean fashion) to the more manageable SKB1. A kayak seemed the best means to explore a mangrove forest on the fringes of land used for military training.

Our stiffest challenge was hauling ourselves up for a six-thirty start on Sunday. The start point was Sembawang Park, just short of two kilometres west of the mangroves we were due to visit. We learnt that SKB1 was really the Sungei Simpang estuary, and that the actual Sungei Khatib Bongsu (SKB2 in logistical parlance) was further east. It was all the same, as distant plans for Simpang New Town or even for another estuarine dam threaten both areas.

Below: kayaks line up behind the start line in the sand, Sembawang Beach

The trip was not a guided tour as we thought it would be. Seven plastic cases containing information sheets were scattered throughout the mangroves, numbered accordingly on a map distributed to us before we set off. We paddled as a group to the river mouth, where we were dispatched in smaller groups upriver, each of us assigned to a particular number on the map to prevent overcrowding. It suited us perfectly, affording us the opportunity to explore the area at our leisure.

Below: room for leisure on the trip.

We spent close to two and a half hours in the mangroves, inching gingerly in and out of narrow mangrove channels, ducking low overhanging branches and keeping a lookout for (what turned out to be very shy) wildlife. The calm before us was beguiling. (Only wakeboarders were determined to break the silence, their roaring speedboats tearing up the tranquility and demonstrating the wave-breaking properties of mangrove trees.) It was hypnotic watching the ripples widen into silken oblivion as our kayak glided on the water. We could hear the gentle parting of the water. Sometimes they seem to whisper as breezes delight when they nestle in the leaves. At other times, they tinkle teasingly like distant elfin bells. Water, earth and sky were woven into a single elemental drapery, held together by intricate mangrove braids of root and branch.

Above, from top to bottom: a fig tree lets its hair down; two green worlds meet at the prow.

Below: can you find the spot of bother in what would otherwise pass for an imperturbably serene picture?

Below: make-believe mangrove Maori.

There could be no sharper contrast to popular perceptions of mangroves. In these accounts, mangroves are pestilential wastelands, known first as swamps before they are acknowledged, an obscure second, as forests. Civilisation, so it goes, has no place in this terra nullius with neither past nor future and which only await the transformative touch of an excavator. These same green shores once hid tigers and crocodiles, and today still attract interminable clouds of biting insects, as many Singaporean men who have spent time there during their reservist training can attest. As morning waned, and the harsh noon sun climbed, the Sungei Simpang estuary seems to turn into a featureless expanse of green and brown desolation.

However, the remains of docks and abandoned ponds we saw there told a different story. The people from the nearby Kampong Wak Hasan, cleared in 1998, once thrived on the bounty from this labyrinthine waterland - fishes, shrimps, shellfish, timber and fuel. And for even longer, the mangroves were home to nomadic sea-people known as Orang Seletar, who have today profited little from the claims made on their land by developers, and on their heritage by national identities.

Below: what used to be Kampong Wak Hasan, now reclaimed by the jungle, the sea and the Singapore Armed Forces.

Fetid or fecund, mangroves such as Sungei Simpang, or SKB1, are an integral part of our natural heritage. Unfortunately, they stand on the verge of erasure. Their beauty, forgotten, endures nevertheless. The grandeur of mountains is immediate, that of deserts and grasslands striking in their stark duochromes. These places awe from afar. But the beauty of mangroves is not in scale, and is yielded only to those who look closely.

Above: from top to bottom, what wildlife we could capture in photographs: a grey heron, a common sandpiper and a common sloth.