Most visitors give Singapore two nights between flights. This is twelve days on foot and by MRT across an island rebuilt within the lifetime of people still living on it — the 1840s waterline now half a kilometre inland, the estates that put four in five citizens into a government flat, the Malayan railway line handed back in 2011, and a granite island in the north-east that still has a kampong on it.
Kampong Glam and Rochor
Arrive and do nothing about a travel pass — a contactless bank card opens every gate on the network. Then walk. There has been a mosque on the Sultan Mosque site since 1824; the building standing now is Denis Santry's of 1928, and the dark band at the base of each dome is the ends of glass bottles, donated by congregants who could not afford to fund the marble. The Istana Kampong Glam behind it was built in the 1840s for the family of Sultan Hussein Shah and is now the Malay Heritage Centre — check that it is open before setting out, because it has spent much of the last few years being rebuilt.
Little India and Jalan Besar
Breakfast at Tekka Centre, then Serangoon Road on foot. The Sri Veeramakaliamman temple was founded in 1881 by Bengali labourers working the lime pits, and Race Course Road is named after the racecourse that opened at Farrer Park in 1843, which is why the street grid runs the way it does. On 8 December 2013 this quarter saw the first riot in Singapore in more than forty years, after a private bus struck and killed a construction worker on Race Course Road; the liquor restrictions that followed are still in force and still apply here more tightly than anywhere else except Geylang.
The civic district and the made shore
Start on the Padang, which was the beach. In 1822 the sea came up to roughly where Connaught Drive runs; the cricket pitch was the strand, and everything seaward of it is fill. The National Gallery occupies the former Supreme Court of 1939 and City Hall of 1929, and the Japanese surrender of South East Asia was signed in the City Hall chamber on 12 September 1945 — the room is part of the visit. Finish across the barrage at the river mouth, opened in 2008, which turned a tidal estuary into the island's fifteenth reservoir and the first one in the middle of a city.
Chinatown and the old waterline
Telok Ayer means water bay and the street was the shore: Chinese arrivals came off the boats here and built where they landed. Thian Hock Keng went up between 1839 and 1842 with timber and tiles shipped from Fujian and put together in the southern Chinese manner without nails; the Nagore Dargah of 1828 and Al-Abrar Mosque are on the same street, because everyone came ashore on the same beach. The sea is now four blocks away. Eat at Maxwell, which is a working hawker centre and not a heritage attraction, and go before one o'clock.
Tiong Bahru and Queenstown
The Singapore Improvement Trust built the flats at Tiong Bahru between 1936 and 1941 in a curved Streamline Moderne that looks like nothing else on the island, and Block 78 Guan Chuan Street still holds the civilian air raid shelter it was given in 1939 — the only one left inside a residential block. Then west to Queenstown, the first satellite town, begun by the Trust in the early 1950s and carried on by the Housing and Development Board after 1960. The sequence is the point of the day: this is where four in five Singaporeans ended up living, and it started with a few hundred flats and a war.
The Southern Ridges and Pasir Panjang
Ten kilometres of linked ridge from Mount Faber to Labrador, mostly on boardwalk and mostly in shade, which in this climate decides whether a walk is possible at all. Henderson Waves carries the path thirty-six metres above the road on curved steel ribs. Halfway along, on Pepys Road, Reflections at Bukit Chandu marks the Battle of Pasir Panjang of 13 and 14 February 1942, where two battalions of the Malay Regiment held this ridge against a division for two days and Lieutenant Adnan Saidi was killed. Labrador at the far end keeps a coastal gun battery and one of the few stretches of natural rocky shore left in the country.
Toa Payoh
The first town the Housing and Development Board planned from nothing, from 1964, on ground that had been squatter settlement, market gardens and a reputation for gang violence. It was also the estate the state showed to visitors — Queen Elizabeth II was taken up to a flat here in 1972, and the athletes of the 1973 SEAP Games slept in the blocks. Walk the town park of 1973 with its lookout tower, then Lorong 6 for the dragon playground of 1979, the last one left with sand under it, which survived the estate's upgrading because the residents said it should.
Katong, Joo Chiat and the East Coast
Koon Seng Road has the best run of Peranakan terrace houses in the city, put up in the 1920s and 1930s for Straits Chinese families who wanted a European façade with a Chinese plan behind it; Joo Chiat was made Singapore's first Heritage Town in 2011. Then walk south to East Coast Road, stand on it, and take in that it was the coast. Everything between there and the water — the park, the expressway, the whole of Marine Parade — was pumped out of the sea from 1966 onwards.
The Rail Corridor
The Malayan railway ran across Singapore to a terminus at Tanjong Pagar, on a strip of land that belonged to Malaysia until 2011. The last train left on 30 June that year with the Sultan of Johor at the controls, and the next morning twenty-four kilometres of track bed became a public corridor. Walk the central stretch: the steel truss bridges of 1932 over Bukit Timah Road and Dunearn Road, and the restored Bukit Timah Railway Station, reopened in 2022 with its signalling levers still in place. There is no shade for long stretches and the surface is crushed stone — start at seven.
MacRitchie and Bukit Timah
MacRitchie was finished in 1868 and is the oldest reservoir on the island; the forest around it is water catchment, which is the only reason it was never built on. The TreeTop Walk crosses a valley on a suspension bridge two hundred and fifty metres long and twenty-five metres up, runs one way only and closes on Mondays. It is not a viewpoint you arrive at: the shortest approach from the reservoir car park is about four and a half kilometres of trail, the loop back makes eleven, and the bridge stops admitting people at a quarter to five, so this is the whole day. Bukit Timah Nature Reserve — gazetted as forest reserve in 1883, topping out at 163 metres, the highest natural ground in the country — is six kilometres west but the best part of an hour away by bus with a change, so treat it as its own morning rather than an afternoon extra.
Sungei Buloh and Kranji
The north-west coast on the Johor Strait — mangrove, mudflat and tidal channel, opened as a park in 1993, gazetted a nature reserve in 2002 and the first ASEAN Heritage Park in Singapore. Between September and March it fills with waders on the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. There are estuarine crocodiles in the channels and the signs about them are not decorative. Kranji War Cemetery is twenty minutes back down the road: more than four thousand graves, and a memorial carrying over twenty-four thousand names of people whose graves are not known.
Pulau Ubin
Bus to Changi Village and a bumboat across, ten minutes, leaving when twelve passengers are aboard. Ubin is granite — the name comes from the slabs quarried here until the 1990s, and the flooded pits are still in the middle of the island. Hire a bicycle at the jetty and ride east to Chek Jawa, where six ecosystems meet on one shore that was scheduled for reclamation in 2002 and reprieved at the end of 2001 after an unusually loud public campaign; the boardwalk and the twenty-metre tower opened in 2007. Around forty people still live here. This is what the coast looked like before the rest of it was moved.
Good to know
The SG Arrival Card is free and is submitted to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority in the three days before you land, the day of arrival included — before, not after; every site that charges for it is a reseller. Passports need six months' validity beyond the date of entry, and that one is checked at the desk. Fines here are real and are collected — eating or drinking on the MRT, littering, smoking outside a marked area. E-vaporisers are illegal to possess or use, are seized at the border, and the penalties are not nominal, so leave them at home rather than in a bag. Chewing gum has not been sold in Singapore since 1992; a pharmacist may dispense a therapeutic sort against identification, and that is the whole exemption. Trafficking above the quantities named in the Misuse of Drugs Act — fifteen grams of heroin, five hundred grams of cannabis — carries a mandatory death sentence, foreign passport or not, and Singapore does carry it out; it belongs in the same list as the chewing gum because both are enforced with the same literal-mindedness. Public drinking is prohibited between 10.30pm and 7am under the Liquor Control Act, and Little India and Geylang are designated zones where the weekend restriction runs from Saturday morning through to Monday morning. There is no dry season: November to January is wettest, February to April hottest and driest, and in any month the reliable pattern is a heavy afternoon thunderstorm — put the museums between two and five. Transboundary haze from fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan can shut the outdoor half of this route for days at a stretch in drought years, usually between August and October; the National Environment Agency publishes hourly PSI readings and that is the only number worth acting on. The TreeTop Walk at MacRitchie is one-way, opens at nine and is closed on Mondays, and the long-tailed macaques will take a plastic bag out of your hand if it looks like food. Bus 925 pulls up at the Sungei Buloh gate itself only on Sundays and public holidays; the rest of the week it stops at Kranji Reservoir Car Park B and leaves you a fifteen-minute walk along the road, so check which service is running before you count the hour. Bumboats to Pulau Ubin run on passenger numbers rather than a timetable, so going out before nine or after four means waiting; the last boat back is around seven and is also not a schedule. Ubin has no bank and no ATM — carry notes for the boat, which is about five dollars each way, and for the bicycle. Chek Jawa's flats are only exposed at low water, so check the tide tables before committing the day to it. For everything else, tap a bank card at the gate — the tourist pass rarely repays itself against fares of a euro or two.
Shorter or longer?
Two more days for St John's, Lazarus and Kusu, reached on the Marina South Pier ferry, which sails a handful of times a day and more at weekends. St John's was a quarantine station and later a detention camp; Kusu fills for a Taoist pilgrimage in the ninth lunar month and is close to empty the rest of the year. There is no shop and very little shade on any of them — carry water and plan around the return sailing.
Kampong Glam, the civic district, Telok Ayer and Chinatown, the Rail Corridor and Pulau Ubin. Keeps the two things that explain the island — where the sea used to be, and what is left of the coast that was never moved — and drops the housing estates, the ridges and the reserves.