Pasir Ris Park


This morning we went to Pasir Ris Park. Pasir Ris is right at the end of the East West MRT line, so the name had a passing familiarity, although it’s never somewhere I’d been before. I wasn’t feeling that great: two hard days of running behind me, and we’d been out til midnight at a friend’s 40th. I don’t think I had that much to drink (3 beers and a glass of champagne) but the combination of the heat, the humidity, the standing up on tired legs for four hours, the being a lightweight… So the thought of traipsing around in the sun didn’t fill me with joy. 

It’s a good park though. You sit on the train for 40 minutes then walk five minutes more to get to the first part of the park; a large lake with people fishing in curiously organised manner, and a short walk after that takes you to a path next to the canal. It was low tide and, below the locks, we could see herons striding about (and later a huge monitor lizard too). There’s also a huge tree full of birds; mynahs, orioles, even a kingfisher. My spirits began to lift. 

Following the Park Connector route brings you to a boardwalk over a mangrove swamp. Once La Serpiente was persuaded that a boardwalk isn’t a bridge (and therefore doesn’t conceal any trolls) she was happy to walk down it and look at the fiddler crabs in the mud beneath us. There were quite a few mosquitoes around but we were liberal with citronella patches and didn’t get bit. 

Coming out of the mangroves there’s a small vegetable garden to explore, then the park widens again; there’s lots of grassy space and paths to run or cycle on, and a good view of the sea. Pasir Ris is down the same end of Singapore as the airport, but it’s surprisingly peaceful. One thing to shatter the peacd is a nearby water park, where small children splash one another while Also Sprach Zarathustra is played at ear splitting volume. No, I don’t know why Wagner is appropriate accompaniment to water slides in Singapore, it just is. (The water park is hidden behind some trees so we never actually saw it, just heard its Terrifying Presence.)

I jumped around on some steps to amuse Destroyer, then we retraced our steps. We stopped at the station for lunch and to listen to an inept busker, then home. Today I was meant to put in a two hour run, but hangover and walking around with the kids and a huge rainstorm and being exhausted put paid to that. I hope this doesn’t signal the disastrous end of my marathon training efforts. 

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