West Coast Park - the end of free carpark

West Coast Park is a public park. It is beautiful, it is not very accessible to people who do not live near it but one thing I always liked about this park is that you get a welcome feel when you get there especially by car because the carpark there does not make you think that all the government is interested in is to milk you of your money even though you are just out enjoying the great outdoor in an environment that they have created for you. Today I saw a sign next to a gantry that will soon be operational and it said something to the effect that when I visit a park I should feel joy paying for the parking. Anyway, the flowers bloomed for me and the birds entertained me and for a while I forgot about the end of free car parking at West Coast Park for a while. Most likely next week, the Wilson Parking will be operational and most likely I will visit the park less and stay home more.

Sungei Buloh

 I was given a choice this morning - to go to the Botanical Gardens or to Sungei Buloh. Without hesitation I chose the latter for I did not wish to spend Sunday with hordes of tourists preferring the wilder side of Singapore. It was a good choice for us. No doubt the morning was hot with the sun determined to scorch the earth dry. Indeed when we arrived at Sungei Buloh it would have seemed that the sun had succeeded. The water level was extremely low exposing the aerial roots of the Mangrove trees but of course that was the doing of the moon rather than the sun. Surprisingly I did not spot a single crab or mudskipper as might have been expected when the tide is low. Insects? They were on the way to extinction I guess. Only the dragonflies and carpenter bees were in a healthy population. We spotted a few hornets doing routine flights weaving in and out of a particular patch of shrubbery and that was all. Some grasshoppers and that was about all the insects we saw. It would have made our day if the otters came out to play. As it was, they were nowhere to be found. We saw a stork feeding amongst some egrets when the tide was low and it commanded the attention of four photographers who were pointing their digital armoury at the clueless birds wading in the mudflat. I did not take many shots of the stork because the sun was shining in my eyes and my camera's capabilities were limited. I did see a beautiful pair of collared kingfishers that chose to perch in the open to be photographed well. As usual they did not disappoint with their feathers of fine royalty blue. I enjoyed their presence as much as they enjoyed flaunting their beauty. Lastly, an ugly act of destruction by a child accompanied by an insensible adult marred our outing a little. When you come to the photos on spiders here, you will see how the child had thrown twigs at the spider's web and made a huge hole in the web. The poor spider was trying its level best to remove the twigs but to no avail. So it set about trying to mend the web with the ugly twigs stuck in it. If I had been aware that the child was destroying a part of nature I would have told him and his father off and asked them how they would feel if someone had thrown rocks into their house. Unfortunately, I was a distance away when this dastardly act occurred and did not have the chance to tick them off. It really isn't the child's fault because the father stood by and watched.

And one of the high points of our visit was this huge bird that I think is an eagle flying past when I was up on the viewing pod.