Date: 28 Dec - 29 Dec 2021
How it started
Since Covid-19 started, I haven't really got the chance to go overseas for holiday. The borders and VTLs started to open up, but since I wasn't planning on going anytime soon, it got boring doing the same few things in Singapore. Since I had some camping equipment lying around at home, I decided to gather a few friends and go for a camping trip!
I always liked the idea of kayaking from Sentosa to the Southern Islands to camp there overnight, then kayak back the next day. However, doing that required my own kayak, which was too much of a commitment for me right now. So I settled for just taking a ferry to Lazarus island to camp there.
Pre-trip
For our trip, we needed a few items to ensure a comfortable stay. Things like tents, fire, food etc. Here is a list of some of the stuff we used on our trip to make our life easier!
Tents
For our trip, we got two tents for 4 people! The first tent (left) was a tent that I bought a few years back to camp during hiking trips. It's a Nature Hike Cloudup 3, it's designed to be a three-man tent but it's really just nice for 2 people. Having 3 people in would be too squeezy to sleep comfortably. From experience, it's a really solid tent that has good ventilation and tested to be waterproof even in heavy rain. The second tent (right) that we had was a three man tent from decathlon. My friend Lavnit brought it, its super value for money and has good headroom for up to 4/5 people to sit in it. But for sleeping, 2/3 people is the limit.
Hammock
Decathlon is a great place for buying hammock, they are cheap and good! Got this brown two-man hammock for $40. They also have a 1-man hammock for just $17.
Cookware
We used Cookware that I just bought from decathlon. Its price is cheap at just $20. But one drawback is that the utensils are plastic instead of metal. If you want to do cooking on a campfire, RMB to bring metal utensils! The plastic will melt when exposed to the direct flame which makes it way less versatile compared to metal. But overall eats still good for camping. For our fire source, we used solid fuel bought from the supermarket.
Food
As the ferry to St. John island is located at Marina South Pier MRT, we bought our food from a supermarket at Raffles City which is at City Hall MRT.
For dinner we had:
Pesto sauce pasta
Sauteed mushrooms
Foil-wrapped portabello mushrooms
Foil-wrapped vegetables
For breakfast we had:
Scrambled eggs
Bacon
Bread
I had actually also prepared a raw chicken to be cooked using the campfire, but unfortunately, we could not find any usable firewood which can give us enough fire to cook the chicken. Hence, our whole dinner and breakfast was cooked only on the fire that the solid fuel provided :(
Getting there!
After buying our food from City Hall, we took the MRT to Marina South Pier. We had bought our ferry tickets online beforehand. We got them from Marina South Ferries. They have daily ferries to and fro the southern islands. At Marina South Pier, there are actually several small shops that sell camping stuff like solid fuel, instant noodles, soap, wet wipes, alcohol etc. After waiting for 10 mins, our ferry came, we took the one that goes directly to Lazarus.
We got to the island in a short 10 mins. The ride was exciting with waves rocking the boat and all! After we reached the island, we walked a short distance and was greeted by what is probably the best beach view in Singapore. The place was teeming with holiday goers coming to the beach for a good break from city life. Even though there were many people, the place was still relatively clean. Not much rubbish was found around the beach. There were probably around 10-20 yachts parked in the bay you see below. These yachts could be rented for a few hundred dollars an hour to sail with and it comes with a captain to operate it.
Shortly after we arrived, we found a nice spot to pitch our tents and make camp!
To look for our campsite, we were looking for a spot which was close to the beach (so that we could keep an eye on our stuff when playing), flat ground, grassy (for cushioning), not too densely vegetated (as we were starting a fire) and also had trees to hang a hammock. Ultimately, we chose a spot on the rightmost side of the lagoon near a manmade pavilion.
Fun Cook Chill Sleep!
Afterwards was just having fun on the beach and taking nice photos!
Very soon, the sunset and we had to get our campfire started! We used solid fuel which made the job a lot easier. Earlier in the day, I had gone around the beach looking for some firewood to feed our fire with. I found a few pieces of coconut husks to use as a starter and some larger tree branches. Unfortunately, the wood I had collected was still very wet inside and could not catch fire. Throughout our meal, we had to rely solely on the solid fuel for fire.
The food was super good! Although we couldn't have a real wood fire, we still made it MmmMmm guud. Our cooking pot was slightly too small to fit all the pasta, and some of the ends ended up a little charred, extra camping flavor! The portabello mushrooms were so good with mozzarella cheese and butter.
After dinner, we just hang around chilling and htht under the stars. There were much more stars on the island than in the city. We could see several constellations in the night sky and Dina even spotted a shooting star!
After a while, we got tired and went to sleep at around 3 am.
The Next Day
The next day, for some reason, all of us managed to wake up before the sun rose. So we all got to witness the sunrise together and it was beautiful! Pics below:
After the sun rose and pictures taken, we continued our beauty sleep LOL. We slept for 2 more hours to wake up and cook breakfast!
Breakfast was simple bacon and scrambled eggs with a loaf of bread. Simple but super tasty because of the butter that we used to scramble the eggs. Unfortunately, breakfast had to be cut short as we needed to rush for the 1130 am boat ride back to Singapore mainland. The moment we realised that, we started to pack up our tents and left for the jetty.
The End
And so ended our lovely 2D1N trip to Lazarus island. It was a really good trip overall, lucky that the weather was good throughout and we had really nice clear skies to star gaze and to watch the sunrise. Also, the whole beach was empty after 6pm as most people headed back to mainland. There are NO lights on the island so it was completely dark out there and really felt like we were far out of the city.
Some things that I would have done differently now that I had this experience:
Bring more solid fuel. Extra solid fuel would have helped. Although we brought plenty, 24 tabs iirc, we didn't expect that there would be no firewood to burn there. Hence, I would definitely bring more next time we go camping.
Bring charcoal. I would bring charcoal next time to make cooking much easier to handle, we wouldn't have to worry about having no fire and we can also cook the chicken in the hot coals (whole wrapped chicken takes hours to cook fully). Also the charcoal can serve as a light source as well. Of course, it wouldn't have to come to this if we had some firewood. But knowing that its quite hard to find any useable ones there, I would definitely bring charcoal next time.
Bring more metal utensils. I initially only brought the plastic ones that were part of the decathlon set, luckily Ann Ying brought along some metal utensils for us, if not we wouldn't have had been able to cook effectively without the plastic melting on us.
Bring wet wipes! We almost didn't bring wet wipes with us luckily we bought some last minute at marina south pier. Wet wipes help to clean up any sticky messes that are sure to occur during cooking, and also help to wash up after a day's work.
Thanks for taking the time to read this! hope you had learnt something from our trip or enjoyed reading it!
Interesting post!