The Mangrove Swamp

Sorry for the delay in the blog posts.  Its been hard to want to write nice things about a place that is toxic to be in.  The haze in Singapore is the worst it has ever been in the history of the nation thanks to Indonesia's forests burning down.  Yesterday the peak PSI (pollution index) hit a whopping 401, which is in the very hazardous range.  So far I have been extremely lucky.  No bad symptoms and no trouble breathing.  However I cannot say the same for the rest of my traveling group.  Several people are starting to have headaches and other common symptoms, so far nothing alarming but merely annoying.  Luckily we are leaving soon for Thailand, so we just have to sit tight for the next few days and endure.

In the meantime I'll post all the pictures of the places I have been that were relatively haze free.  First up is the mangrove swamp of Malaysia!

We took a weekend trip to the city of Melaka, birthplace of Malaysian independence.  Merdeka!  We had a  fabulous tour guide, Francis, who gave us a guided tour of Melaka and beyond.  First up was Pulau Kukup Johor National Park.  After a presentation on the park by the park guide, we took a boat ride a mangrove swamp.

After a short boat ride past a few fish farms we arrived at the mangrove swamp.

We docked at the red building seen above and got our first taste of what a real mangrove swamp is actually like.  

To be honest, I was nervous about this trip.  I was expecting tons of mosquitos whirring around my head, water-snakes, large lizards, death.  I was more than pleasantly surprised however to find a mostly mosquito free environment.  Francis explained that Malaysia, until its urbanized neighbor Singapore, is not undergoing a Dengue outbreak.  The reason being, is that Malaysia is not a concrete jungle and mosquitos have natural predators that keep their numbers relatively low.  My biggest fear allayed I only had to worry about water-snakes and large lizards, but they kept to themselves and were smaller than I had feared.  However, the greatest fear for some in our group was the suspension bridge.

A couple members of our group had a near crippling fear of heights; however, they were both troopers and with a few tears and Francis' help made is across the bridge.  Next up is the swamp proper.

What first struck me after the noise of Singapore was the quite of the swamp.  No cars, no buses, no teenagers.  I had forgotten what wide open space and natural (i.e. no parkland) looked like.  It was a very serene setting, made more so by the occasional inspirational sign.

For the curious, this is what a majority of the swamp bed looks like.  Can you spot the mudskipper in the first picture?

The waters of the swamp were filled with archerfish and mudskippers.  The muck was filled with small to medium crabs.  Frances told us that in the old days, natives would gather up the small crabs by the hundred during molting season, fry them up, and eat them whole.  These days however, most people in Malaysia know that the true value of the mangrove swamps is not in their crabs but in their trees.

Mangrove trees are special in that they thrive in brackish swamps.  The salinity of the water is high due to their proximity to the ocean and most plants simply would not survive the high salt content of the water and the large changes in water level.  The mangroves have an intricate system of roots that hold the soil in place and prevent erosion of the swamp land.  Destroy the mangrove swamps near the coast and a tsunami will do much more damage to an island.  For this reason, Malaysia has been replanting mangroves to repopulate their swamps.  Above you can see a few baby mangroves planted by school children.

In addition to housing a variety of crabs, fish, snakes, lizards and other un-fluffy critters, they are also home to a few species of monkeys.  Including this grumpy guy.

A note on monkeys.  Hide your food, don't look them in the eye, and some of them don't like having their picture taken.  This big male was not happy to see us and charged one member of our group who was acting like a paparazzi.  Luckily no one, including the big guy, was hurt.  After the swamp we toured a fish farm.

Each farm has several bins that house a different species of fish.  This one has archerfish, pufferfish, and many many others.  After a quick snake break it was back on the boat for an awesome seafood lunch (the chili crab was amazing) and then on to Melaka!