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“So, how about moving to Singapore?” It’s a sentence that has been uttered to many partners and potential trailing spouses. I’d venture many of them then dust off the old school atlas to find out more about the place. “Not very big, is it?” “Is it part of
One question I don’t remember asking is, “Is there anything living there that can kill me?” You know, things lurking in dark corners, or under loo seats.
My husband’s recent dalliance with the shockingly ugly and extremely dangerous Synanceia verrucosa has made me question just how benign this little island really is.
In the damp corner of Northern England that I call home, nature won’t tend to harm you. So, on Morning One – a newlywed in a serviced apartment in a foreign city – I was dutifully sorting through some laundry when out jumped a spider. The Red Dot’s equivalent to the Red Back, perhaps? I’ve watched Arachnophobia; it didn’t have a good effect on me. Nor did this! (Now, almost a decade on, I rather admire them; in fact, I egg them on – with their legion of loose-bowelled gecko pals – to gobble up as many mosquitos as possible.)
My first encounter with a python was in Macritchie, with my in-laws. We were ambling along the boardwalk when I noticed that the large log in the water was swimming, fairly quickly, towards the path ahead of us. It heaved itself out and slowly slithered up a tree and along a large overhang – which we then had to walk beneath. There were strong memories of “Trust in Me” from The Jungle Book as we bolted past.
When we later moved into a house, the snake stories multiplied: there weren’t just pythons to be aware of, but cobras, paradise tree snakes (which fly, ye gods), Oriental whip snakes (rather beautiful), pit vipers and the elusive blue Malayan coral snake – the apparent cause of a rare death due to a snake bite in Singapore, over 25 years ago.
For an arachnaphobe like me, more worrying than a cobra in our garden was the tarantula in the study. It was rescued by my rather braver husband and taken back to the jungle (and I will admit that it grows in size with each retelling). Apparently, the worst a Singapore tarantula can do is bring you out in a rash, though I’m really not keen on proving our place at the top of the food chain unless really necessary. Karma and all that.
Among the nastiest things in Singapore is one that most people will be blissfully unaware of: the aforementioned Synanceia verrucosa, or stonefish – the most venomous fish in the world. They live off Sentosa and, we discovered for ourselves, Pulau Ubin. Treading on one isn’t immediate agony – according to my husband, it was more like treading on a drawing pin; that is, until the venom takes hold; at that point, it’s excruciating. Stories of victims asking for their feet to be amputated ring true.
One of our less sympathetic friends found that his Google research provided the perfect jibe about hubby’s weight: “When the stonefish is disturbed, it injects venom proportional to the amount of pressure applied to it.” No wonder that my six foot, three inches and well-built man was in need of morphine and two nights in hospital. (The bowl-of-searing-hot-water trick, by the way, is not only soothing; it also localises and destroys the venom.) Google will tell you this, too: a stonefish sting can be fatal. But it’s unlikely to happen here – not with the excellent hospitals and ready availability of antivenom.
Perhaps it isn’t a bad thing thing that somewhere as clean, sanitised and safe as Singapore can occasionally remind us that it is also home to some rather unfriendly natives. It literally is a jungle out there.