I got up very early this morning at 530 am (though I slept at 2 am) as I had to bring the 42 students from 5A1 (my form class) and 5A2 to kukup for an educational trip.The traffic jam was pretty bad at the Tuas checkpoint this morning and we were delayed by almost 2 hours. We had to cancel our visit to the pewter factory and proceed to a local restaurant for breakfast. After that we took almost 1.5 hour to reach our next destination -kukup village. As it poured suddenly, we had to take our lunch at High King restaurant first instead of going to the fish farm. Most of the students finished up the 5 dishes - vegetables, chilli crab, steam prawns, cuttlefish ball, sweet and sour fish and I asked for one more dish - fried egg tofu for 3 tables. After that we had pineapple for dessert.
The rain stopped and we went up the boat which brought us to the fish farm. I was quite hesistant in going up the boat as I hurt my back but I must say the students were most pleasant as they helped me along the way.
On our way to the fish farm, we could see kukup island and the tour guide told us that it is the 2nd largest mangrove island in the world. As the study of natural vegetation is included in the new syllabus, I might arrange for one trip for the students to look at the mangrove on the island. The tour guide also told the students that most of the villagers in kukup are Chinese and that a temple as well as a primary school can be found in the village. The houses are located near to each other as they share the water pipes (nucleated settlement pattern) and as the village is built on mangrove ground, they have to raise the houses on stilts to prevent the houses from being flooded. There is also a ferry terminal with ferry going to Batam. It seems that the ferry from Singapore used to stop here but the service was terminated.
The students enjoyed themselves at the fish farm (kelong) as they were shown the fishes reared in the farm as well as interesting seafood such as the horse shoe crab -I didn't know that it can be eaten and thought that it was a cray fish. There is increase interest in aquaculture and blue revolution has been included in the new Geography syllabus. The students have to look at the need for fish farming to increase our food supply as the world population increases.
After that we went to the fruit farm and the students were allowed to sample some fruits. The students were shown interesting fruit trees such as the dragon fruit tree. We also bought some of the fruits such as cempedak( a kind of jackfruit).
Our last stop was Jusco and I was quite upset as some of them did not report on time after being given some time to shop - though they were sweet enough to buy some teacher's day gifts for the teachers.
I must say I am really grateful to the teachers who had sacrificed their time to help out in the trip - Mr Fahizal, Mr Ng and Mr Jude Ang. Of course I have to thank our humorous tour guide, Doris, who had made our tour most enjoyable.
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