Not too long ago I wrote about a bus ride I sat from Geylang to Changi Village.
That was Part 1.
Here's Part 2.
Originally I had intended to chuck every picture into one post, but then it would have become too long, too confusing, too unreadable.
So here we are.
A bus journey spilt into two parts, and, in an odd way, looking at these pictures now, how apt it is, too.
The scenery changes as the bus trundles along Sims Avenue and Sims Avenue East all the way down past Bedok MRT and Tanah Merah MRT station, but it becomes at once more spacious and sparse after you pass Simpang Bedok and into what is commonly called the Simei area.
I had thought that the ITE campus would make for a scene change.
Indeed so.
But the real change came a little while after that- at the junction to Expo.
Or was it after Expo?
Somewhere around here is when you begin to realize you've skirted the border of Changi and Simei, and are genuinely entering into the zone this side of the island all the way down to the end point of the Eastern Coast that is Changi V.
The correct name of this road around this junction is probably Upper Changi Road and which leads to Upper Changi Link.
There're a couple of industrial buildings here- whether light, or heavy, I don't know- but their buildings are big, and they aren't of the JTC flatted sort. It still surprises me the amount of industry there is in this area. I hadn't thought there would be this many factories and industrial buildings this side of the country.
From here the bus turned into Upper Changi Road East where there was the SUTD (University), a church at where I attended a youth camp with a Christian association some twenty plus years earlier, and a couple of pretty, resort-looking condominiums.
It's really condo after condo after condo here until one gets to the large, neat campus of The Japanese School, and then the bus turns into Upper Changi Road North.
It is right here, I should think, that one can consider themselves legit getting into the vicinity of what I feel was once the colonial part of Changi with the most significant landmark being Changi Chapel Museum.
This is the part where today Allied veterans in their 80s and 90s, together with their children and grandchildren, still come to.
More than once I've seen seniors in their walking shoes and their walking gear make their way over and around this museum whose exhibitions must bring back some form of memories big or small, pleasant or unpleasant, otherwise.
But before that, however, there is a stretch of (more) industrial buildings, and then, like an icon from times past- the (still standing) old whitewashed gate of Changi Prison, its greyscale walls, and the yellow and blue walls of present-day Singapore Prison Service.
You'll also pass by the entrance of the present-day Changi Prison Complex in between but there aren't any pictures.
Not recommended to be snapping them, nor posting them.
All along Upper Changi Road North the bus continues, with the entrance of Cosford Container Park on the right, and Selarang Park Rehabilitation Complex on the left. When it was that rehabilitation for drug addicts and former drug addicts got moved to this space, I don't know, but it's got to be fairly recent, I presume, for whilst the Selarang Park Complex has been there a while, Christian-based DRC Breakthrough Missions moved to Cosford about two plus years ago, and I think they've got a cafe there.
Cosford itself is a place for food and everything, as so it seems, whether it be Thai Mookata or Taiwanese grilled skewers.
And, apparently, one gets of arriving, and departing airplanes on the runway.
I might pay a visit to Cosford Container Park one day, but that's for another time.
What charms me most about this side of Changi is the feel of the rustic interposed with the colonial.
Where other places might have forested, jungly green, here one gets a plethora of wide, open space, and meadow-like fields.
I don't have a picture.
I've never been able to get a proper picture of them green fields and little green hills and house on top of a hill.
I don't know why.
Maybe because it is often here on Loyang Way that the bus tends to speed along as quick as the driver can, and the scenery whizzes by before I can press the shutter.
This time I was sitting on the right hand side of the bus, though, and thanks be to God, I got these rustic-like shots of Changi that serve as reminder of what this place might once have been.
There's a fair bit of construction happening on now- either the Terminal 5 or something else- and then right after that comes the storied building of Selarang Camp on one side, following which after marker junction Cranwell Road is the School of Commando (Hendon Camp?) and part of Changi Air Base (West) on the other.
Somewhere along here I think is what makes up part of Changi Air Base (West) then one comes to Cranwell Road on the opposite side.
Cranwell Road is to me a major marker junction on this stretch, for it is here that one has to take to get into the curve of Netharavon Road, the old Changi Hospital, and the ferry terminal at Changi Village.
This is the section that makes you think of Changi Air Base when it was still RAF.
Not so because of the location, or that there're two military camps here, but because of the road, the scenery, the humongous colonial-style buildings that have retained its architecture but are so huge that nobody knows what exactly to do with it.
They've haven't figured out what to do with the old Changi Hospital too.
But one catches a glimpse of the Changi golf course, with the classic-looking, standalone, small church building of Maranatha BP on the right side, before the bus turns into the HDB-type apartment blocks of what feels even more kampong-like Changi Village Road.
