Local adventurers take Singaporeans out to see lesser-known trails

From our personal interactions with several outdoor groups out there, we found that many of their meet-up events are rather large, with some of them even reaching over 150 people. We felt that the large size of the group made it rather difficult to form meaningful interactions and make friends with everyone.

Since our first meet-up, where we started with five participants, we have now expanded our participation size to about 15 to 20 hikers per hike – although with current restrictions, we've kept numbers down to 10. We have learnt from our first few hikes that participants generally prefer a smaller group size as it allows everyone to be a lot more personal and interactive with one another. 

From our interactions with our community, we also realised that there is a growing interest in outdoor adventures amongst the general public. To expose more outdoor events to the public, we started ExplorerSG to share the latest outdoor, sports and fitness events happening in Singapore.

We are also currently looking to collaborate with local outdoor groups to introduce more unique outdoor adventures and encourage more people from the public to try out and even find their passion by being in The Great Outdoors. All of these efforts are part of our overarching goal to truly make Adventure For All.

We try to find intriguing places in Singapore that are less travelled by the general public. For instance, we recently announced a meet-up event where we will be exploring the abandoned Jurong Railway Line, an important piece of local history that even many Singaporeans are unaware of. From time to time, we also introduce popular routes that many of us in the outdoor community enjoy to the newcomers.

We did – and completed – the Coast-to-Coast Trail, which stretches across many nature parks and into the heartland of Singapore. It was also the first time when we truly felt a sense of the community spirit as one of our regulars stepped up and offered to lead the hike. To put the icing on the cake, many of our participants (including both of us) who participated in the Christmas challenge that NParks was organising at that time, also won $200 worth of NTUC vouchers!

Our favourite trail so far has to be the first Do-It-Yourself (DIY) hike from Marsiling to Sembawang! We visited several places including the Woodlands Waterfront Park (where we enjoyed a panoramic view of Johor Bahru), Admiralty Park Playground (where we played on 26 slides), Kampung Admiralty (World Building of the Year 2018) and Sembawang Hot Spring Park. It was a really enjoyable hike as most of our participants had not visited any of the attractions and were thankful that we had organised this hike for them.

We will continue to organise similar DIY hikes, so that our community can experience Singapore from a whole new perspective, beyond those that are provided by NParks.

For each hike, we always make sure to do extensive research, both online and offline. We will recce routes that we are unfamiliar with and inform our participants of any potential risks or hazards prior to the hike. With that said, we do not venture into places that are off-limits to the general public.

Pulau Tekong! Well, it’s a training ground for most National Service Recruits and is off-limits to the general public with the exception of special events. It is such a mysterious place even to most recruits who have spent two months or more on the island. I’m sure it will be an eye-opener for those who have never been to Pulau Tekong.

Sure, we are a tiny red dot, and we don’t have mountains – Bukit Timah is technically a hill – but we feel that there are still a lot of interesting and unexplored places and activities out there in Singapore. This is why we started the group – to always provide new adventures for everyone to discover, have fun and fall in love with the outdoors.