There isn’t much to do here. Wandering into a live military training area, I look for the pungent and prickly durians that fall only in the dead of night.

Lim Chu Kang isn’t a big place, situated as it is in the northwest of Singapore, a diamond shaped island state only 25 kilometres by 48 kilometres. But it gives the impression of space, dotted with orchid farms and odd patches of jungle with flaming red tulip trees from Africa. Botanists refuse to call this secondary forest.