Syonan Jinja

Yesterday was another great geocaching adventure with Andy.  This time the target was Syonan Jinja, the ruins of a Japanese Shinto Shrine built during the World War 2 occupation and then destroyed by the British.  The cache is called Yamashita's Gold and has a reputation of being a more difficult and epic cache in Singapore.  We set off from the entrance of the tree top walk about 8:40 and spent just over 3 hours getting in and out.  The trail was fairly easy to follow and it wasn't quite as tough as we'd feared, although I would still not want to be finding my way out in fading light.  It also helped our confidence that we met another large group of walkers, who had done the walk before. Happily for me (unhappily for Alice and Andrew) we didn't see any blue Coral Snakes or Spitting Black Cobras, as reported by some previous cachers.

The ruins themselves were pretty amazing and much larger than I had expected.  The original shrine looked across Macritchie Resevoir (roughly in center of Singapore) to what is now a golf course but the jungle has all grown back now.  We could clearly see the broad platform at the bottom (see 1943 photo below) and then climbed the stone steps up the hill.  At the top was a basin for washing and more stone ruins.  While we could occasionally hear the golfers across the water, traffic in the distance and fighter jets overhead, we were still standing in a pretty isolated part of Singapore, surrounded by jungle.  It was very cool.