Taman Negara to Taman Merlion: Jungle to Metropolis

Taman is the Malay word for ‘park.’ Negara is ‘national.’ Taman Negara, the National Park of Malaysia, is the world’s oldest rainforest. So how old is ‘old’? An impressive 130 million years old. Think about that. That’s 65,000 times more distant from our lives than Christ. Taman Negara owes much of its longevity to its relatively close position to the equator. It survived several Ice Ages and geothermal disasters. It’s the stuff of legend. I spent a couple days hiking its more easily accessible routes (like the one leading to the pictured Canopy Walk), taking a wooden speedboat down its river’s rapids, and getting red mud tattoos from locals.

So that’s Taman Negara. Keeping in mind that taman means ‘park,’ what do you think that Taman Merlion means? Surely merlion doesn’t refer to the unholy union of the Queen of the Sea and the King of the Jungle. Right? Right!? Wrong. The Merlion – indeed half Mermaid, half Lion – is the ‘mascot’ of Singapore. Who knew that cities had – or needed – mascots? I was wondering what Knoxville’s would be, but then I realized that for all intents and purposes we do have a mascot (the Volunteer and/or Smokey, of course). Maybe since Singapore isn’t big enough for any kind of sports league, they thought they’d just make one hybrid, Voltron-esque mascot for the whole country.

On my first night in Singapore, I was taking a bit of a stroll down the city’s stunning waterfront promenade – which earns my nomination for ‘coolest place to spend an evening’ in Southeast Asia – when I happed upon a sign pointing to “Taman Merlion.” I had read about the mascot before in my guidebook, but never gave it a second thought until now. I veered off the road down to the bay and came upon the funniest looking thing I have seen in weeks: a life-sized statue (I say ‘life-sized’ because I can only imagine that a merlion would be several meters tall in real life) of the beast illuminated by floodlights, sitting proudly on its curled, feminine mermaid fin and spewing a stream of water from its mouth. The merlion elicited an explosive fit of laughter from deep within me – the kind that only solo travelers and asylum inmates seem to make. I swear that when it saw me, the lion-shaped torso looked almost embarrassed at its forced association.