The island of Singapore is small, and sometimes it feels too small. There is no lazy island life here; instead imagine close to 5 million people squeezed into a land mass the size of Lake Taupo – a bustling city state hurtling forward. Sometimes you just need to get away.

My inner island getaway is tucked at the east end, near the Changi Airport and past the compound of unspeakables, Changi Prison. With the nearby rumbling of jet engines, and the hush of the prison fences, laying dormant like a remnant of the past is Changi Village. It sits like a forgotten corner, left behind by the continually growing, modernising city.

It is not so much a rural village but what all of Singapore might have looked like in its modern infancy - now viewed as a relic, a kitsch nostalgic what-was. It has a hooded quality about it with unpruned trees growing wild and impressive, and a lack of high-rise buildings thanks to the airport and that much of the country’s army compounds are still located here. The expansive trees give camouflage and the seemingly abandoned army buildings give an eerie yet serene entrance to the village on the ambling bus ride in. The buildings are former British soldier barracks and dormitories, also used by the Japanese soldiers during their occupation of the country, and home to many broken windowed (and likely haunted, they say) officers' mass halls. Here the heritage trees are preserved and slithering cobras and pythons can still be spotted deep in bushes – such a rare sight in comparison to the rest of the city.

A tepid crowd descends on Changi Village on weekends, but on weekdays the common sight are shuffling retired men, lazing fishermen and languid sleepy stray cats draped over each corner and beam. The beach is quiet, with a dwindling number of bumboats thumping up against each other at the jetty.

The nostalgia is also personal. I spent a lot of time here while growing up with my family at the hawker food centres; or at open air seafood restaurants where we sat on fold out tables and chairs in open lots; or six-years-old with my best friend, whose mother would take us to have nasi padang dinners, watching the transvestites linger at the bar next door.

Where the transvestites sought semi-open refuge from the country’s unforgiving mainstream is where I now run to as a weekday recluse. From the beach, I walk down the boardwalk towards Changi Beach Club, where I was thrown into a pool and then learnt how to swim. With an unwavering heat and the stifling still air, the walk is rejuvenating but also tiresome. To add to that, there are the dirty littered beaches and I’m not sure if the water is safe to swim in. The walk culminates in a pleasing kelong walk – perched on stilts out in the water – but that too is an elegy, constructed to recreate the past, and nothing like the genuine kelongs out at sea. The wooden stilt houses are almost extinct, with the remainder struggling to break even, most of them converted into fish farms.

Changi Village is not perfect, and is not untouched by the rest of Singapore, by the city. It is slowly but surely. It resembles a smudge here, a blemish there, its appearance contorting and with it, a lot of my childhood memories also feel like they are being wiped away.