Image 3.1 Tanjung Balai Karimun (Photo from Shutterstock.com)

Image 3.2 Icon of Tanjung Balai Karimun Island (Graphic Image by Fidelia Beatrice)

Tanjung Balai Karimun around 35 km southwest of Singapore. It is a 1 and a half-hour ferry ride from Harbourfront, Singapore. It has a land space of 1.524 km², with 23 islands in this province with a 229,194 population count as of 2017. Most of which are Chinese Peranakan and Malays.

The major occupation ranges from agriculture to working at Saipem (an Italian company Shipyard), with the majority being fishermen.

Image 3.3 Occupations of Tanjung Balai Karimun (Agriculture photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels, Shipyard photo from Saipem’s Website, Fishermen photo by Agustin Piñero from Pexels)

This island is also famous for the Bak Kut Teh and fresh, affordable seafood. Sadly, it does not have any mall, Starbucks, Macdonald, or any cinema. The only fast food we have, which only came in very recently, is KFC. So, there is actually not much to do there, other than the seafood and beach.

Karimun also forms part of the Batam-Bintan-Karimun Free Trade Zone, which is currently under development to be an industrial and tourism region. Thus, she has a future plan of developing a harbor point between Batam, Singapore, and Johor with the first phase of Karimun Gold Coast being the harbor under construction currently. Being the future tourism and developing area, the people of this island has an even stronger reason to keep this island and the water areas clean and sustainable.

Video from https://youtu.be/KFM6dFGTEHY