You may have heard of this place. I wasn’t initially planning to go to Malaysia but when I saw the proximity of Forest City to Singapore, I saw my chance at visiting a real life ghost city. Having seen many ghost towns and abandoned places, these bizarre empty metropolises have been on my list. China is notorious for sinking billions of dollars into a development and having it sit vacant. This one is not in China though…

Stagnant water pools inside the hull of a boat that had other plans

Forest City is referred to as a ghost city because there is really no other word for it. Ghost municipalities imply some kind of history with the promise of tragedy and trapped spirits but there is nothing more lacking here than spirit. Not so much abandoned, but rather never occupied in the first place. Even the land it is all built on was created and its history is yet to be written.

It appears someone had to leave and one can assume they are not legally allowed back to their home.

Around the year 2000, soil was pumped in to the Johor Strait and they started to infill and build structures and take deposits on future real estate. The Country Garden corporation from China decided that they wanted to build vacation homes for their upper-middle class and secured a deal with Malaysia for the area. The land reclamation disrupted fishing and the sensitive mangroves and some backlash began. They violated the environmental impact approval and the deal started to look not so great. One of the other broken promises was that it would create housing and jobs for Malaysians as well. It was priced way higher than any of the locals could afford and was not viable by any means. They brought in their own workers. With determination, China kept building and eventually sunk $100 Billion into it. And counting.

They built a public art staircase to nowhere on the beach. Inadvertently creating a perfect metaphor for the rest of the development. They just keep herding people onto the stairs with promises that at some point, it will lead somewhere.

In 2017 China cracked down on laws for foreign ownership of real estate. A policy that keeps the country’s revenue invested in itself. Then in 2018 Malaysia had a change in leadership that was not friendly to China and more policy went into place about foreign ownership in their own country. It killed the whole idea of Forest city with many of the investors still tied to their contracts. Many hopeful Chinese are locked into paying a mortgage on a place they are not allowed to inhabit. They can’t sell what nobody will buy and the developers are still marketing the presales and making some pretty wild promises.

You’ll hear people blame Covid for contributing to this issue, but seriously that is a hat on a hat at this point and shows some delusion.

Country Garden Developments maintains that the project will still go ahead to its fullest ambition once they can sort out the details and are still aggressively trying to sell units. I guess anything can happen, but the sunk-cost-fallacy is so obvious, front and centre, that the whole place has taken on the most intense and bizarre facade. Delusional is the only word I can accurately use to describe this place. The sales office has this massive model showing what they still plan on building, and it’s absolutely off the rails.

I can’t think of a more cursed wedding venue. Isolation, false promises, failed expectations, and a view of the second busiest shipping port in the world that belongs to a different country.

There are a handful of people that live in Forest City and they run a hotel/resort to bring in some income. It’s not all an abandoned and decaying dystopia that a lot of vloggers and Youtube content creators are trying to imply, although there is a little of that around and it’s in disrepair. When I first arrived, there was a fair amount of resort patrons contained in the central area. To experience the desertion and liminal qualities of this place, one would have to get up early in the morning, which is perfectly up my alley and how I experience a place.

Exploring was absolutely surreal. I arrived in this blunderland by train and bus from Singapore, where I have been immersed in an idylic city of the future. It’s spotless and beautiful, high density, high efficiency, and big on quality of life. The requirements for green space and parks for Singapore is built in to development and it’s kept very verdant and natural. Forest City wanted to take that concept and leapfrog into the future with their own hypergreen metropolis, but fell a little short in execution. There was a disturbing amount of astroturf, fake plants, and plastic flowers stashed around the structures. Trying hard to sell the image falls apart when you start to see the cracks like this. Little glimpses into the crooked integrity are indicative of the tragedy of this city. Instead of working with the elements, they are pushing against the grain. Right from the literal foundation of infill eroding awkwardly, China is trying to create against the odds.

I managed to catch one of the miserable guards on their break. I set my camera on a table and pretended to repack my bag to take the shot. They seem very protective of their misery but not to the point of faking happiness.

The place is in disrepair but the staff were sweeping up leaves like animatronic robots and standing beside road barriers to patrol who goes where. The restrictions are pretty wild and there is always someone watching. I kept hearing this awful sound in the daytime that sounded like a sick train and I finally saw where it’s coming from. It was indeed a sick train. Driving loops around the grounds like a zombie with zero to one passenger aboard, distorted whistle blowing into the echoing vacant parkades.

All the roads are blocked off and the ones that allow traffic are stationed with a lonely stone-faced guard.

Fibreglass statuaries in disrepair are a favourite of mine

Only one of the megatowers was completed, Carnelian Tower, and some of the units that were pre-sold are being used as AirB&B properties since that is the only way someone could get anything back from their failed contract. This is where I stayed, and the experience was surreal in itself. I arrived at the tower and there is a twenty-four hour security guard standing motionless out front. This obedient and bored-looking employee reminded me of videos I have seen of those eerie militant workers in North Korea. I had my weird instructions for check in that were translated and emailed to me, so I stood at the counter in an echoing dusty marble lobby and opened a safe with the provided code. I sorted through all the room cards to find the one for my room and took the long elevator ride to the 41st floor. The hallways are open to the elements and a hot breeze pulsates through the corridors. The room was amazing and the balcony view of Singapore is breath-taking. There is an Infinity pool on the 35th floor that I had to myself for most of my stay and it was immaculate. The constant cleaning/maintenance/security staff is always lurking silently in the shadows and that is easily the creepiest part of this whole city. All these silent shadow people everywhere.

Carnelian Tower on the right is the tallest and most foreboding from the outside. My room on the 41st floor was clean, air conditioned, and gorgeous though. You can see the underside of the infinity pool protruding from the 35th floor here too. View from the pool was jaw-dropping.

The eerie lighting and a glimpse of that sick train hiding in the emptiness, ready to do its sad loops when the sun comes up.

The deserted “mall” is the centre of the establishment. There is a 24hour 7/11 and a place to rent kayaks and stand-up paddleboards. They recently removed all the signs telling you to stay out of the water because of crocodiles. I guess the signs were bad for business.

The sounds of tropical birds echoed through the vast corridors. The faint jumble of several high-key jovial songs all at once played from a claw machine arcade down a deserted breezeway. And silence.

During my first night, I had been woken up by firecrackers numerous times, I got up before the sun and headed out to have the whole city to myself. The guard at Carnelian Tower was out front even at this ludicrous hour. After the sun started to rise and give light to the day, I heard a motorcycle approaching on the footpath. One person driving and another clutching to his back with some kind of leaf blower billowing out some sickly smelling pesticide fog. They were not wearing any kind of protective gear or respirator apart from balaclavas. I’ll say that again… balaclavas. I mean it when I say the workers here are the creepiest thing about Forest City. I approached a nearby security guard and politely asked him what they were spraying. “Is that for insects?” I gestured. He did a nervous no/yes head shake and started to walk backwards away from me with his hands up, as if instructed to not speak to anyone.

The sales office has all these towers marked as “sold out” and are pushing to sell buildings that haven’t been built yet on land that does not exist yet. At night, I could see maybe five percent of the windows lit up with inhabitants. There is a good chance each one of the darkened units is collecting monthly payments from someone trapped in an investment that they are not allowed to use. It’s quite a lesson in risk.

All of Forest City is a manufactured island attached by one slim bridge into the dense Malaysian jungle. It’s very near the equator and it’s very wild. I wondered what kind of insects might be lurking and the actual dangers I might be near. While there are the occasional and rare saltwater crocodiles in the strait and tigers in the dense brush, the abundant insects are probably the only real concern. Well, that and wild dogs…which was my next surprise the following morning.

The alpha Telomian after he had calmed down and retreated to the hedge maze. Being stalked by a pack of wild forest dogs in a labyrinth in a Chinese ghost city in Malaysia was not something I had anticipated in this life.

I had seen a glimpse of what I at first assumed to be a stray dog when I walked over to the far corner of the island to see the hedge maze. What could be more relaxing than getting lost in a hedge maze in a creepy isolated ghost city and running into a pack of tree-climbing jungle wild dogs that like to chill in the centre of the labyrinth? It was not a stray at all, and it didn’t occur to me until the following morning when I startled a pack of about twenty of them in the darkness of five AM and was aggressively approached by the alpha. This pack of Telomian had snuck into the shoreline area overnight and suddenly it occurred to me that the firecrackers that I heard the first night were not blasting last night. Keeping the jungle beasts in the jungle, I assumed was the reason, and I was face to face with some evidence to that theory. The flashlight I carried was enough to intimidate and neutralize the threat as I backed away to “civilization” (I can’t think of an accurate word here)

When the sun illuminated the land and neither I nor the Telomian had the uncomfortable element of surprise to deal with, I went back to the labyrinth to see and photograph them from a safe distance.

Guarding the centre of the labyrinth like a canine Minotaur.

If there was a theme park where you could go and experience what it would be like to be the last person on earth, it is Forest City. To have that experience with a thirty-fifth floor infinity pool with a view and a phenomenal forty-first floor room with air conditioning and wifi was unreal.

The House Crow is a common cawing resident.

Satisfied with my experience, I am grateful for the chance to have stepped into a unique world for a moment, and in surprising luxury and comfort.

There is a chance Forest City will make good on their promises to continue the development and turn this area into the luxurious resort that they intend to. Anything can happen, as we have learned lately, and the world can take wild turns. Leadership and policy change could open this all right back up and this little blunder in the history of the development could be paved over and forgotten. Or it could continue the degradation to the point that the developers have to abandon it completely.