Uncle Chris has built something of a reputation for himself in Singapore’s tour guide scene with his walking tours.
The 70-year-old, whose real name is Chris Ng, leads regular walking tours through the country’s historically seedy hotspots like Geylang, Flanders Square and Keong Saik, discussing taboo topics like prostitution, illegal gambling and kept women.
For up to four hours at a stretch, he’d entertain – and sometimes astonish – participants young and old with a patter both raw and distinctly unfiltered.
Participants are duly warned before they sign up: “This is a highly adult walking tour and may not be suitable for everyone.”
Thereafter, the consequences of joining the walking tour – and any offense taken at topics confronted therein – are theirs alone to bear, says the maverick.
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“My notice on the sign-up page is clear,” he says.
"So if you insist on bringing children along, don't turn around and scold me. If you are the kind of person to be easily offended by certain topics, don’t sign up."
He adds, “That’s like going to a rock concert and saying it’s too loud.”
Uncle Chris - Race driver, car writer, tour guide
As unconventional as that sounds, it’s a style of guiding that’s proved successful for Chris – he tells SilverStreak that walking tours with “sensational” themes revolving around vices often attract a far larger crowd than staid outings to the heartlands or touristy spots like Chinatown.
“In squeaky clean Singapore, there’ll always be a natural curiosity for the dirtier side that we don’t see every day,” explains the silver, who develops the tours himself after intense bouts of research on the Internet, at the library and in-person with on-site interviews.
For you see, Chris is no historian. According to his Eventbrite page, he’s simply an “everyday Singaporean Uncle who has lived a good amount of time and has a repertoire of interesting stories to share”.
Much of his earlier life, in fact, revolves around cars.
Chris sold cars for the now-defunct Singapore chapter of Barcelona Motors, raced around the now-demolished Kallang Carpark in a legal rally circuit organised by the Singapore Motor Sports Association, and wrote about cars in now-discontinued magazines.
He’s also conducted advanced driving courses, fronted his own car magazine and – in a move precipitating his future as a guide leading walking tours – organised overseas driving holidays to Malaysia, Thailand and further afield, all the way from 2003 to the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic.
And that, of course, brought the silver’s driving holidays screeching to a halt.
Uncle Chris Walking Tours was born
"Leading a tour wasn’t really my thing, you see. With driving tours, you do minimal talking. Most of what you give are the routes, routines and instructions – like turn left here, look out for the exit there."
Thus, the silver started Uncle Chris Walking Tours in September 2020 as an independent outfit, figuring that it’d make it easier for him to start – and stop – tours depending on market demand.
That decision soon proved fortuitous when his first batch of tours – centred around “conventional” tourist hotspots like Little India, Chinatown and the Civic District – failed to catch on, even after he’d reached out to his “sizable database” of driving holiday customers.
“I consulted my daughter, and she told me, ‘You are doing what everyone else is doing.’ So I gave it some thought and came up with a tour of 17A Keong Saik Road, which used to be a major red-light district right smack in Chinatown,” explains Chris. “And that turned out to be a hit.”
The attendance at his walking tours started to pick up. Like most other walking tours, attendance to Uncle Chris’ tours is free, though tipping is standard practice.
From the get-go, his participants were largely youngsters “probably bored with nothing to do during the pandemic”. Once things opened back up, more older folks joined. Through it all, the crowd has always had a strong local core.
The silver doesn’t see retirement on the horizon for him anytime soon – nor is he afraid of being typecasted as the guide who does “sensational tours”.
