A Charmed Life: Life's a Play!

From Malaysia to Singapore to Batam island in Indonesia.


My visa-stay in Malaysia was again running out (and I was being pursued by the authorities for overstaying and alleged illegal work! -- kidding, hehe) so I had to run to Singapore!


Arriving in Singapore, after much walking and sweating looking for a cheap place to stay, I found a hotel where I met a couple of extremely interesting people: A guy from Chile with a very dramatic and amusing life-story, and a recently separated Korean young mother who equally had a very interesting but a rather mournful life-story to tell. Their stories were very long and despite the tiredness and stress of that day, meeting them made my one night stay in Singapore very memorable. Their stories could definitely be written down into novels to entertain the world but I won't go into that.... Ok, what I'm saying is; looking back to that night, and how I happen to randomly hook up with 2 very contradicting personalities, who, after a mere couple of minutes of meeting them, opened up to tell about their most personal lives - I found it very odd, and very heart-warming at the same time.



Anyway, that night, the Korean lady mentioned that she wanted to go to a really beautiful beach resort island part of Indonesia which is less than an hour away from Singapore by ferry. I was intrigued and I thought I'd go with her since staying in Singapore is expensive for me anyway. So the very next morning, we bought our tickets and off we went, excitedly, to an adventure in Batam island, anticipating to see white sand beaches and hunky boys, hihi.



Arriving at our destination, however, we were met by surprise and great disappointment. We arrived at a dingy, dusty, depressed-looking, overpopulated city with no trace of fellow travelers, or hotels, or tourist destinations. My friend insisted that we're supposed to be in a touristic area with excellent resorts and white sand beaches! The locals didn't know what a guesthouse or a traveler's hotel mean. They didn't have an idea what we were looking for or why we were there in the very first place. They gave us the look: "who are you and what on Earth are you doing here?" To boot, nobody spoke English! You either have to speak Chinese or Bahasa Indonesia. (My little knowledge of Bahasa Malaysia helped us through).



It was both our first time to set foot in Indonesia, and ignorant of the very low value of the local currency (US$ 1 = 10,000 Rupiah), we thought we were just being blatantly ripped off. And my companion, specially, became very aggressive in arguing with the locals. She even started to quarrel about taxi fare with the taxi driver who became intimidated by her. After a couple of hours being shuttled from one old, dark, rat and cockroach infested hotel room to another; and prices that don't contain less than five zeroes, we almost lost hope, and darkness was fast approaching. We were strangers in a very strange island. The island inhabitants didn't speak our language and we didn't speak theirs.

But, to the local people's credit, I hasten to add that nobody tried to harm or seriously cheat us. They had been all nice, friendly and helpful. One hotel owner even offered us 50% off, that would make a dirt cheap 50,000.00 Rp/night for the 2 of us. But we declined because we could not stand the dimly lighted rooms and corridor, a leaking bathroom, and my friend shrieked when she saw cockroaches. They even made all efforts to find the only guy in town (it seems) who spoke English - a young Indonesian man who learned English by formerly working in a resort somewhere else. He was very helpful and very sympathetic towards us -- we, scared, but very demanding, very confused and disoriented-looking chicks ( i mean, we really looked like lost baby chicken squawking).



To make the story short, we settled to consider ourselves lucky to have finally arrived to this one resort near a lead-colored seashore at a discounted price of Rupiah 250,000.00 /night. Compared to all the hotels we were brought to within the city limits, this one looked very decent, had a nice sea-breeze, and it has a swimming pool at least. It was not peak season, the manager said, that's why we could stay at such a discounted price. Being an experienced hotelier, the manager somehow understood our shock when it came to money matters. He calmly and soft-spokenly explained to us, with a calculator, the currency conversion. And he spoke some English and was kind and understanding; and we felt finally at ease.




These were the only photos I managed to take of Batam island. We were too scared and nervous at first so that only after we settled in this resort (PT. KTM Indonesia Hotel and Restaurant) that we managed to relax and take photos.




















The next day, we spent all time enjoying the swimming pool, and then finding no other thing to do in that island, we took the afternoon ferry bound to Johor Bahru, Malaysia.



The hilarious thing, which we only realized after we left the island, was, we were supposed to go to Bintan island and not Batam! Huge difference! Bintan island was the beautiful resort island my friend spoke about. Batam island is another island which only old Casino-playing Singaporeans go during weekends!

Yay!!!!





I'd still say it was a cool adventure, something worth retelling, hah hah!