by
evilhippy
@ 2008-05-31 - 13:17:27
Yesterday I ran away from the safety of Singapore, easiest but mostly costly of foreign cities so far on the trip, and into the waiting arms of Indonesia and its half-billion haranguing taxi and moto drivers - I'm only 60km by BOAT from the state of St. Raffles but it is very much like India and far less like even Thailand, Vietnam or Laos. Quite a bit like Cambodia mind you. Yes, this is real Asia again.
Upon disembarkation and obtaining my 30-day visa for the archipelago (largest one of them we've got on this Earth, you know) I was instantly seized upon by a bevy - no, a clutch of panhandlers, taxi harassers and the like. Good job I spent all that time in India, and memorised enough of the streetmap of Tanjung Pinang (my present location, largest city/town on the island of Bintan) to walk to my hotel, although I had to deny at least a hundred requests/threast of motorbike taxis, taxis, cyclos and dubious looking women of probably negotiable affection.
After no-fingers-leprosy-woman in Margao, and seeing all the death and devastation in Mumbai, Chennai and various other attrocities of the South Indian street lifestyle, I was totally non-plussed, and non-negged either. I smilingly walk through all this now even though they start out just as persistent as anyone I've seen; after the first hundred times a person tries to con you or harass you you get pretty well adjusted I suppose 
.
Most of them don't seem to have the biting persistence that many Indian harassers do though - I've noticed, strangely, that the more Islamic a place is the more viciously all the taxi-men and the rest of them seem to harass tourists. Must be all that strength of conviction, or something.
The place I am now is a regular mix of Chinese folk, Malays, Indians (mostly Tamils just as in Singapore) and the odd few people who might actually be descended from native Indonesians, although by all accounts almost all Indonesians descend from various Malay or Indian invasions and subsequent migrations over the past millennium.
There are very few `real` Indonesian people left on the islands, here so even fewer. The influx of Islam for the past 800 years or so has not only steadily converted the majority of people native to these islands to new religion, as Christianity has also done for the past 300 years, but also seen a massive increase in population as communities from these nearby-ish countries grew in the equatorial splendour that seemed ripe for the taking.
Just wipe out a few native tribes, try not to lose to many parisioners to the cannibals and the place is yours, sort of thing. Seems to have worked quite well for most of them - not so the guys who were already here.
Mind you, they really DID eat people.
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That last day in Singapore then arriving by ferry in Indonesia could not have shown more different kinds of worlds flourishing/struggling so close to each other.
My last day in SNG went like this, you see:
Wake around 9, still need to pack everything and check out by 11, sod it. Sleep in, get up at 10:20 and throw everything into bags, begin the daily sweating - this goes on until about 7 at night - check out and say `ciao!` to a few people there and also the lovely landlady.
I felt a lot like I was on drugs at that time. I felt like someone had dosed me with speed, in fact, and in fact this was almost the case. The guilty bastard that spiked me? Glaxo-SmithKline-BeechamHoneymelon-SonyCocaColaMcDonalds, or whatever they're called these days, bloody omnipresent pharmas - I picked up some paracetamol to combat some cold symptoms and saw some particular anti-cold-symptom stuff on the shelf in the 7-11, so I bought it smugly and happily.
These things have, in addition to the usual 500mg of paracetamol, an added 30mg of pseudoephedrine hydrochloride (HCL) which is pretty much like a legal form of amphetamine without the risk of serotonin syndrome as it doesn't actually hit your serotonin receptors as much, as much as I could feel it anyway; but I suppose I could try a whole packet in one go; but gives plenty of the wakefullness (read: hyperactivity) mildly enhanced sensory perception (read: mild hallucinations) and general excitement about the world and everything in it.
It doesn't have a comedown as such, but you do still feel high the next day, which is sort of nice on the face of it, but really it was more of a bloody inconvenience.
Anyway I staggered through the morning rituals of packing up and checking out feeling halfway between a comedown and a proper high. Not great for the concentration - if Singapore weren't so dashedly easy to deal with it would have been a nightmare.
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MRT.
The Mass Rapid Transit network in Singapore is the same as the London Underground except much of it is overground on elevated tracks, half undeground, half L-Train. Is the metro in Paris like that too? Never been there myself.
Anyway they have the same dealio as the Tube with those Oyster cards that you use like a Pay-as-you-go phone card, topping it up with credit, and scanning your way into and out of every entry and exit station on your journey. They call them EZ-Rider cards (American pronunciation of the `Z` there of course) in Singapore.
Interchanges are all behind the barriers so you can chop and change trains indefinitely (well, from 6:30am 'till 11:45pm anyway) and you only scan in and out once per proper trip, and you have to do so to leave any station, so while you could, theoretically, tour every station on all 4 MRT lines and then come back just one stop from where you started and pay about 20 cents for a whole day's travel, you would only have ever seen the inside of every tube station in Singapore (I know that sounds exotic and everything, but I imagine it's not exactly thrilling) and would have also wasted one whole day of your life in doing so.
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So I left the hostel and MRT-ed three-quarters of the way across the city/island/country to Harbour Front station on the NE (North-East) line, staggered my way through the gates and into the big shopping centre (a shopping mall in Singapore - how surprising!!) that was needlessly placed there solely to intercept human traffic to the ferry terminal which services the travellers leaving for certain destinations in Indonesia.
I guess the authorities just saw that many people in one place and couldn't help themselves but whack a fuck-off great shopping mall there right in front of it, so the only way to catch a ferry to Pulau Batam, for instance, is to pass two McDonalds, at least one Subway, a dozen or more Asian (or Asean, as they like to call themselves) chain junk-food outlets, and a full range of semi-designer clothes stores and electronics outfits so you feel a little like your hungry, unfashionable and out of date just by the time you even see the signs for a bleeding ferry.
It is all very pleasant though really - I was just in that weird state of mind after 50 minutes riding the Tube with 3 awkward bags, one of them very heavy (I was phasing towards `comedown` by this point in the latent pseudoephedrine cycle) - and I had to settle for a Mackie-D's breakfast about 30 seconds before 12 when they switched to the proper menu - i.e. the one with burgers on it.
I suppose some eggs and toast with jam set me up for the day better than a McQuarter McPounder with McArterial Failure though.
I arrived at the ferry terminal, found it bewildering beyond comprehension, and escaped to the toilet. Emerging about 15 pounds lighter made it easier to work things out, and I harassed a guy at a desk for information (it wasn't an information desk, but in Singapore everyone - everyone - who speaks English is polite, knowledgeable and supremely honest. Well everyone behind a counter of some sort, anyway.
He was a tour operator for some specific company and had no obligation to tell me a thing, but when he said that my intended destination in Indonesia was not serviced by this ferry terminal at all, but by the one at the other end of the island - beyond where I started from in fact but damned closer to it than I was now - I knew with a sinking feeling that I could trust him on this.
There's some total bastard called Murphy who should never have been let into the legal profession, in my opinion.
I asked as well of this tour clerk (with a small queue growing behind me) if he knew whether I could actually GET a V.O.A. - Visa On Arrival - at the place I wanted to go to. I trusted him on this too, even though he was on the other side of the country/city from where we were talking about and had nothing to do with immgration at all, but he was right about this too: yes, the place I had in mind did have the V.O.A. facility. Clerk-man even had the gumption to ask my nationality and knew that the British were among those who could do this.
See - everyone in Singapore is informed, helpful and honest. It's a wonderful place. Just too fucking expensive, that's all.
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So I MRT-ed it back the way I had came, back beyond and through my former local stop (glanced out of the window to see my beloved 7-11 as we passed) and arrived at a weird interchange at the end of the EW line. Waiting there for a train to the airport, where the authorities say the ferry terminal is, I realised the name of this changeover station was the same as that of the ferry terminal. On an impulse of intuition I left the platform as my connecting train pulled in and everyone else rushed aboard, and went through the minature maze of escalators and tunnels to reach the exit gates, and asked the ticket lady if this was the closest station to the ferry terminal.
She looked at me with mild surprise and a smile and said that it was. Seems most people go all the way to the airport and have to catch a taxi back (score now Singapore: 1 ~ 1 :Tim, and I'm happy to leave on a draw).
Immediately she began giving directions to walk to the ferry point but with a mildly-intoxicated smile I thanked her and thought gladly about getting one of those fancy taxis myself.
I turned to leave then remembered - I wouldn't be needing that EZ-Rider card any more, would I? I had stuck $25 on it when I got to the first MRT station and had used it a bit (two nice long trips that morning already ) but still, something left on it...any chance of...?
Ten bucks back straight away, just hand over the card and you get whatever money is left on it plus the $3 initial deposit you paid for in the first place. Nice.
I walked outside dreading the wait for the taxi - not least because I had no idea of the timetable of this ferry so there may not even be one to where I want to go that day, and if there was I could easily have missed it, or there might only be a later one left now, leaving me to arrive in a new country after darkness had fallen - this is against one of the basic golden rules of travelling I have set for myself:
Always Arrive With Enough Daylight Left To (Safely) Find A Hotel.
But the taxi rank was full and located immediately outside the MRT exit doors, the taxi driver was friendly and polite, the ride was brief and inexpensive (about $5 instead of the $12 it costs to come from the airport, apparently) and the ferry terminal, when I got there, was easy to understand (you have to speak to the operator booths to get a ticket, somehow I understood that and didn't, as I'm sure I would normally have done, wander over to what looked the biggest counter and ask dumb questions for half an hour) and the operators were all friendly and helpful, the ferry itself wasn't even that much at $37SNG. That's about £15 which is good for any international crossing in my book.
I had about an hour and a half to kill before leaving, and changed a load of Sing Dollars into US Dollars (re-stocking some of my emergency caches) and Indonesian Rupiah.
The exchange rates given were even better than those I had checked out the night before on www.xe.com so either Indonesia underwent a major financial crash overnight, or even moneychagers in Singapore are damned decent about it all.
It may be dangerously expensive, but the sheer level of openness and honesty - oh, and everyone in the central city speaks English more-or-less fluently by the way, everyone else expects you to as well and there are scores, hundreds, thousands of totally fluent English-speaking citizens - are such a relief and reward after everywhere else I've been.
At the terminal I met another friendly traveller who I got on with extremely well while waiting and then also through customs and all through the ferry ride. Guess what? It was another German, chap called Jan working in Singapore doing something complicated with silicon flakes and microfibres and surface imaging and other things I will never know anything about, on a long weekend to some of the nearby islands. It still impresses me - the Germans really are great on holiday.
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This tiny part of Indonesia, a city called Tanjung Pinang that is really still quite close to Singapore, is much like small-town India or the slummier parts of big cities (I could be cynical and just say like anywhere in any city in India and probably not be far wrong, but credit where it's due in India there is much more development and fewer holes in the street in the posher parts of a city). Here it is half-open sewers and chunks of pavement missing to show off all that effluent all the way around town.
Still it is nice to see a regular mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian people all throwing their lots in together, and Indonesia is largely even less developed but far less hasslesome (?!) than where I am now.
My only challenge now is transport, and deciding where it is I want to go - Sumatra I have sort-of written off in favour of Kalimantan (Borneo), but if the transport available here can't get me to the latter until this time next week I will probably reverse plans and go to the Southern part of Sumatra anyway. This is quite likely going to happen, as boats to Borneo are very infrequent; technically these islands here belong to Sumatra so the transport links are good for there, and shit for everywhere else (although there is a boat to Jakarta on the island of Java, which is the Indonesian capital, a mere 900km away by sea, which will take two days solid seafaring to get there..).
There is an airport but it - according to the lonely planet, but not to an overly chatty, mildly obnoxious guy in the hotel lobby last night - only deals with freight, not human cargo. Airfares around here are cheap as hell so if that's true it's a bit of a shame to say the least, but hey.
So that is the mission for the rest of today I suppose - my hotel is less than inspiring and there is no internet access (there are wireless networks but all of them are protected 
) so I type this up in my meagre room and look forward to an excuse to wander the city a bit more, although I may just go for one day at the posh hotel next door if I have to stay until Monday anyway - at about 300,000 Rupiah per night rather than the 55,000 Rp I'm paying here ther prospect doesn't exactly enthrall me, but it will give me a chance to get closer to a sort of contemporary state with those photos.
You'll find out which happens soon enough 
Goodness knows the makers of House think he's an awfully handsome chap by the way they write the show, making his grizzled, semi-lame angry-man the object of many a female's affection - but regardless of that he is fantastically amusing however you slice it. Maybe that's what it's all about after all 
