Just found some notes from the last few weeks and places and I felt like tidying them out of the way before I give you the interesting stuff. If you don't want my idle observations and the odd bitter experience, please turn the page to the next entry ;) :

More or less starting in Batam 2 weeks ago (after a totally uneventful few days on Bintan doing...nothing) and this place could well be called the Sin City of the East. The doorman at my smaller, cheaper hotel here was just offering me hookers, multiple, out aloud and unabashed in front of full lobby of customers. He said, when I staggered in under the weight of much beer, if I had women in my room.
No.
Do you want some?
Hmm. Have you noticed these other, less noticeably criminal of your countryfolk round here? They can hear you, you know.
I call, you want one, two, three...?
Woah. (steady on - Is this all foreigners do here?!) - nothanksreallynot mythingbyebyenow- *runs*

Batam is the #1 holiday resort for Singaporeans and, perhaps inevitably, it seems wholly built on what you might call misdeeds. The island and especially the main city, Nagoya, flourished in recent years because gambling was introduced in a big way to Indonesia, and massive development occured largely at either end of the archipelago near the alluring prospects of both Singaporean and Australian dollars. Giving new hope to many cities, especially Batam which previously lived very much in Singapore's shadow, the newfound business and employment oppurtunities were a big step forward for this small island outpost, underdeveloped and underfunded, in an already poor country.

Then just as unexpectedly the Indonesian goverment re-criminalised it and investment simply disappeared, large semi-finished luxury hotels were left high and dry (there is a 6-star place outside the city limits with what looks like 1000+ rooms, truly giant perimeter walls topped with life-size statues, all fully built and finished but acres upon acres of grounds are 6-feet deep with weeds, and someone has pinched a chunk of the grounds and is growing crops almost up to the hotel wall) and people's new-found dreams of auspicious riches and guaranteed jobs evaporated, leaving a hole in commerce and society which, apparently, only the friendly neighbourhood pimp sees as part of his civic duty to fill.

When this is the highlight of your visit, you know its time to leave.

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And I did, with flights from Batam > Jakarta > Pontianak: I wasted 6 hours at airports that day, nothing else to add from the experience yet (see below) but that amount of wastage deserves a little mention. It factors in a small way into an incredible new phenomenon, first catalogued by me (riiiiight...) and one which might turn our idea of time and space and the theory of relativity among much else on its head. I call it Asian Time, and if you're familiar with Stephen Hawkings ideas about spacetime (being finite rather than infinite and with without any boundary or edge, like the surface of a sphere) and know about his use of imaginary time, this will be slightly easier to get your head around because Asian Time also runs at 90 degrees to real time, or at least at 90 degrees to the printed schedule.
Latest news of this breakthrough will come once I've consulted with Dr. Hawking, and found a stopwatch that can take the interdimensional stress.

The only noteworthy thing was while flying into Borneo when I could see, past a small crowd of like-minded rubberneckers, the lush verdant jungles at the outer edge of the island, and I don't mind telling you I felt a real thrill at the prospect, more so than I ever have since the first time I went abroad.
But, I saw far more of actual interest later on another plane, which you shall see (hopefully before the end of the century) too, and that was in a little low-flying propellor thing that allowed me to see between the clouds and with amazing views of gigantic snaking rivers: that is definitely the best way to see this country from the air, as long as it has at least two propellors, for my own peace of mind.

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Airports featured quite heavily on my love/hate radar recently and two different examples couldn't have been more different.
On the way to Borneo I transfered in Jakarta (if you look on a map you'll see this a highly wasteful way of getting from, essentially, Singapore to Borneo's West coast, but hey - not enough people to justify a direct flight I guess, and as for me I don't drive and I'm allowed my fair share of planetary devastation too) and was struck by the glorious nature of the place. All I saw of Jakarta was the inside of the airport but it was by all accounts a far fairer locale than there exists anywhere else in the city.
It must be the most thoughtfully designed airport in the world, at least for transfers. As soon as you leave the plane the exit corridor is air-conditioned (a nice touch in this part of the world) and leads to an almost immediate transfer desk getting rid of any worries that you might not find it in time or even at all. Despite the fact I had a weird flight schedule split between two tiny budget airlines and that no-one at the desk spoke English and that my booking information was pretty lacking in detail, they issued me a boarding pass amid a crowd of some forty shoving, interrupting customers who had quite literally pushed me and everyone else out of the way to get seen (grrr....although I had cunningly established my Gaijin Perimeter on first arriving as well as using my longer caucasian legs to get to the desk early, so I was simply waiting). I had to have my boarding pass offered at full-stretch by the poor harassed clerk over the heads of half the crowd, but the staff themselves were friendliness itself.

Getting through the terminal was painless and not having to pay the departure tax again (and that's a laugh in itself, isn't it? Departure tax for getting a flight to somewhere in the same country. In fact departure tax even internationally is a joke. Who does it go to? The airport already charges its own tax, the airlines get the ticket price, and duty free takes whatever you have left. What - or rather who - the hell is departure tax for? Charging on domestic flights make it a proper exercise in piss-taking) was smugly satisfying, then making one's entrance into the departure area and woah - what a piece of work!
Although hardly ultra-modern, clean and polished as one might expect, say, Heathrow or LAX to be, the thought that had gone into the design was just wonderful. After the duty free and eating area, the whole central aisle which every gate leads off was made in a touchingly cheap and tacky pseudo-traditional style, with everything from the massive supporting pillars to the front edges of benches and tables painted a dull red to match the polished redwood fretwork corners that had been hung in the inner angle of the columns and roof beams, an amazingly false and tacky touch but they somehow looked just right and they matched the huge reproduction chandeliers that loitered between every roof section, also painted the same red and with copper-orange false wax trays around each bulb.
The whole effect inside - incuding a supporting chorus from similarly styled curlicues of wood and iron sprouting from the arms of benches and edges of the multiple smoking booths inside the concourse - was of a delightfully cheap yet charming area made for people to visit briefly and rarely, and to enjoy it.
The effect outside was even better because between each gate, and you could see clearly because most of the wall on every side was glazed and felt completely open, was a landscaped garden, every one different, every one well maintained and quite excellent. There were at least 6 individual gardens, maybe half an acre each, making use of the space between gates as no other airport I've heard of has bothered. You can see to the edge of the airfield but nothing of the busy petroleum-based excitement out there because the far edge of the gardens had been fenced off to enclose the gardens and almost completely screen with trees.
At a distance of less than 100 feet from landing and departing jetliners, the people behind Jakarta airport had made you forget you were even travelling anywhere. I think that is worth a small prize.

By contrast I went from Pontianak to a place called Pangkalan Bun a week later and was frustrated at every turn, until we took off at least. The ticket I had contained my name and.... nothing else. I had to trust my name was on the flight manifest or I was going nowhere. Apparently there was nothing else the travel agent could give me, Pontianak airport only issued and allowed certain details, it seems.
The flight was scheduled for 06:30am and getting there as advised to check in at 05:30 I began a dismaying journey through the terminal, starting outside the doors when I was standing a few feet back and a porter arrived, pushed in front of me with a 6-foot-high trolley of boxes and left me behind maybe 20 items that would need to be x-rayed before I could proceed. Oh well it'll only take a couple of minutes - but then the airport churned out its porterage staff and they all pushed a similar trolley in front of me, about half a dozen got in before I assumed an intimate position with the last trolley and forced them to dump the rest behind me. That's gonna be quite a few minutes before I can even enter the terminal. Shitsticks.

And of course the doors didn't even open until gone 06:00. It would have been okay had it not been that I could see the airline check-in desk was staffed and waiting, the sands were rapidly escaping my half of the hourglass, and we were all only delayed because the guy who opens the doors got in late, apparently operating on Asia Time while the rest of us were about to miss an expensive flight.
I know he was late because he was still buttoning up his uniform and arrived at a half-run when he finally appeared on the other side of the glass to let a small crowd of us through - happily enough the porters toting massive trolleys of packages had seen my sweating Western impatience and kindly gestured me to the space in front of the first trolley, and so I had the perfect position to land a crushing thrust in The Amazing Late-Man's pharynx, which I should have done, really should have.

Checking in and getting to the departure area wasn't hard (even though I voluntarily scanned my own carry-on luggage and divested myself of metallics to pass the metal detectors - the area was entirely unstaffed, I could have brought a gun onto the plane - out of a general decency and sneaking suspicion that they might be moitoring it over CCTV), but then things broke down. Absolutely nothing in the departure area was there for the benefit of passengers, except toilets I feared to tread in thanks to the state of just the door, and a prayer room, which is always a reassuring thing in an airport.
The way they did things here was pretty special. I looked closely at my ticket and boarding pass, and found that neither - not even the boarding pass - had a flight number, or a gate number, nor even on the boarding pass did it have my sodding name. In fact, I had in essence not been given a boarding pass, for it was a plastic rectangle identical to hundreds of other plastic rectangles that they dish out and collect back before you leave.

The only reason I knew which gate I was at was because I had checked the flight time and destination - and the destination wasn't totally reliable either - in the main terminal. Inside the departure area there was no way, no way at all to check where your plane was leaving from, and you could not exit the area as there were security guards preventing you. What a fucking setup.
But it got better. Beside the gates there were tele-screens. You would think in the departure area these screen would show the departures, but no; they were all showing arrivals only, and what good that is to people waiting to leave on a plane I cannot imagine. The time ticked on and nothing changed. At 06:20 I tried to ask from which gate, and when, the flight to Pangkalan Bun was leaving, but there were only the security guards, no information desk and no departure information on the monitors.
I craned around one glass wall and reconfirmed the gate number from the screens in the main hall, but they had no details beyond the time and gate, and the flight number which was less than useless because it was the only place I ever saw it.

Waiting until 06:30 came and went I turned to panic to keep me occupied, then anger, then dismay at the apparent loss of my money, but more so the time, as it would be yet another week to get a plane out of there and my visa would be all but expired.
Then a miraculous thing happened - something came over the speaker and everyone loitering near my gate upped and ran, partly in the standard Asian manner of pushing in front of everyone like a schoolchild, but partly out of some genuine need to run madly across an airport floor.
The gate had been changed, twelve minutes after the flight was scheduled to leave, with no announcement of any delays, and no confirmed details of the change left for, say, anyone in the toilet.
The plane took off - actually took off - less than eight minutes later, and although it was a fairly small plane you can imagine how long it still took to get us all on onboard and seated.
We had to run across the tarmac to get to it too and leg it up a mobile staircase at breakneck speed; I got the distinct impression that the pilot was taking off when he wanted to whether he had his passengers or not.
The stewardesses looked a lot like people evacutaing a burning building, and not one person I saw was even vaguely checked for tickets or identification, so I not only could have brought guns for everyone, I probably could have got on board without any right to be there.

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Mooching around Pontianak a week before that unfortunate experience, I found myself up against another well-thought-out little trick of this country, which I affectionately call The Laundry Issue. It's a damn good job I have almost no personal hygiene to speak of, that's all I can say.
At one point I was wearing the exact same clothes for 5 days running - all of them right down to the unmentionables - in a full-sized city full of all the trappings and facilities that engenders, because no-one can operate a washing machine in Indonesia outside of a certain class of hotel. It seems to be something genetic.
It did at least give me a half-arsed excuse to stay in those 4-star places, mind you.

You'd think a single laundromat place might have existed in Pontianak, but I kept getting told that that sort of thing was waaaaay out of town, as if washing ones clothes in something other than the polluted river was like admiting you had the plague and have had for a while, or that everyone had to travel to the next town along the river when they wanted a clean shirt. Yeah like hell, that's what I thought too.

Posh hotels tend to be the ones that do it as well and budget places mostly don't. When the cost of a room in the first of these places is as much as a small car then you can more easily accept the crazy prices charged for a man in some far-off room throwing your stuff into a couple of machines and waiting, doing nothing else of benefit to you but taking about as much money for it as a family can eat on for a week. The last place, the cheaper place I was at in batam (Bahari 1, as opposed to Bahari 2 and Bahari 3 just around the corner) didn't do laundry, the gits, and neither did the first or last place I was at in Pontianak.

So I was down to last reserves, wearing a ralph lauren shirt I had bought on impulse at Batam airport that cost as much as a night in a 4-star hotel, or indeed a small car (but it is fitted and very stylish, against the day I become less fat and ungainly) and baggy Steve Irwin-style jungle shorts. It looked very much like I was wearing a leotard and a skirt, with a fitted shirt and big flapping shorts, and as the shirt was fitted to my luxoriously distended stomach the whole deal was not helping my self-image much. I didn't dare use the mirror in my room and had to tactically check my watch or the street or just burn my retinas out on the sun whenever I went near a glass building for a couple of days. God help all the members of the public who had to focus on me.
I really did get some funny looks, with that and the new exposed tattoo on my extravagantly shaven leg (they took enough hair off for a piece almost twice its size) it made me look rather like an escapee from a place with high walls and well-oiled guns - or just a bit of an idiot with a very confused self-image.
Both apply equally, I'm sure you can agree.

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Wasting time yet further, as I had to waiting for the flight to Borneo, I spent a whole day watching films - 8 of them in a row with occasional breaks for food, dropping in to the supermarket for more beer, and being ill - all bought the day before. I already mentioned how little they cost; just 5,000 Rp. each which is something like 28.89pence or some similarly pleasing figure.
This is hardly an acheivement in itself, except that to sit down for 12 hours of audiovisual entertainment at a single stretch without seeing a single fucking advertisment probably deserves an honourable mention somewhere :)

This day I decided to cut my plans short, too. Not enough time for Java, thought I, Must do Borneo properly. As it is now I think I can see a fair bit of Java (already doing so in fact), namely a volcano somewhere in the East of that island and the biggest Buddhist site in the country by the name of Borobudur, leaving me hopefully within easy distance of Bali which I know I said I wouldn't go to on principal, but hey (the principal was that I don't like going to the typical tourist places. Recent experience suggests I'm being a latent quasi-rebellious child, so I'm off to Bali).
Anyway the flights from Bali to Oz are frequent and quicker and hopefully cheaper, and I don't fancy Jakarta much anyway as it is known to be an especially noisy, busy, fetid city.

The good thing about Java is that unlike nearly every other island in the whole country there is a proper train network. In fact the only other place in Indonesia that has a railway anywhere is Sumatra, but that only covers half of the bottom of the island, and is quite famously shite in every respect, so Java is effectively the only place where you can consider riding the rails. It's even quite nice by all accounts.

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Everywhere, especially Pulau Bintan and Pulau Batam, The weather inside Asian hotel or hostel rooms is quite surprising, in that it actually exists, for one thing. You can expect to get dripped on by tiny itinerent spots of water from the ceiling, some it possibly soaking through from above if you're on the top floor, often around the time of the daily storm. It's obvious when you think about the heat and humidity, but still a bit weird when it's dry and hot outside to get rained on INDOORS in an impossibly localised way.
I'm not sure what makes the ceilings so cold in these places as to allow so many showers of condensation; perhaps all the chill from the nation's fridges and freezers accumulates inside the floors in rented accomodation (and you never CAN get a truly cold drink anywhere...) as tribute to some dark god for a past attrocity. There very well could be a god for it in fact, there is a god for most things around here if you look hard enough, and if not then at least a minor epic poem ;)

And I saw something again on those islands, I think I mentioned this in India but it seems to me to be worth repeating: Asian hotels, of a certain calibre (i.e. my calibre, i.e. distressingly cheap) are always building extra levels onto themselves.
Not that I'm suggesting these building are conscious living things that grow themselves a crown of laterite walling with a plaster epidermis and unfortunate decorative facial features, I'm assuming that at least semi-humanoid builders are involved, but it seems a very standard business model 'round here. Just make a little guesthouse or hostel out of a two-storey building, then when you've had enough guests to save some cash you whack an extra level on the top and you can call it a hotel, building the roof up from the rimmed skid-pan it was when you found it and building another skid-pan on the roof of the next level; rinse and repeat.
Totally logical, but to see it everywhere in a city or town, as if the buildings are indeed all growing themselves upwards like desperate plants competing for sunlight is a little odd. Charming, perfectly understandable, and somehow pleasantly odd.

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Anyway that's just to finish off my past thoughts - things of genuine interest have happened since then, you'll be amazed to hear: I really did get off my arse and do stuff :D