Getting there is half the fun

Bintan Island, Indonesia

This past weekend Samson, Lisa, Misha and I took a ferry to nearby Bintan Island for a little taste of Indonesia. Bintan is an island about 2.5 times the size of Singapore and only about 50km from here. We took a ferry early Saturday morning to the resort port as it's the only port on the island authorized to hand out visas on arrival. The entire northern coast is owned by posh Singaporean resorts and golf courses. Starting at $100-200 (up to $500 or more!) a night they cater to the richer class - We were looking for dirt cheap! (side note: I don't know why people can be so crazy to come to a third world country and pay exuberant first world prices, the profit for the owners must be insane) After clearing immigration and being warned of what's also severely illegal in this country

we went in search of a ride. Since the entire northern part is resort owned we were forced to take the resort owned taxi service (read: expensive). After about 15 minutes of driving we came to the end of the resort territory and passed through a heavily guarded checkpoint complete with fully automatics and razor-wire fences. Immediately the manicured expressway transformed into potholes and oil patches with dogs sleeping at the roadside. The next hour of driving was quite interesting. The roads were really skinny, about one and a half lanes wide, so it was like a game for the driver to see how close he could get to the oncoming scooters with large baskets hanging off the side. After an unmeasured amount of time we reached the east coast!


Half way into the drive our taxi driver graciously informed us that the place we requested he drive us to had closed down recently. So instead he took us to another place. Leaving the paved roadway to drove through sand for a few hundred meters to reach a place called Shady Shack. The owner wasn't in so our driver translated for the owner's wife. Although the place was on a very nice beach and was quite cheap it lacked certain amenities, like electricity! I personally wouldn't have had a problem staying there, actually I thought it would have been quite fun, but I was grossly outnumbered - the other guys wanted to try some place else. So we drove a few kilometers down the coast to Trikora Beach "Resort". The place was a lot nicer and was actually a real hotel. But apparently they haven't had many visitors lately as half of the place was falling apart, the rates were slashed in half, and the kitchen no longer served food other than omelets. We ended up staying there for $25sg a night each, so not too bad, but I was hoping for maybe $5!

The first important lesson of the weekend learned is that taxi drivers only take you to places owned by friends or where they get free coffee. Walking up the road to find lunch we came a cross a really cool "sea hotel" on sticks that was a little cheaper. We had a good lunch of some fish (can't remember it's name) and seafood mee goreng.



The waters around the island coast are really shallow for hundreds of meters out so you can walk for a long time through the mix of sand and seaweed patches. But after a while this got boring and we all got cut from stepping on stuff so we rented kayaks and set off for a gold rimmed island in the distance. Sorry that I didn't bring my camera so you'll have to take my word for the white sand beaches and crystal-clear waters we swam in there.

Sunday we got the hotel guy to give us a ride in the "complimentary shuttle"



We got dropped off in a small town down the coast. There was only one street and is was lined with people just standing around. As soon as we got out of the van and it pulled away we had a few hundred Indonesians all staring at us. Man it felt weird. This is when the scale of poverty here first started to register. The people don't appear to have much at all. And a lot of the living conditions were quite dirty. I didn't take my camera out for fear of losing it but I got this one picture of the creek running behind the main street.


Eventually the masses stopped staring and shouting stuff in Bahasa Indonesia at us so we could relax and look around at the few basic shops. After a short walk around and some delicious fish paste (otah or otak?) we stuck our thumbs out for a ride back up the coast. Misha was determined to get a ride in one of the many dump trucks passing by but they were all (luckily) full of something other than stupid travelers. Eventually we got picked up by one of these island roaming vans. We had some fun taking pictures in its relative safety:



Later got another ride in our rockin' hotel shuttle and checked out another floating village for dinner.


This boardwalk to the village was a little too well used!


Our pre-arranged taxi picked us up in time and even early enough to make a detour to buy some dinner from a market. There really wasn't much in there that we could identify so we all just went for some cookies and bottled water for dinner. Arriving back at the resort area our vehicle was screened and then later checked for bombs before being allowed into the "compound" with the rest of the "travelers". The abundance of golf shirts, Chinese business men and while folk confirmed with us that we were indeed heading back to Singapore.

All in all a pretty good weekend and a decent first taste of Indonesia! If I ever go back and plan on traveling outside of the tourist areas it'd be best if I at least learned the rudiments of the language. Going there I felt so bad not even being able to say thank you at first, not to mention basic questions and courtesies.

More pictures can be found in my gallery - link to the left

Posted by Evan at 4:28 AM