Celebrities in Indonesia

WOW.....

I'll start from Sunday night. After we spent the day walking around Singapore, we headed up to the roof to see if my friends from Colombia, Australia, and Indiana were there again. They were and they were joined by a few fresh faces: a girl from South Carolina, a guy from Chile, and two girls from Slovakia. After a few beers and some great conversation about our respective cultural experiences, we decided to go out to a bar. We found a reggae club down in the Quays by the river and spent the night dancing to our own, personal live band, who took all of our request and danced with us up on stage. (There were only about 5 other people in the bar that night who we forced to dance with us --- Sunday night.)

The Colombian and I spent the night speaking Spanish, and it took a night of drinking.. but I FINALLY used my Chinese on actual Chinese people! And I was blown away by how fluently it came out! Very cool.

We also saw our group of first lady boys having drinks with some business men. I wonder if they knew or not...

Monday morning we woke up around 7:30 and raced to the subway station to catch a ferry for Indonesia. Of course we missed the train by about fifteen minutes, so we missed the bus to the ferry, and then we missed the ferry. The next one left at noon, so we spent a long morning reading in the ferry terminal.

We went through customs, which was WAY easier than I expected it to be, and we set off for the unknown. (We didn't have a guide book for Indo..) The trip was about 2 hours through a series of small fishing islands in the Riau Archipelago. Riding through the South China Sea was exactly how I would have pictured it -- old men in tiny fishing boats with cloth sails gliding along and riding our wake, tiny fishing villages on stilts over picturesque bays, coconut palm lined beaches, enormous cargo barges crisscrossing the straights. We were the only Westerners on the ferry, which foreshadowed the rest of our frustratingly short stay in this incredible country ----

The adventure started as soon as we got off the boat. This place is foreign.. after navigating our way through customs and getting our visas, we were escorted to the door and onto the dock which leads to the main village. We were immediately bombarded with taxi drivers and hotel hawkers. We had a posse of people walking with us and yelling at us as we made our way to the main road. My tactic of ignoring them didn't help at all, and Brian's tactic of humoring them with conversation did just as little. When we reached the end of the ferry pier there was a man with a sign that said "marrshel". He asked me if I was marrshel and I said I was. Accepting defeat, the posse immediately dispersed and we followed this strange man who knew couldn't spell my name to the main road, where he explained that he was sent from the hotel I had called earlier that day, to pick us up. We wanted to explore the town before we went to the hotel, so he said he would wait for us and drive us at 5:00. (4 hours later) We had no Indonesian money or ticket out of the country, and at this point with all the hectic energy in the town, we really had no idea what to do about anything. Luckily our driver brought us to an ATM and a travel agency where he helped to interpret for us to get ferry tickets to Johor Bahru in Malaysia the next day. (As we would soon find out, no one else spoke English, aside from maybe a few words like "mista, mista" and "face very handsome!")

We set off to explore this completely foreign and unfamiliar city, where most people had obviously never seen white college kids. EVERYONE we passed stared at us, most of the women giggled and smiled when we made eye contact, and a lot of the guys just watched or confidently tried out their few English words - "hello mista! how are you today!" We rounded a street corner between an ornate Buddhist temple and a very serious stoic looking mosque just at the moment that a parade with hundreds of children from all the nearby islands began to march through in front of us. The kids were playing drums, horns, and odd Indonesian instruments that I've never seen before. Already excited about the athletic competition they were marching to, seeing these two tall white kids with huge backpacks taking pictures of them almost stole their attention from the parade. All the kids watched us as they passed. Most of them grinning from ear to ear, some waving, others shyly glancing, but all very excited to see this spectacle. Like "the wave" at a concert, one kid would notice us and tell his friends and before we knew it the whole parade was enjoying our presence as much as we were enjoying their parade.

We found our way back to the market and Brian tried his luck at buying sunscreen. The vendors knowing no English and we knowing no Indonesian, the encounter was quite amusing. After pantomiming rubbing on sunscreen for a few minutes and turning down an array of lotions and oils, I remembered hearing somewhere that Bahasa Indonesia (their language) is almost identical to Bahasa Malaysia (Malay), so I pulled out my Malaysia Lonely Planet Guide and found the "useful phrases" section, and lo and behold - we got sunscreen! Over the course of our stay we developed a pretty good cache of Bahasa Indonesian phrases: "terima kasi!" "tidak!" "apa kabar!", which have been enormously helpful and appreciated.

After getting some suggestions from local girls who couldn't get over "how handsome!" we were (and no they were not prostitutes...), we took a 40 cent cab ride to this terrific restaurant next to a fishing village and had our first taste of Indonesian food. I had chili gong-gong (sea snails with HOT chili sauce) and Brian had spicy pepper shrimp - both delicious! After our 150,000 rupiah lunch ($4 each), we walked next door to a stilt-village, where some of the island's poorest people seemed to live. It was a little embarrassing at first to walk into these people's neighborhood with cameras, but we were met with a wildly warm welcome. Walking down the narrow wooden plank boardwalk suspended over the water, we passed a house with about fifty veiled women cleaning shellfish. When they saw us walk by they all started to giggle and cat call at us out the green, screened windows. We tried talking back to them and had a great exchange, with some of the more adventurous women coming up to the window to get a better look and try out their "mista, mista!" and the shier ones giggling to themselves and avoiding eye contact. We got a picture, which they loved, and walked down another boardwalk street. An old woman was sitting on her front porch holding a small boy who had clearly never brushed his teeth in his life. I asked if we could take a picture and she agreed. When I showed the kid the picture he screamed out in excitement, and we were joined by kids from all over the village. Seeing us was exciting enough for them, but seeing themselves on our camera screens was something they will never forget - neither will we. I snapped a great picture of Novello kneeling down with a ton of kids surrounding him smiling for the camera and all of the women hanging their heads out of their doors and windows trying to get a look at this extraordinary scene. Sad to leave, we caught a free ride back into town from the host at the restaurant, found our driver, and headed off to our hotel.

The ride to the hotel was about an hour, and it took us through the hills and villages of this beautiful island, past veiled women on motorbikes, roosters running through the streets, mosques set in the jungle atop hills of blood-red clay earth, blasting the call to prayer through the thick, equatorial air.

When we got to the other side of the island where our "hotel" was located, we pulled into a tiny dirt road where we were dropped off at the most breathtaking beach either of us had ever seen. This was no cheap backpacker flea pit hotel -- this was paradise. We were led from the van along the edge of a soft, white sand beach to our one-roomed, stilted bungalow overlooking a the sunset on the pristine South China Sea. As dusk became night, one-by-one little lights on the water would appear from the seasonal fishermen who live on wooden floating houses miles off the shore. We were served a traditional Indonesian dinner and fell asleep under the mosquito net in our bungalow, to the peaceful sound of calm waves lapping against the beach just meters from our balcony. We woke up early to catch sunrise, Novello went for a hike down to the granite formation at the far end of our deserted beach (we were literally the ONLY people there), while I went for a run, did some yoga, and meditated with my feet in the calm 80 degree water. I'm trying to be as visual as I can with this description because even the pictures don't do justice to the unbelievable beauty and serenity of this place - don't think I'm just exaggerating :-)

After a breakfast of mee goreng, eggs, and delicious tea with the son of the owner who proceeded to roll a spliff for himself (which I'm sure is his daily routine and a pleasant way to appreciate the beauty of this place), we went for a swim, tried out the squat-toilet (which was an adventure in itself -- but I will explain later), and reluctantly headed back to Tanjung Pinang to catch our ferry while getting an Indonesian language lesson from our driver. We were escorted to the ferry terminal by a guy from the coast guard who was about our age, and who continued to brag to everyone we passed that we were his "American friends". He and his friends at customs sat with us proudly as we waited for our ferry and continuously complimented us on how interesting we looked and how cool it was that we were from "New York". Every time Brian would glance over the kid was staring at him with a huge grin (a little awkward but all with good intent). After saying goodbye to our new friends and our new favorite place on earth, we hopped on the ferry.

In complete awe of what had just happened to us by complete luck -- we headed across the straights to Malaysia, not quite the same as when we arrived.

(I'll write about Malaysia later..)