Hotels in the red light district

Trip Start Apr 26, 2010
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Trip End Nov 16, 2010


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Where I stayed
Hotel 99

Flag of Indonesia  , Riau,
Tuesday, October 12, 2010

We said goodbye to Dave and Keryn and gradually packed up our stuff, with our clothes smelling and feeling properly clean for once courtesy of their washing machine (small pleasures these days, Adele goes a little bit loopy when she smells clean clothes lately!). Rather than braving busses etc with all our packs, we took a taxi back down to Little India and jumped on the metro down to Harbour Front, where we found the others and caught up on the past few days. We managed to find a decent takeaway laksa store too, for one final hit of my favourite food before leaving the world's smallest country.

The ferry to Sekupang on Batam Island is a somewhat strange affair, as it’s a pretty small catamaran, and your luggage gets put on the back deck, yet you have to check it in and they weight it, just like when boarding a plane. I’m sure it’s not just me that feels when I check luggage in for a journey, I shouldn’t then see it sitting where I can get to it... Anyway, it takes less than an hour to leave Singapore and arrive in Indonesia, and we were pretty quickly through immigration and into our penultimate country.

Lu had booked accommodation for us not too far from the ferry port, but it was about a 20 minute taxi ride to get there with some rather hairy driving from our F1 wannabe driver, using both sides of the road and pushing past scooters the whole way, but we arrived without incident outside Hotel 99. Lonely Planet advises that most of the cheaper hotels on Batam are fronts for brothels, and this one was looking like a good candidate for one of them!

With a 30 hour ferry ride looming, we took a walk to the Nagoya Hill shopping centre, which is surprisingly large and modern for what feels like a slightly washed out backwater of a town, containing a massive supermarket and most of the western chains of junk food. We stocked up on a few snacks of dubious nutritional value for the ferry, then had a VERY spicy Indonesian dinner of mashed chicken at a local restaurant. I think it may well have tied up first place with our food court dinner in Chengdu, with the advantage that there were no Szechuan peppers to numb my mouth.

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