I went to Indonesia yesterday with herself. It’s only an hour away by ferry. Although the island we went to is due south and 99% of Indonesia is east of Singapore, it’s still an hour behind (it should be an hour ahead, if anything!), so we arrived at the same time we left!
I think it’s fair to say that first impressions were not good. To tie in with yet another book that I am reading (the real history behind the Da Vinci Code – I’ll be the annoying one in the cinema going “Well, actually….”!), if the Romans had made it out this far, they would have probably named it Shitholeius Major!
Coming from Singapore with its (mostly) pristine buildings, green areas, flowers and new cars, it’s a bit of a kip to be honest. It was similar just north of Singapore in Malaysia when I was there a couple of years ago. Some new building going on, but in the main, it’s not pretty. Everything looks so poor and dilapidated. The locals have bare good-for-nothing orange ground with corrugated hovels built on them. They try to sell stuff to passers by and usually have bits of old cars lying all over the place. The hovels line the hilly, twisty roads which get really fun during the rainy season apparently. This poverty is pretty hard to stomach and you can’t stand still for 2 minutes without someone trying to sell you something or beg off you. I thought there were poor people in Singapore until I came here! Then you have foreigners up the road corralled in fancy resorts, playing golf, tennis, getting pampered etc. There’s something wrong there somewhere.
The driving is crazy and they seem to progress by horn, rather than indicator, traffic light or any other such luxury! We did find a snazzy new shopping centre, which was a little incongruous to say the least! The picture shows me doing my Hannibal (the original Hannibal, that is!) impression in the middle of that new mall! Would have taken more snaps but honestly couldn’t find anything worth snapping! The taxi was moving too fast (and erratically!) for hovel shots!
To paraphrase a nerdy scientist (whose book I read once, naturally!) on Antarctica – the 2 best days in Indonesia are the day you arrive and the day you leave. Fortunately, it was the same day for me. On the plus side, I thought the women were better looking (perhaps I’m biased there! However, herself is ethnically Chinese, not Indonesian!) and things in the main, were very cheap. That is, if you could work out what they cost!! Knowledge of the 5500 times tables would have been useful as that’s how many Rupiah there are to the Singapore Dollar! That makes it about 11000 to a Euro! I changed about €50 and had over half a million! I felt rich until I had to buy something – everything costs thousands or tens of thousands! Not much use for decimal points here – the €9.99 deal becomes 99,999 Rupiahs!
Still, an interesting experience and another country ticked off the “been there, done that” list! More to follow....
No comments:
Post a Comment