Batam Harbor
Alright, as you all probably know by now, I tend to end up in the craziest situations when I go out drinking. I have ended up in all sorts of weird place but NEVER have I ended up in a different country. (Except for when you get on drinking with the backpackers at the airport bar)
You know that you have been partying when you wake up somewhere you do not know and wonder “what the fack am I doing here?”.
Here is how it all started.
side note: I have removed most of the people’s names for privacy reason…
Yeah… I guess you know where this is going…
This all started a certain Saturday afternoon where the guy next to my cubicle randomly asks me; “so… wanna go to St-James tonight?”. As much as I hate the place, I decide to go anyway.
Just getting startedSo, the night begins with me picking up my mate at his place. He is there with another of my workmate and a friend of his. We cab all the way to Vivocity’s train station where we are picking up another mate who never really comes out. We kick off our night as usual with a few drinks at the jazz bar. Nothing too fancy, just a few martinis to get us started. We then go to Dragonfly. We have a bit of a dance (anyway I did ^^) until everyone gets bored (that took about 15 minutes or so). We decide that we are heading to Movida. We hit the place pretty well. We dance for a while until I get bored and decide to go for a drink. Then everyone decide that they are going to the Powerhouse. We have a bit of a dance on the blocks to some music that I hate. We bump into a few more people. After a while, I am completely sick and tired of dancing. So, I just head outside to chat with some people and have a hot dog. That was relatively successful. I meet a bunch of German people. Chat with them. Then I bump into some of my mates who decided that they had enough. Since we could not get any more hot dogs, we decide to go for pratta in some place that I have never been before. We talk for a while and then catch a cab home.
The end?
Yeah… it was a bit of a eventless night out until…
Let the real adventure begin
A Model Citizen
Now I am not sure whose idea that was. It is about “too fuckin late” O’clock and we are completely drunk. Someone says;
“Hey! Let’s go for a beer and play golf in Indonesia! Right farken now! The ferry for Battam starts at 0600”.
“Alright!!!” I must have said
It sounded like a good idea at the time so I drop him home so that he can grab his passport and have a quick rest. (Obviously he probably had a whisky instead). I make it home. I grab my passport and then I am about to call a cab when the rain starts. I ring him and actually ask him;
“So… were you serious about going to Indonesia?”
“I guess… were you?” he says.
“Meh… lets just farken do it!” I end up saying and then hang up the phone.
I jump into a cab. I pick him up at some train station on the way. We continue further down so that we can go catch the ferry. The fare costs about 40 $S which is… fuck all really.
I manage to sleep for about one hour on the boat. I am really hung over and afraid to get sea sick for that same reason. I lay on the floor of the rocking floating machine and just pass out until I get waken up to;
“Franky! Franky wake up! We’re here!”
I stand up. My eyes are completely stinging due to my dried out contact lenses. My hat is on a 35 degree angle which is a style that simply does not suite me. My head feels like if a hamster with “taser slippers” is running around it. I look through the window. The sky is gray and it is pouring down rain like crazy over the Batam harbor. The place looks completely dead. I cannot see any vegetation. It is more like some deserted wasteland with a harbor in the middle of no where. At that exact instant, I tell myself:
“what the… what the fuck… am I… doing here?
Interesting color scheme
With roughly one hour of sleep in my body, I walk out on the jetty and make my way through the customs. It is a very easy process in Indonesia. We pay for our visa on the spot (10 USD). We pass in front of the guard. He does not even look at my passport and tells me to carry on. We pass through a metal detector which does not detect any of the metallic weapons that I am wearing at the time. My bag passes through the X-ray screening machine… I quickly realize that no one is actually screening the monitor.
This is a great start! At that time, I am currently starving. So we go for some toasts with some creamy coconut stuff in it. We then jump into a taxi that brings us to the city center. I do not think that this will come to a great surprise to you guys but it is about 0900 o’clock and we really need a cold beer.
My friend can remember a series of bars around the area which we cannot find at the moment. It is still raining like an overflowing toilet but that does not bother us. We stop in a Chinese hawker center for a quick drink so that we can gather our strength for the journey that lays ahead of us.
We then start walking around looking for those infamous bars. The place looks fairly different from Singapore. It is obviously not as clean but also the architectures of the buildings are quite different. They even have a market that is fully shaped like a 17 century French village. It looks very nice.
After walking around in circle for an hour or two, we conclude that we need a massage more than anything else. So, we drop in one of the massage place and get ourselves a one hour and a half Thai massage for a fairly cheap price (I can not remember the exact price but it pretty much matched Bangkok prices. No happy ending included…).
side note: Now here I have to say, those massages are simply an awesome cure for hang over.
The lady who is taking care of me is simply awesome. As usual, they focus a bit too much on the legs and not enough on the back. But I am enjoying this very much.
One point five hour later, we get out of there to continue our mission which is to find the bar street. After much troubles and tribulations, we stumble across a series of bars.
“That is it!” my mate says.
All the bars had very interesting names such as “Lucy’s Oar House” and “Red Cock” with a rooster for logo. Most of them do not have windows. There is no way to know what to expect. I see a bar that states “The Last Bar & Restaurant in Batam”. It looks like a typical Irish pub/hotel. At that time, I am starving so I just decide that we are going in. We sit at the bar where we order drinks and ask for the food menu. I get myself some fried noodles and a bunch of spring rolls. The noodles are extremely spicy but the spring rolls are seriously… THE BEST I ever had. Anyway, we finish eating and then leave with the idea that we are going to have a drink in every bar on this street. A mid day pub crawl… why not.
We walk into some bar which has a dirty name. The place is empty except for 3 Australians (2 of them has a Queenland accent). For some reason, we were expecting the place to be loaded with people. I really do not know where we got that idea from. We have a drink and move to the next bar.
We enter the bar which is completely empty as well except for the 2 waitresses. (Here I must say, they were extremely cute!). The place is quite funky. The tables are made out of a pole, and a round piece of glass which seems to be supported by a car tire. Everything looks very small (from the waitresses to the pool queues). I baptized the place “The midget oar house”. We decide that we are having a drink and playing a game of pool. The girls would set the table up for us and cheer at us when we would get some good hit. It is a bit of a magic table too. Obviously not regular in size but we are for some reason playing much better than normal. I won the mini competition 3-2 and then we challenge the 2 girls against the 2 of us. They beat us 3-2. Some British guy walks in and we have a game with him and his wife who is local. They are quite nice, we chat a bit with them until our original goal comes back to us. PLAYING GOLF!
Tiger Wood Jr
The British guy grabs a taxi outside and explains to him in Indonesian that we want to go to a specific golf club which is probably the best on the island. By that time, we are completely drunk. (The girls kept feeding us alcohol.) So, we jump in the taxi. The driver takes us 45 minutes out of town to the famous Batam Hills Golf Resort.
The taxi drops us at the resort which is shaped like an Egyptian temple. There are some sphinx a bit everywhere and some statues of people with bird heads. It all looks very fancy. So, me and my mate just stroll in and say;
“Oi! We want to play golf!!! Right Farken Now!!” (with a drunken voice)
Completly Psyched up
They explain us how things work and how much. We paid allot of money for what we did not actually use or do. The price was about 75USD per person for the clubs, 18 holes, the buggy and the 2 private female caddies. We are quite late and un-experience. So, we grab a drink and jump in the golf car. I still can not believe that they let us drive the bloody thing. We are obviously off our face and not in a stage of driving anything except our bed.
“I am driving!!!” and I run to the buggy so that I can grab the front seat.
We drive to the first hole. (We literally though that we were driving a formula one.) I Stop the car. I Jump out and rip the club off the caddie’s hands. The excitement level is just going through the roof. We are already laughing our ass off and barely able to stand still. How the fuck are we supposed to hit a ball 75 meters above a lake of water?
I set myself in position. I attempt to look semi professional since the pressure is all on me. (For the record, the 2 of us have never played golf. Me and my sister use to go mini golf when we were kid and we would never finish the game. We would always end up smashing the ball at each others or fight with the clubs until our mum would come running at us or the club would kick us out) so here I am… barely able to balance myself. I raise my right arm to the side and bring the club to a 70 degree angle. I look toward the flag. I look back onto the ball. I SWING!!!! The club completely misses the ball and hit the grass. A big chunk of green and black matter just goes off flying 20 meters through the air. I lose balance and end up falling on my ass.
“Alright, alright… that was a practice shot” I say to the 3 others.
My friend is cracking himself laughing with tears and almost to the point of rolling himself on the ground. I am pissing myself laughing trying to position myself correctly for a second attempt. The 2 girls are looking at each others with the biggest “what da fuck” look on their face.
One of our caddy
Anyway after losing 3 balls in the water, and 2 others which went completely in the wrong direction, we decide to just go around the lake. Alright, try 2. This is where the real game starts. One of the girl hand me a different type of club. PW F7 (or some shit like that). I swing again with pretty much 0 success. Sometime I would actually hit the ball but the grass that would come off with it would make it further than the ball.
We then see some guy from the club coming behind us on a boggy. I tell myself “oh shit, we are only at the first hole and we are already getting kicked out”. But no, he was actually coming there to teach us how to hit the ball. He gives us some pretty good tips.
“put your left arm straight”
“make a weight transfer toward the left leg”
“twist your leg”
“don’t cut… just swing”
I used every single tip that he gave me at once and then… SWING!!!! I hit the ball for at least…. 50 meters. Tears almost come to my eyes. My mate and I start hugging each others and jumping around until we both end up on the ground laughing. The 2 girls and the teacher are looking at us and end up saying something in Indonesian. I do not understand the language but I can tell by their eyes that what they said was “those guys are just fuckin retards…”
So anyway, we sucked probably enough to win the trophy of “worst golfer ever”. We are having allot of fun. We are also learning allot about golf. How to putt. How to get out of the sand. How not to send your ball in the wood. The name of the different clubs. Etc.
Obviously, my friend and I are complete idiots. We would have been the only people who ever hit the ball and actually run after the ball to go get it instead of driving the boggy or picking another one. I was digging in the wood fighting with giant cobras just to get my ball back. We also manage to have a few boggy races now that we have 2 boggies. That stuff is really fun. I want a golf court where you do not play golf. You just cruise around in the golf boggy.
So anyway, after 6 holes (1/3 of what we paid for), it is pretty much night time and the girls tell us that we need to get off the court. Those people must have been seriously bored anyway. Just imagine trying to be all professional and stuff when you are working for 2 drunken dumb ass who never played golf in their life. I believe they were paid to entertain us at the same time. Cheer whenever we hit the ball and stuff.
We drive back to the club house where we drop the boggy. We tip the caddies and then call a taxi. It is quite late by this time and we realize that we need to go catch the ferry back to Singapore. We do not actually know where the ferry place is. So we call a cab which accepts to take us to the ferry. It is quite close so it does not take long. We go to the boarding area and present our ticket. The dude explains to us that this is the wrong place and that we need to go back to the main town. We get into another taxi. As we are driving, we realize that the time table is in the wrong time! We are actually one hour late and that there is no way that we are going to make it in time.
“Fuck it, we are staying here tonight.” My mate says
By that time, we look like shit. We are still wearing our clubbing clothes. We have had fuck all sleep during the passed 36 hours and we have been drunk for almost 24 hours straight. We tell the driver to bring us to a hotel. He drives us to some dodgy hotel where local people usually stay. The place looks like shit but it is a bed which is what we need. We pay about 13 USD each. We get our keys. We go to the room to have a quick shower. I walk in and the first thing that I see… a cockroach that hides itself under the bed.
“fuckin hell…”
I walk to the bathroom. I strip my clothes and have a leak. I push on the flush button… I push again… and again! And again! … There is no water!!!
“Jesus fuckin Christ!”
So anyway we end up going out for food and more drinks. It is a better plan than staying in the room with the roaches. We have dinner at the “Last pub”. I order some very expensive lamb chops. It is ok but not great. We have a few drinks and then move on to the next bar.
Because it is Sunday night, everything is quite empty. There is not much happening. There is still a bunch of girls who comes talk to us. (Nothing out of the ordinary.) We jump between places until we are completely drunk again. We end up in some place where they accept me as “DJ”. I queue up a bunch of songs. Then I am just tired and half a sleep. So I play some pool and then some girl drove us home. I slept.
I wake up by magic at around 0600 o’clock. I do not know how. My alarm failed to wake me up. I bang on my mate’s door telling him that we are late for the first ferry. We make it there and then leave. I manage to sleep a bit more. We drop through the Singapore customs. We jump into a cab and head straight for work.
Reflection
Anyway, I do not know how this story actually reads itself but we both agreed that this particular Sunday was a “fuckin hilarious/fun day and that we must do it again sometime”. I wish I could do those kinds of spontaneous crazy things more often. I mean… it is what life is all about… right? Opportunities are out there… it is a simple matter of taking them.
Most of the time, we tend to be afraid of what we do not know (it is part of human nature… afraid of the changes… afraid of losing control) or afraid of what other people tells us. It is something that is subconsciously there in the back of our head and influences our daily actions. It explains why so many numb nuts people will go halfway across the world just to go sit by the pool in their expensive hotel drinking Pinal Colada with orange juice aside. What we often fail to realize is that about ~90% of the time where we just let go and take the mind state of “act now and think later”, our adventures end up being extremely successful. Even if everything goes wrong, as long that you survive, you will usually come back with a descent story.
I am sure that I am not saying anything new here but I do strongly believe that we need to get those things repeated to you on a daily basis if needed. It is never easy to face your fears but it usually worth it.
-Francois-
PS: there are some lie within this essay and some sensible/useless details were edited out.
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