monkeycrap's Diaryland Diary
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batam 18/12/2006-20/12/2006: discoveries amidst the deluge
You tell me. The moment I knew I was haphazardly booked on a trip to Batam, stunning images of golden honeyed vistas searing in the sun's incandescence flooded my subconscious. You know, the kind of images that, at the very thought of, help alleviate the accumulated tension arising from one university semester's worth of nothing-doing. Ahh. Batam bliss.
It rained. For almost the entire duration of the trip. We wanted to soak up the sun. We got soaked all right. We wanted our skins to, by the end of this trip, look like a million dollars. We got our wish. They turned out blue and crinkly, thanks to the rain. We wanted cable-skiing. We got cab-skiing when our taxi had to trudge through the mud springing from the overflowing longkang banks. But, you know, despite the rain, overflowing longkang banks, disrupted water supply and all, I still enjoyed myself on this trip, and I say that with as much pride, gusto and honesty as someone who chugged down 2 large mugfuls worth of A&W root beer (one with float, one au naturel) in one sitting.
I miss you guys so, so much.
It's about yearning, it's about expectations. You want sun, you get rain. You expect endless stretches of golden brown sand, you get rain. You yearn to sit in a deck chair, sip pina coladas and listen to the sound of lapping waves and shrieking babes, you get rain. Kundera explained that the Greek word for 'return' is nostos, and that algos means 'suffering'. Thus, we have nostalgia - the suffering caused by the yearning to return to what was, what should be. In turn, we overlook the beauty of the present, of the moment, of the rain. I stood at the hotel room balcony admiring the grass, the trees, then the vast expanse of sea in the distance, all huddled under the oyster-grey cloud shroud, all embraced in its fine sodden discharge. Batam in all its glorious beauty, as you've never seen her before. I loved the discrepancy between what I had expected and what I had received, I loved the rain, I loved being in the moment. Before long, nostalgia and its baggages of 'what was' and 'what should be' creeped in, and it made me wonder whether (at both that point in time and in life itself) I was living for the moment or in the moment. Then, I gave the sea a visual one-over and thought about how people talk about the sea being endless, being neverending, and how wrong they are, for the seas and oceans flow into themselves, either through the circular circumscription of the earth or the orbicular configuration of the water cycle. This entire notion of circularity, of things going full circle, of what goes around comes around can either (a)give you hope, (b)give you a sense of security, (c)shroud you in hopelessness and despair, or (d)scare the shit out of you, depending on the circumstances. At that place and time, (b) seemed like the final answer.
Anyway. The trip was lovely, and the fact that I travelled with 2 equally wonderful travelmates, Denise, Louis, did much to serve the cause. To subdivide the trip into days 1,2 and 3 wouldn't do much good, simply because this entire trip was centered around the two main themes of sloth and gluttony, or what the less judgemental of us might call 'nua-ness'. Nuaness, like the flood waters, overflowed from one day into the next, resulting in predictable behavioral patterns which involved eating, sleeping, eating, hibernating, eating, watching soccer, eating, rating the models on Fashion TV (6.5, 7.5, maybe a 5.5), eating, watching Ellen DeGeneres play tennis with Matthew Perry. But there were some highlights though.
The Phantom Resort
It had to be the best taxi ride of my life. We had just finished sparing no one in our Ayam Penyet Massacre, in what would undoubtedly go down in Batamian Histori as 'The Great Belachan Raid',
and spent half an hour watching Chen Taiming on a small screen in one of those old school kopitiams.
It was total monsoon madness outside, but we were being discreetly ushered out of the kopitiam, hence we had no choice but to run across the street, to the bus stop, and flag for a cab to take us back to our hotel, which was as ulu-ated as any hotel could get. It was 10pm, there were few streetlights and even fewer street signs. Visibility was almost zero because of the rain. And yet our driver, the uncanny hero of the night, managed to get us back safe and sound. He did make a wrong turn just before our resort, and because of the visibility, or lack thereof, this unoccupied, abandoned phantom beach resort just appeared right before our very eyes, not unlike the ship captained by Davey Jones in Pirates of the Carribean II. The rain, the lightning, the hazy greyish-purple glow of the god-forsaken colonial style structures, it really was quite freaky. Straight out from 'I know what you did last Hari Raya'.
Sound of the Underground
It was pretty apparent that 'nightlife' in Batam on a cold monsoony night would either be referring to the hotspot that is the hotel frontdesk or the occasional abandoned resort apparition. Or the discotheque in the hotel, which we decided to check out. I had my reservations about a joint uncool enough to call itself a discotheque, but oh well, when in Batam. The 'underground' leadway to the, ugh, discotheque, was pretty cool, with a red lantern cave theme, which consisted of, well, red lanterns and caves.
We had a few choices. To party the night away to techno music emanating from DJ Kool up in da' attik, to play pool, or to do a little k-box in one of their cutesily named rooms - choose from aquarius, oceanic or rainbow. Something to that extent. Seeing that there was absolutely no soul in the club(both literally as well as in DJ Kool's music), we decided to self entertain via karaoke. Songs were really old. If embracing my cultural roots mean belting out 'Shanghai Tan', 'Su Su Liam Liam' and 'Bengawan solo', then I have done my part in delaying the advent of westernization. Hoh say lah!
The Dinner
The trip was made worth it by the glorious, divine seafood dinner on the 2nd night. For what one would pay to get greasy shit at some shopping mall 'restaurant' in Singapore, we got, I don't know, say, crabs, coconuts, beer, prawns, coke, fish, calamari, tomyam soup, seasonal greens, free flow of rice, free flow of toilet bombings. Except for the last item, which was just a minor backlash, everything else was prepared to perfection. I swear, those coconuts were bottomless and much better than those served up in Singapore. Or on Fashion TV, for that matter. Never mind.
So I didn't get what I had hoped for in Batam. Guess things'll turn out fine when there's good food, good company and (preferably a large jug of) teh-o-eis.
1:58 p.m. - 2006-12-31
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