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Indonesia / Singapore, June 2000

Old town, Jakarta

Jakarta, the capital city, is Indonesia’s biggest and most important city. On this occasion I would only stay one day as I was merely passing through. I was on my way to Singapore from where I’d head up to Thailand passing through Malaysia. Once back on the Asian mainland I’d be on familiar territory — I had criss-crossed the area before — Kuala Lumpur, Georgetown on the island of Penang, no news there.

PELNI ferry

But first I had a 25-hour ferry journey ahead of me. My longest ferry ride ever had taken me in the opposite direction from Medan, Sumatra to Jakarta, Java. On my way back I would get off in Batam, an island just off Singapore.

For once I wasn’t on my own. I was traveling with a Swedish couple who had been on the bus with me coming from Yogyakarta in central Java. But luckily, even without them, I wouldn’t have been the only Western traveler among two-thousand or more Indonesians, filling up every corner of every corridor of this vast ship, the PELNI ferry K.M. “Kelud”.

My moderate grasp of Indonesian enabled me to get an approximate idea of the loudspeaker announcements, so I picked up a message about a Christian gathering in the multipurpose room on Deck 4.

How courteous, I thought. The captain had just blessed all his fellow Muslim passengers (most of them) — a speech that not surprisingly ended in multiple mentionings of the word Allah — I didn’t understand much more of the announcement, which were followed by Islamic prayers echoing out of every loudspeaker of the ship-wide PA-system.

Just five minutes later, the captain addressed all Christian folk on board, but without mention of the word for the Christian god or the phrase God bless you, which I’d have recognized because of their reoccurrence in my phrasebooks. The poor captain probably didn’t even know any Christian courtesies but, nevertheless, he impressed me with his practice of religious freedom on his ship.

Due to my total indifference to the practice of religion in general, and of protestant Christianity, which I was borne into in particular, I didn’t participate. None of the other passengers around me, who must have understood the captain much more clearly, seemed to bother, either.
They usually sneered at the captain and interrupted his announcements with silly comments, but this one simply passed through them.

Maybe, I should have gone, just to have a look at the people and listen to what these seafaring Christians have to say, but out of rebellious ignorance I didn’t want to give them the pleasure of welcoming a Westerner to their get-together. I imagined the odd mothering friendliness that I usually experience with Christian crowds.

“Hello, Mister.
Thanks for coming.
How nice.
Sit down: There’s a chair.
Here, sit on this one.
How did you hear about us?”
“I heard the announcement.”

The rest of the mothering welcome speech would then be delivered in Indonesian which would be spoken much too fast for me to understand.

But this is pure fiction — I didn’t go.

Instead, I picked up another announcement, by the ship’s entertainment officer, concerning the onboard cinema. They were showing Mission Impossible II, a film I even had a mild interest in seeing: a gadget-laden secret agent flick. Why not?
With only 2,000 rupiahs left (30 US cents) to my name, I borrowed the rest of the ticket price from the friendly Swedes — the equivalent of 1 US$.

“Thanks guys!” and I maneuvered over fields of bodies spread out on newspapers (that nobody read) and mattresses — youngsters sneering at me (“Hello, Mister, where you go?”), old people in rags, toddlers, breastfeeding mothers — the whole demographic spectrum of Indonesia was in my way.
The cinema was installed on Deck 2, the lowest of passenger decks — not only in altitude within the ship, but also in comfort. The decks acted like a system of sieves straining the bewildering mass of people, leaving the Chinese businessmen in cabins on the top decks and the filthiest and poorest latecomers with no previous bookings right at the bottom, on Deck 2.

Economy class

Moving down in the ship, the lights grew dimmer, the floors became dirtier, and the crowds stared more aggressively when I joined the queue for cinema tickets. Needless to say, the people who bought such tickets were from decks further up.

The tiny room was filling up quickly. Gun-wielding secret agents hurtling through flames and explosions to save the token female character seemed to appeal to them as much as it did to me, maybe even for the same reasons.

First the rooms was full of boys about my age who were chatting, making conversation (“Where you from?”) and constantly changing seats. They seemed to know each other.
When two elderly well-dressed men with gray hair walked in, the whole group laughed and applauded them. They knew those two as well?

“What’s so funny?” I asked the boy next to me.
“He’s our father, how do you say, minister … uh, reverend.” His spoken English was excellent, but because of his Chinese looks, the good education didn’t surprise me.
“Are you traveling as a group?”

“Yes, most of us are here.” Another reverend of theirs had walked in, much to the amusement of his students.

“I used to study in Australia, three years, then England,” he explained his good English.

“Studying what?”

“Missionary studies. Learning about the Bible and teaching people the Word.”
“I see. Theology,” I replied in an interrupting, almost rude tone a school teacher would use when trying to say, “Remember that word, Son!”.

Christian church, Indonesia

The courtesy of the captain towards those of a non-Islamic religion now made perfect sense — the Christian gathering, the reverends . . .

The Christians were these folks, and being missionaries by nature, they’d asked the captain to read out the invitations to their get-together over the ship-wide PA-system.
My slightly harsh interruption of his explanation was perhaps a subconscious expression of my disapproval of missionary work — aggressive, persuasive, fear-inducing speeches about the Almighty . . . well, usually more about Satan and the Gates of Hell, while quietly trampling over the indigenous beliefs and traditions of their audience.

In anticipation of the film I had directed my attention away from Tony, as his name was, to the screen that was showing a music video of a European-sounding techno track. The lyrics had caught my attention, although it consisted of only one word repeated every so often between hard dance-music thumps.

FICKEN, the Teutonic voice said, German for fuck. How nice, I thought. I just hoped these Bible-bashers didn’t speak any German before they blamed Western culture in general, and me in particular, for such obscenities.
The picture quality of the video CD shown was of low quality and the sounds weren’t any better. The subtitles were in Malay and although any Indonesian could understand the language in its written form (Indonesian was derived from a Malayan dialect) this glitch made some people leave after only five minutes.

Halfway through, the movie was interrupted to raffle off some T-shirts with the logo of the Indonesian national passenger shipping line, PELNI. As soon as the draw based on the number printed on the cinema tickets was finished, more people left. When the baddie was dead, the cinema was half empty — with ten minutes of film still to go.

The pirated CD had been secretly videotaped in a cinema somewhere, probably Japan, shortly after the film’s release, then quickly subtitled in Malay and Chinese in a high-tech playroom of a KL gangster syndicate and shipped over to Indonesia for mass-duplication.

I could clearly see the silhouettes of people walking past the video camera in the Japanese cinema, where people seemed as impatient to leave as these missionaries were only moments after the villain’s demise.

We got to Batam the next morning. So far everything had gone perfectly — I had arrived without a single rupiah left in my pocket — the precise accounting had saved me another trip to the bank. From there onwards I had only Singapore dollars (S$), Malaysian ringgits, US$, or plastic money. The ferry over to Singapore was payable in S$ — even the change was returned to me in S$ which, once at the World Trade Center docks, I used for the bus to the train station. I now had precisely 30 S$ left: The ticket to Malaysia was 19 S$, leaving me 11 S$ for food.

Perfect.

A big plate of rice for dinner, plus desserts, chocolates, and some rations for the road. I would also leave this country without a trace of its currency.

I enjoyed backtracking on myself — it was a way of tying up loose ends — to finalize all the irrational decisions I’d made that would take me all the way from Bali, where nobody had any use for me in any of the dive centers, all the way to a tiny island in Thailand where 22 dive schools competed for customers and coral garden real estate on only 22 square kilometers of rock in the ocean (“Koh Tao”).

The train didn’t leave until 10 P.M. — four hours away — which left enough time to convert 11 S$ into an achingly full stomach. So I munched and scribbled notes.

Arab Street, Singapore

I enjoyed being able to afford sandwiches again, at 1 S$ — only half the price of a plate of rice with vegetables. In Indonesia, bread, and the eggs that made up its filling, were both rare commodities, and there I would have been charged three to six times the price of a plate of rice. That would have worked out to about 1 S$ (equivalent in rupiahs) per sandwich.
So, in bread-and-egg terms, Singapore was six to twelve times cheaper than Indonesia.

Amazing, I thought, and bought another coffee.

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