Back to Bintan
I’d been in Singapore for a while, and done all the standard weekend destinations — Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi, Bali, Bangkok. But somehow, they left me wanting. The places I went to were certified full-on Asia, with great street food, tons of cool and ancient places to visit, and gorgeous everything at the sweep of an eyeball. But were they the real Asia, the soul of that wonderful archipelago that had spawned nutmeg, cloves, sumptuously beautiful silk fabrics and best of all, chutney?
Greg, Ben and I, huddled over a chilled beer on Liang Seah Street, decided no, they weren’t. We needed to dig deeper, to go off the beaten track — to explore as opposed to go on a trip. We needed an expedition.
We opted for a short ferry venture, across the strait to Bintan. It was only a couple of hours away yet undeniably foreign, and anyway, you needed passports and visas to get there because despite the proximity to Singapore it was in Indonesia, and was therefore adventurous.
We booked up, got haircuts and packed suitable clothing (shorts, t-shirts and slippers), prepped our digital recording equipment (Greg’s Nokia phone with a wowee hi-def video camera), passport, cash, toothbrush. We had already decided that the exotic reaches of the Riau Archipelago (first colonised by Hindu merchants back in the late 4th-century, and of which Bintan was a part) demanded lone and intrepid travel by our team, not some cheesy backpacker-oriented organised minibus tour.
Bintan had people who spoke a different language, ate gado gado, visited prostitutes, snacked on cap cai and boasted small, tough men with high-pitched laughs! These things alone justified a proper, random exploration — but we couldn’t take our bicycles on the ferry. We decided instead to rent scooters.
Ben had a current bike licence, and so did I. But Greg had never ridden a motorbike or scooter in his life. That left Greg as the big question mark hovering over our expedition readiness. Would Greg be Oates to our Antarctic pole push? Would we have to eat him? Ben and I nodded covertly to each other and tacitly agreed we would leave him behind if he crashed. Explorers know the risks . . . .
The passenger ferry from Tanah Merah to Bintan made us feel like proper adventurers; other less hardy travellers clutched and heaved into sick-bags as our vessel rolled and wove between supertankers and massive container ships to the slightly distant, smudged outline of Bintan on the eastern horizon. We arrived in Bintan, paid our visa dues, inhaled the welcome tang of clove cigarettes and two-stroke oil, and strode into a worker hostel town looking for some mo-sickles.
After a bit of haggling, we rented two 150cc Yamaha step-throughs from a man who knew the man who owned them, plus another Honda from a man who said he would rent it to us as long as we took good care of it. They asked if we knew how to ride them; pathetic non-explorer formalities such as rental agreement, licence, insurance, ownership documents etc etc were only for sissies, and therefore not even hinted at. We bestrode our highway stallions and thumbed the starters. Greg blipped the Honda throttle, rakishly adjusted his helmet, and kicked his bike into gear. Miraculously, it didn’t stall, but instead leapt forward — straight for the ditch. Getting going obviously wasn’t an issue for him, but directional accuracy was. The man who owned the bike developed a worried look as he watched Greg lurch away up the road, rebounding off obstacles like a well-cued billiard ball, cleverly converting linear momentum into directional change. We were on our way.
To celebrate the fact, a Singaporean Airlines A380 superjumbo roared low over our heads. We assumed they had heard of our trip, and were doing an honorary flypast. We waved, Greg veered, and we rode towards the mystic east or in our case Trikora Beach, where there were rumours of primitive huts suspended on poles over the water that we could rent for mere cents and maybe watch fish flit and dart from our verandahs as we marvelled at the phosphorescence flickering along the tops of breaking Pacific Ocean waves. Magnificent!
After 20 minutes or so, hungry, we stopped at a wayside shack-style eating house, where three young girls rushed around in a frenzy to serve us delicious fresh-caught ikan rendang. After the fish was eaten, the girls suggested that Greg undergo some kind of personal therapeutic massage; maybe they had already heard about his cornering technique through the local grapevine, and thought he needed loosening up a little. We sweated in the early afternoon heat.
The last of the fish and Fanta disappeared, clouds appeared and it was time to leave; we were reluctant though. The delights of fresh cooked spicy food, along with a simple and innocently open curiosity from the eating-house girls were utterly refreshing. They asked where we were from, why we were there and where we were going. Absent were the pretend shyness and post-colonial deference we were used to in Singapore; they were just interested. They were there to serve fish, so they did it, and they also made the most of our unexpected appearance while we ate. The experience was exactly what we had come for; a breath of fresh, third-world air. If we hadn’t been on crappy mopeds we might have felt slightly superior, but as we set off up the road we heard the girls sniggering at our pathetic attempts to ride properly. We were the losers: not them in their wonky sheet-iron food stop, worn out flip flops and second-hand t-shirts.
We made it across the island hinterland, admittedly on serviceable tarmac roads rather than jungle tracks, and came out on the eastern seaboard at Trikora Beach, just 90kms from Singapore’s bustle and worldliness. We could just as well have been on a castaway desert island. A few dogs struggled off their sleeping spots in the road as we chugged past, fishermen mending nets looked up and waved through the palm trees, and an old man knelt in the road spooning cement into a crack in the tarmac. Otherwise, nothing moved but the clouds, the palm trees, and a vulture cruising over a ridge.
We were the only, really the only, motorised vehicles on that road. It was blissful. We swerved like drunken snakes from kerb to kerb (or would have done if there had been kerbs — the tarmac just melted into sandy ditches) and hooted and shouted with joy as we rolled south. We felt immersed in Asia, the real Asia. That night, we slept in palm thatch huts suspended on poles over the water, sat on the verandahs and watched fish flit and dart under our feet. There wasn’t any phosphorescence, but it really was wonderful.
Next day was a Saturday, and a day off work, so the roads changed from empty ribbons of baking, vacant sloth to buzzing highways jammed with scooters (known locally as chicken-mashers, for fairly obvious reasons).
The scooters carried variously drivers, babies, passengers, chickens, guitars, food boxes, newly-felled trees, small boy racers, demure tudung-wearing girls — or a combination of all the above at once. Every corner was a Brands Hatch, every straight a drag strip. It was brilliant, with not even a microburst of road anger (let alone rage) to be felt from the cheering riders and pillions when they realised we were foreigners as they passed us, or we passed them. I have never seen so many smiling people on any road, anywhere.
We rode on, got lost, ended up in ear-high elephant grass, then stumbled across a popular beach where we ate pisang goreng cooked on oil-drum woks, and watched literally hundreds of locals shouting happily as they jumped in and out of the sea and floated around in old car innertubes, fully clad. It was astonishing, it was bedlam, but you know what? — we felt we had discovered the real Asia, the one that we were looking for, the one that left memories way stronger than the glitz of Marina Bay Sands shopping mall, or the superficial flattery of Bangkok street hawkers.
Sunburned, weary, but on a high of goodwill and simplicity, we caught the ferry back to Singapore, where the predictability and convenience of a waiting taxi somehow seemed like a let down. We hardly spoke to each other as we drove down smooth multi-lane tarmac, back to our fully-equipped, air-conditioned apartments. We were thinking about what we had seen, and maybe mulling our next adventure. It wouldn’t be to Bangkok or Bali, that was for sure.
