News

We were not ready for this - crazy

There is not many pictures in this news post, but trust me, it's worth reading.

It’s time for the boat story, which is 4 days of our trip but needs to be told in two parts. Part one leaving singapore and going to batam. To leave singapore, it’s pretty easy you just have to take a ferry and an hour later your are in batam. (If you want more detail on how to take the ferry in Singapore to go to batam click here) And no, we couldn’t just jump from singapore directly to Jakarta/indonesia wich was our final destination (At least the information we got from internet told us it was not possible...) So to Batam we went, leaving was fine, the boat ride was nice but the arrival… oh boy. I thought I would never be pushed through immigration by another passenger, but now I can check it off my bucket list. A man literally grab my arm to push me toward the immigration officer because I wasn’t walking there fast enough for his taste. To be clear we were already in line and I was next. That was a really chaotic arrival at least I thought that until we arrived in Jakarta but that’s another story. Once we passed immigration which was pretty easy (See here for more information about visa in Indonesia)... too easy... but we will only learn that a few weeks later when we will try to leave Indonesia. I promise that was the last cliffhanger. After the arrival it was time to go to our hotel, it was old, but honestly after the hotel in singapore it looked like a 5 star hotel, I may be exaggerating a little bit…

Once we settled in, it was time to look for food and that’s when we got our first bad experience has tourists. We first went to a grocery store and full up on snack for the boat ride, everything was cheap so we kinda went overboard and bough way too many sweet snacks. (Caramel popcorn…..) After that we headed to the restaurant next door. That’s where someone with a very serious face tried to sell us a very tiny piece of fish for 35$CAD… No it wasn’t a high end restaurant or even a nice one. So we started laughing, closed the menu and left. The second restaurant actually tried to sell it to us for 45$. I wouldn’t even pay that in canada… I am not about to spend that kind of money in a street stall when I am pretty sure there’s rats in the kitchen. (NO that’s not a free insulte a few minutes earlier on our way there, I saw two rats fighting in the street) So we got back to the hotel without food, thankfully we had grab and on our phone. Fortunately, they can’t know we are white on grab. So the fish in the same restaurant when ordered online suddenly costed 2$ ... We were so pissed that we order Mcdonald… We didn’t want to give them our money so we chose the most american thing available. And yes we did that for the 2 days we stayed in batam. (Here’s more information about grab food)

After that infuriating experience, we order a grab to go a different part of the island in order to get our tickets. We stayed close to the departure point, but for some odd reason you had to buy the ticket 30 minutes away from there. So we got there and we saw the lovely sticker of Visa and Mastercard on the door and we naively told ourselves this is going to be easy. We were wrong very very wrong. We needed 2 millions Indonesian Rupiah cash and only had 300 000 in our wallet. So we got back in the grabcar and negotiated with the driver again (We already negotiate with him to wait for us outside while we were paying the ticket… off the app of course) Then, we asked him to drive us to the airport where we could withdraw cash and come back to the ticketing office... no big deal. (The airport was 2 minutes away) which he did but the ATM at the airport didn’t work with our cards… none of the 5 ATM over there worked with our cards... that’s where panic started getting to us. (Here’s more information about ATM when you travel) We didn’t want to stay longer on that island and to boat only leaves once a week, on wednesday. We are not staying one more week!! We hopped back in the grab car and kindly ask/negotiate with him to drive us around town in search of a working ATM. The man was incredibly kind and helped us. Our next stop was a bank hoping that they will be able to help us, unfortunately they just referred us to another ATM. First try, Alexis card didn’t work, second try in an other ATM his card didn’t work but as he was trying his second ATM I tried the first one thinking It won’t work since we have the same account. But for some reason the ATM liked me and gave me ¾ of the amount we needed. That’s where my amazing bear got a great idea. Use our remaining Thai baht, transfer them in Indonesian Rupiah via the airport transfer counter and with that we should have the full amount for the tickets. And it work!!! We were finally able to buy our ticket to leave for Jakarta. After a stressful 3 hours, we were back in our hotel. (For the record, in front of our hotel there was a working ATM. We just didn’t wanted to make the trip back to the hotel and back to the ticket office twice). In our trip around the island, it’s important to mention how it looked like. It was a bit odd, there was huge hotel complexe with themes and hundreds of rooms, but they all seemed run down and empty. It’s seemed odd and partly explained the eagerness of the restaurant owner to sell us overpriced food. Finally, the time came for us to get to the docks.