A funny thing happened on the way for a beer.

So, it’s the first night of my holiday in Belitung and I fancied a beer. I also needed something to eat. The last time I was here on the island I had brought Mum and Dad as part of their trip to see me in 2011. We had found a restaurant called Pandan Luat and so I thought I’d head back and give it another visit.

A great Sate Ayam with plain rice was washed down with a deliciously cold bottle of Bintang, one of Indonesia’s main 3 beers. The others are ‘Anker’ and ‘Bali Hai’ but you can also find Carlsberg, San Miguel, Heineken, Corona and Guinness, (delightfully pronounced Gwinness along with biskwit, gwitar and ker-nock!) but since I had the bike I didn’t want to have too many, so after the meal I headed back to the hotel, parked up and went for a walk along the beachfront in Tajung Pandang. I had heard a band tuning up earlier so headed back there as I thought I might as well listen to some live music while enjoying the beer.

Arriving at ‘Caspreso’ the band were in full rock mode, belting out a cover of an Indonesian rock song. Indonesian music, I find, is better for not knowing the words. Take something like AC/DC’s ‘Let me put my love into you’. A thinly veiled allegory on getting into your girlfriend’s pants. Indonesians don’t do veiled allegory (as far as I know) so their songs are usually a lot more earnest and even the hardest rock songs or thrash metal are describing what we would normally expect to hear in a Taylor Swift song. The lead and rhythm gutars, bass and drums are still banging out a similar sounding tune though. Anyway, I ordered my beer and the band asked if I had any requests. Stating that I liked the last song using my growing Bahasa Indonesian, and that I also liked Indonesian music, I hoped this would give them the opportunity to keep with what they know rather than murder a western song for the sake of having a patron from that area of the world.

Well,  I’ve heard some unusual covers, none more so than Tori Amos’s version of Smells Like Teen Spirit, originally recorded by Nirvanna (as if you didn’t know!). This still didn’t prepare me for the keyboard player’s opening chords to Dancing Queen by Abba. What was once a cheesy pop record from the Swedish quartet, in the hands of this band it became Dancing Queen in the style of Slipknot. I just wish my phone had been fully charged to allow me to video it. If this had gone viral they’d be a mega success.

The beer finished, I headed back to the hotel and sat on the veranda enjoying another beer watching the motorbikes buzz by and was presently joined by a trio of Indonesians. Friends holidaying together, they found out that I spoke a couple of sentences (actually a lot more than a couple but nowhere close to being fluent, priimarily because of a shortage of vocabulary) these two sentences apparently suggested that indeed I was fluent and encouraged the three of them to speak in rapid, confusing bursts. Asking them to speak slowly had little effect whatsoever but I guess we managed to make ourselves understood all the same.

During this discourse a pretty girl approached us and asked if we wanted to go to the cafe next door to the hotel and listen to live music. Now I’d heard about this place from two sources. One was a write up on a website, the other was from a friend of mine. She had returned with stories of ‘fallen women’ sharing a beer with her and some interesting stories of what went on inside. I needed to see this for myself as from the outside it looked completely innocuous. On entering, I noticed that the place was virtually pitch black except for a few red lights (they’re always red for some reason, aren’t they?) and a loud band playing on a stage at the far end. The place was virtually empty except for the sofas in front of me where  four guys sat being entertained by four girls, taking it in turns to sing along with the house band on a radio mike (the girls, not the guys). On the level I was sitting, in front of the bar, were a couple of guys sat on stools and over to the far side of the bar, in even further gloom, was a table with what appeared to be 5 or 6 girls. I ordered a beer and agreed to buy one for Ria, the girl who’d invited me. What does an Indoesian order in a place like this? A wine? A vodka? Nope,  a bottle of Guinness topped up with Red Bull!

Now let me tell you,I was in no doubt from the moment she’d asked the group I was with to enter the cafe as to what her ‘job’ was. I have a perfectly gorgeous girlfriend back in Tangerang so had come in, pretty much, to put a picture to the story from Emma and on finishing my beer, using the words of journalists everywhere, I made my excuses, paid the Rp170,000 bill, and left. Yep, one large Bintang, a small guiness and a red bull was £12.

The thing that makes this story more coincidental is that I wandered around town the next day and walked into the small mall they have. There at the cashiers desk was Ria, working her day job I guess, but a face so full of acne I realised what the dim, red lights were actually for!