Golf course, this way...

I have had the opportunity to play golf in some great parts of the world on some of the best courses. My favourite experience would have to be playing San Lorenzo, in Portugal’s Algarve, as it had had the prestige of holding the Portuguese Open on a few occasions. I’ve played golf in the middle of the Albert Park F1 Racetrack in Melbourne. I once played a brand new course in Florida with a mate of mine where we teamed up against a couple of cigar-chewing american pilots and showed them that the Brits are ultra competitive and benefit from not laying-up, even when faced with aligator infested water hazzards.....so imagine my surprise when driving the road between tanjung pandang and tanjung tinggi, I saw this sign....

.....this wasn’t here 7 months ago.

It was worth an investigation I thought. Might just turn out to be a cluster of houses with the cluster name “Golf”. Might be a crazy golf course or a couple of pitch and put holes.

Nope...some entreprenneurial local has had the brilliant idea of building a golf course in the middle of a jungle. No pitch-and-putt either, rather it’s a 9-hole course with 5 par-4 holes and 4 par-three holes. Ok, no par-5’s but who knows what they have planned for the future.

This is the view from the first tee and, as you can see, local hazzards include the malaria filled water trap in front, snakes to the left and right and an Indianna Jones style bridge to get to your dive. This is a pretty impressive, first-of-nine, holes.  300 yards, up hill, carrying water. Nice, open fairway but i have no idea of the quality of the greens. I’m guessing slow.

So back up a few minutes....I arrived just as a group of locals were coming off the 9th. One of them asked me if I wanted a drink and when I said a yes, a perfect iced tea appeared in front of me (this wasn’t magic, a waitress brought it). I think, as is usual in Belitung, they wanted pictures with a Bule on their new course and I happily obliged. The golfers, the caddies and I then spoke in broken english and bahasa about golf, Jakarta and, inevitably, David Beckham  so I thought it the right moment to bring up playing a round. Tuesday is my best day as tomorrow I want to visit the lighthouse and this seemed to fit in with everyone else’s plans (lord knows how many people are coming!)I was asked what time and here it got quite comical. I suggested 10am as I didn’t think the heat would bother them (here they were, walking off the course at 1pm). Excellent, everyone agreed at 10......”mungkin jam sembilan?” an indonesian voice in the group suggested, maybe 9am?, ok...9 it is then.....”what about 8?” ok says I, not really wanting to get up that early, but what the hell!!....it now seemed to be turning into a competition as to who could get me to start the earliest including the voice from the back that suggested “Sunday?” which would have meant either extending my stay on the island or going back in time. Giving him the benefit of the doubt I think he joined the conversation late.

Suffice it to say, I’m teeing off at 7am on Tuesday in the extremely unofficial Belitung Open!! (God I want to buy a house here even more than ever now)

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!

Travelling made easy

Living and working here gets you access to something called a KITAS. It’s the ID card that proves our eligibilty to work and, once you have one, it takes the place of your passport in proving you are who you say you are.

It means that when you travel, you just have this flimsy piece of photogrpahic proof but the look that it inspires in the people you’re talking to, that you choose to live and work in their country is always priceless.

The land of smiles.

I have heard many countries referred to as ‘The Land of Smiles’ I’ve also been lucky enough to visit a few and see the evidence for myself and I guess you’ll now call me biased if I say that nowhere is this more true than Indonesia, as this is the place I choose to call home. Well, I defy you naysayers to visit and allow me to prove you wrong.

Sure, Jakarta’s probably not the best example of permanent smiles, it’s a capital city  with the pressures of housing 25 million people in a melting pot of semi poverty and grand indulgence but even here are more smiles than your average captial city.

Out in the provinces you are 99.9999% likely to be greeted with a smile. A certain amount of this is the fact that westerners are still an unusual sight and here on Belitung it’s seriously apparent. Amazed stares are usually followed by rubber necked gestures to confirm that what people thought they saw, they really did. And this is swiftly followed by a beaming smile, a shout to get you to look back again and, if possible, the words ‘hey mister’ (possibly being the only English vocabulary in their posession).

 this picture isn't from Belitong but perfectly illustrates smiles....are you smiling now?

But back to the smile. I once heard it referred to as the shortest distance between two people. A very apt way to put it.

Rules can't be broken, except when they can

Indonesia’s contradictions are never more apparent than in the interpretation of rules. As with any society, the rules here are meant to maintain order, preserve safety and generally make sure things run like a well oiled machine. That’s where the fantasy ends though and the key word is interpretation.

With rules, people are as apt here to read into the spirit of the them as much as the letter, but they are also pretty likely to break them.

I’m currently on Belitung, a small island off the coast of Sumatra having a weeks holiday and this time round I decided to rent a motorbike for the duration of my stay. I’ve mentioned before that driving licences are bought, not earned but that’s as much down to the rampant corruption as it is to any thought for law or rules. Helmets, and the wearing of said item, are more of a personal area of choice for rule interpretation.

 A guy breaking the rules

Today I rode my bike the 30 minutes it takes to get to Tanjung Tinggi and I went all the way, there and back, without a helmet. Now some people would say this is just personal stupidity on my part as the main reason for the helmet is safety. However, on an island of only a handful of people (compared to the 25 million in Jakarta anyway, it’s nearly impossible to have an accident. The second point was that since I would be riding so slowly so as to find great photo opportunities, that even if a rogue Indonesian rider/driver did something crazy the worst I could expect would be dust marks on my shorts.

 Anyway, I arrived back at the hotel as the weather had turned dull and was about to walk into town when the receptionist stopped me and asked why I was walking there. An unusual request anywhere else as it’s probably only a 10 minute stroll, but she still insisted I was crazy to walk and should take the scooter. To be on the safe side I thought I’d ask about the local law regarding helmets. Very gravely she assured me that the not wearing of helmets was punishable ,by some fate worse than death (at least this was what I read into her clearly panic stricken face) so I donned my helmet to obvious signs of satisfaction, rode into town and passed numerous people not wearing a helmet. Admittedly the police would take great delight in stopping an unwary rider and demanding some form of payment as fine for the offense, but I have yet to actually see a policeman here in 2 separate visits to the Island!

And don't get me started on 4 people on one moped.....