Pakanbaru
March 21st 1995
I'd checked out someone's
Lonely Planet
guide book in Ende, for
places to stay in Pekanbaru and it only had one in it, which was
Tommy's, near the bus station.
We walked down the lane where it was supposed to be and after a little way, a few kids came up and asked us if we were looking for Tommy's we said "maybe" and they said "come with us" and started walking back the way we'd come. It was probably a combination of the bullshit with the bemo and the effects of all the dozens of people at bus stations etc, that seem to have tried to make us go with them over the last few days, but we turned round and just kept on walking.
Anyway, we didn't find anything that looked like a losmen and we ended up walking back up the next street. We stopped at a tailors shop that also sold drinks and sweets and stuff and got a bottle of beer, which we sat down on a bench outside to drink.
The people in the shop were asking us where we were staying the night and suggested Tommy's. They gave us vague directions how to get there. But just then a man and a boy rode up on a moped and the shop people called them over. It was Yan, who runs Tommy's, with one of the kids who spoke to us in the lane before. They'd told him we were looking for the place and he'd come out to look for us!
He waited while we finished our beer and then walked with us back to his place. Nicki asked him if he was Tommy and he said no, he was Tommy's brother, Tommy was in trouble with the council and couldn't run a homestay any more, so he was running it now!
"Tommy's Place" was a small, three-room semi detached bungalow, out the back of a house on the original lane we'd walked down. Two rooms had two beds in and the other one had four bunks. Out the back, through the room with the bunks in it, was the kamar mandi. This had half a well in the middle. The other side of the well was divided off by a common wall with the house next door, which shared the well. It was a bit of a strange place, but it was comfortable and cheap.
It was great to lie on a bed again! By the time we'd got in and sorted ourselves out, it was half past eleven and we hadn't eaten for ages, so we went straight out again, to look for some food.
There were warungs, or food stalls, all along Jalan Nangka, which was the nearby main road that runs along the front of the bus station. We walked along and checked them out. Eventually, we got some tofu, tempeh and a couple of different root vegetables fried in rice flour batter. We bought a bottle of beer and went back to our room to eat, drink and recover from the nightmare journey that had brought us here.
It had been a pretty drastic change in our travelling style. After taking two weeks to cover two hundred and fifty kilometres, we'd suddenly just done ten times that distance in a little over six days! The pace had been frantic for the last three and a half, during which time we'd travelled on nine buses and a ferry, and we were completely shattered.
- - -
The next day, i went to the bank to cash a travellers cheque to pay for the trip from here to Singapore, which we were going to do the day after. I made the mistake of giving the bank clerk my british passport as the fact that my money was british and my passport was australian had only added to the confusion in the bank in Bandar Lampung. The clerk asked me about not having an entry stamp and i told him i had an australian passport too. This caused him a bit of concern and he went of to get someone higher up.
This next jerk then questioned me about why i had two passports "in the same name"! I told him millions of people in the world have two passports, but he didn't believe me - i suppose it was because very few indonesians are able to get even one passport. He told me that if they hadn't already changed my money he would have refused me if he'd known i had two passports!!! They photocopied them both and no doubt they were quickly on the phone to the police to inform them about someone who was obviously a criminal, carrying two passports "in the same name"...
I was sure that what really got the smug little git going was that i'd got tattoos all up my arm. There was a national tattoo witch hunt going on in Indonesia at that time. A couple of weeks before, someone with a tattoo had supposedly killed a cop in Jakarta and the police were using that as an excuse to round up everyone with tattoos and... Well, who knows what they were doing to them, but as it was Indonesia, they were probably bashing, torturing and killing them. The Indonesian government's got a history of indiscriminately murdering tattooed people.
Later that day, on the television in the house next door to Tommy's, i saw a story on the news about the tattoo witch hunt. They showed a number of tattooed men lined up for the camera against a wall in a police station in Jakarta. I couldn't really follow the commentary, but i got a fair idea what was going on. However, they didn't show what became of these latest victims of that fascist military dictatorship.
It would be disgusting anywhere, but in a way it's even more of a shame here, in a country with a strong history of tattoo culture in parts of it. Tattoo styles from Borneo, in particular, have had a major influence on modern european, american and australian tattoo art. And other islands in the javanese empire, whose people have a lot of polynesian ancestry, have strong tattoo culture as part of their history.
It was good to be a tourist walking around Indonesia covered in tattoos at that time. Because i was white and european, i was part of what the indonesian government was promoting as something to aspire to, but at the same time, i was tattooed, which they were condemning as evil and a threat to society. I was also virtually untouchable as far as the police were concerned, as the government was desperate to attract more tourists to the place. A lot of people on the streets expressed appreciation for my tattoos and there seemed to be a certain ammount of admiration for the fact that i could walk around openly displaying them.
A lot of people, were trying to remove tattoos at that time. I met one young man with massive ugly scars on his upper arm, where he used to have one. And another whose tattoo was swollen and inflamed, from his attempts at removing it. Displaying tattoos was almost certain to attract the unwanted attention of the police. You don't see older people with tattoos in those parts of Indonesia - apparently they were all slaughtered in the late 60s after the butcher Suharto came to power.