It's a pleasant morning walk along the very spiffed-up
river from the Holiday Inn to the Novotel, where we were to
meet at 10 for our jaunt to Batam, the closest encroachment
of wild Indonesia (Bintan being much tamer, so it's said).

A knot of people was forming at the entrance by the time I
got there: let's see if I can remember everybody:

Baxter&Bessies'Mama
bdesmond
Blank Sheet
chchkiwi
ConditionOne
DLouise37
gvdIAD
karenkay
Kristiaan (I believe KRS)
lili
mikey2007
newself
opushomes
rtarbuck
szg
techgirl
UAX@SFO
violist
wwbgd (+1: the artist to be known as mashg)

A bit of hilarity all around when WWBGD introduced me to his
daughter, whom I immediately recognized as the attractive
young lady in 8H being severely and persistently hit on by
the tall guy in 8J the other day on SFO-NRT.

opus was there to subtly emcee and to hand out sustenance
in the form of Reese's cups and other local delicacies.
He suggested that cabs rather than the MRT would be safer
in a logistic sense, as the ferry terminal is not the most
obvious place in the world, and the cost wouldn't be that
different (it's about twice, actually, 2 bucks a head opposed
to 97c), and as he and others have pointed out numerous
times, keeping FTers together is not unlike herding cats.

The taxi to the ferry terminal took about 10 minutes. We had
some extra time, so I went to the post office to change my
old EZ-Link card for the new kind - apparently, there's some
kind of technology switch (to "CEPAS-compliant," votevver
dot minns). If you have the old card, it's good until Sept.
30, at which time it expires, and the free replacement offer
(at ticket offices or post offices) expires as well. After
then, you can retrieve the value of the old card at ticket
offices but will have to pay $5 for a replacement. The
advantages to the new system: you can store $500 at a
time (this is also an obvious disadvantage); you will be
able to use them at fast-food restaurants, convenience
stores, libraries, swimming pools, SMRT taxis, and, by the
end of the year, hospitals(!). Met everyone with a few
moments to spare, the line having been very long with people
exchanging cards, sending Chinese New Year parcels abroad,
stuff like that.

We ended up taking a faster, more expensive boat than
anticipated, which took us bumpily to the somewhat
redundantly named Harbour Bay, a different port from that
that FTers had entered in previous years and much closer
to the main town, which goes under various names including
Nagoya. It's a small but pretty modern facility with a
somewhat redundant three-stage visa on entry system (you
pay your USD10 at the first booth, and then go to the
second booth, where some guy collects the receipt for the
$10 and gives your passport to a third guy who pastes in
the full-page visa) and a completely totally redundant metal
detector, which wasn't checked even when the alarm went off.
Taxi stand right outside, where opushomes arranged several
to downtown.

The ladies, most of them, split off in search of shopping
(turns out they didn't find much of interest and so went
for massages, $6 for an hour, I don't know if that's US
or Sing).

We regrouped at Harmoni Hotel, one of the classier venues
in town, only to find the bartender off duty and the bar
closed. Well. Some of us went off in search of local color
(didn't find much), and the hungry among us decided to eat
at the hotel restaurant. The hotel promised to roust out
the bartender in the meantime.

It's a pretty nice room for a hotel restaurant out in the
middle of nowhere, and the staff was extremely pleasant.

I had wanted real food - the gourami goreng struck my eye,
but the consensus was that we'd stick with dim summy type
things that went well with pitchers of Bintang beer, which
superficially resembles Tiger but is somewhat sweeter.

mashg ordered us an assortment of curry puffs, samosas,
chicken and shrimp spring rolls, and fried squid (calamari
on the menu), which were all of good quality but pretty
much what you would get at a Thai-style or Malay-style or
Philippine-style nosherie anywhere. Filled us up for not
much money, which is a bit of an advantage. newself was the
maverick here: he ordered French fries, which came out of a
package of course, but were done in fresh oil at the right
temperature - quite good in fact, enjoyed by all at table,
and we had a second order of these. The local bottled
ketchup, ABC, tastes exactly like Heinz chili sauce did the
last time I had it, which was about 1960. There were also
saucers of a not very hot sriracha-like sambal on the table.

After lunch we repaired to the lounge next door, which by
that time had been opened for us and which was gradually
being populated by the others back from their hour of
intrepid exploration. More fried snacks and pitchers, this
time of Tiger. Also very good, Salmonella-free, peanuts.

Several of us had had enough beers and enough of the town
and took an earlier boat back, trading the opportunity to
get down and dirty or up close and personal for that of a
nap before dinner.

There's a big duty-free with fairly crummy prices (SGD
only) and a couple other shops in the terminal. Also a VIP
lounge, which piqued the FT curious, but nobody figured out
how to get in.

The trip back was if anything faster and bumpier.

Huge long line at passport control.

Left the rest of the group at the taxi stand at Harbourfront
and cast a longing eye at the McDonalds Mega Prosperity
Burger; didn't try one, though, and just went to the hotel.

I actually didn't have dinner, instead taking advantage of
2-for-1 (1-for-1 they call it) Tigers and a bowl of free
peanuts. Then a short snooze, a short session on the Web,
and an hour or two of work, not necessarily in that order.

It was well past midnight when I roused myself to find a
taxi (50% surcharge) for the traditional "greet the jet-
lagged UA895/803/AA5836 get-together," this year relocated
from Lau Pa Sat to Newton Food Centre, where most of the
same suspects appeared and were augmented by, let's see,
infoworks, jswong, Lori_Q, melville, mikew99, seanthepilot,
and Starwood Lurker II. Later, AA flyers Mad4Miles and skye1
joined. What I tasted: satay that looked suspiciously dark,
so I asked opus if they were liver; they weren't,
unfortunately; cereal shrimp; various iterations of shrimp
noodles; and char kway teow. These were all leftovers - I'd
arrived quite late - and all I ended up paying for was a
round of Tigers, consumed mostly by other latecomers.