Friday, March 20, 2009

My Weekend Get-Away - Batam, My Cottage Part 2

It is so tiring to process all the pictures…Just this trip alone, I have taken almost 250 pictures. Processing them is quite tedious; especially I shoot them in raw format. Not to mention, its eating up my hard disk pretty soon at the rate I am storing my pictures. Need to get an external hard disk soon.

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I am going to wrap up the whole trip in this posting and so it is going to be a long long post...have fun reading.

As mentioned, I will show more of the cottage we lived in.

These are along the seas and basically they are individual by themselves. Just 1 room for each villa and I won’t recommend for elderly people to stay here. The stairs is going to kill them before they reach the room.
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The below are some that are closer to each other, basically they are single rooms as well sharing the same corridor.
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This is a Villa all by itself.
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Some special stairs linking to each Villa but looks steep, imagine on a raining day. You might as well roll to your door steps.
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Our Cottage
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Nice views from the Living Room but it was pretty warm.
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The Living Room
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My Bed Room
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It looks a bit like a country cottage, and a bit like some kelong. Well, at least the rooms are air conditioned and you can’t expect too much from places like this. The minimum, it’s clean and the toilet is working. Don’t expect a Spacious Jacuzzi waiting for you in there.

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Night Views.
There weren’t much street lightings in this resort.
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You can expect no activities on the Island or at the Resort, unlike Bintan of Bali, you can’t find any water sports, even if they have it, I bet you won’t want to step into their sea considering their toilet flushing systems connect to the ermm “You know where”. The only form of leisure was doing SPA or trying their Indonesian/Jeva Massage.
The difference between the massage in the Resort vs those outside massage parlour was the Sea View, the sound of the wave and the spacious room.

The Spa was located at the far most right side of this stretch of houses.
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Well I didn’t really enjoy mine. I felt it was too tough to undergo the rubbing and more rubbing along the same spot. “Ouch” was the word I use to describe it.

If you weren’t someone that enjoys massage and spa treatment, there is another option. Shopping!
We spend 1 day at the resort and signed up for the City Tour on the next day.

It happened that the day we left the resort was the Guan Shi Ying Buddha’s Birthday. We did some offerings at Guan Ying Temple just right beside our cottage before we proceed for our breakfast.
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Some final shots before we left the resort for our one day tour
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Look at the Blue sky
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The Dirty pool
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Our Main Transport, mini bus
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Yes, Of course part of the tour was shopping..and we were left to do our own shopping at this Mathahari…A safe Mega mall, but if you were to ask me, I preferred the one opposite Batam Center Ferry terminal.
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Favourite A&W spotted
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Okay..before I went, Fion told me that the sanitary pads were cheap. Well of course I DON’T use them but I still went to check out the price…haha…
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Yeah if you were basing on the conversion rate at SGD1 = 7500 rupiah
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So the girls grabbed some home.
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Surprisingly, I didn’t have any A&W for lunch. As the group wanted to try the local Indonesian food instead, so we pop by this small kopitiam across the mall to try it. Food was normal, price was expensive.
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This is nice
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Last few stops were visits to Temple. These are the place; you will see more of the Indonesian Chinese around. Taoism and Buddhism was one of the few main religion on the Island apart from Muslim.

The MaHa ViHara Duta Maitreya Temple
Maitreya was the main worship in this Shrine along with other Buddha and God.

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The Last Temple we went to was a famous Da Bei Gong Temple.
This is a Confucious temple next to it.
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The Hawkers were mainly selling Nonya Kueh and Coconut.
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Price wasn’t cheap and don’t think that places like this sells nice food. The coconut was sour. The mangoes I bought was sour too.

Overall the trip was fun but the tiring part was to carry so many things to board the squeezy Ferry. The trip back was terrible where we sat at the open areas and people were smoking non stop beside us.

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