I've been letting the dust settle from my Indonesia trip. It was so awful I couldn't write about it with any sort of detachment. But I think enough time has passed that I can find the humor in it. I'll start with my hotel room in Labuan Bajo.
I flew there to visit a travel buddy I met who is living and working there. She said she would reserve a room for me in a hotel owned by one of her colleagues, supposedly the best place on the island to view the sunset. Schweet.
I called Stevan from Bali to make sure the reservation was in order. He said he knew I was coming but didn't know what days. Uh oh. That was the first sign this trip wasn't going to go as planned. I had a few questions for him about how to make various arrangements on the island but he said we could talk about that when he picked me up at the airport.
He didn't pick me up at the airport.
I waited around with approximately 5,000 taxi drivers hanging over me. I tried to call him a couple times but he didn't answer. Finally I took a taxi to the hotel. The driver stopped at the entrance to a restaurant on the hill above town.
I thought, Great, I have to wait while he runs an errand or talks to someone or drinks a beer. The truth was worse. We were at the hotel. I've traveled enough to be able to recognize a hotel when I see one but I couldn't tell.
The driver indicated I should walk down a dirt path to a house on the hill. I thought I was staying in a hotel, not a guest house, but no matter. On my way to the house I walked past the "hotel" and didn't even know it. I asked for Stevan. There were two women there who didn't speak English. One of them ran off down the hill.
At this point, under normal circumstances, I would have gone back to the taxi and asked him to take me into town to another hotel. But since I couldn't do that since I was staying with a friend of a friend. It would have been incredibly rude.
A few minutes later a man came up the hill. He was friendly and spoke English. I think his name was Pepin. He walked me to my room.
There may be a hotel there at some point in the future but for now it's just a duplex with other duplexes under construction. The rooms are so horribly misconceived it's hard to imagine the place staying open long enough for construction to finish. This is it as seen from the dirt path.
Note the wooden furniture on the deck. Note the wooden furniture on the deck with no cushions.
I have always said that when I'm traveling alone in budget mode that all I need in a hotel is a bed and a shower. For once I got what I want! The room had a big bed, a tiny end table with a lamp that didn't work, a shower ... and that's it.
I took this picture standing in the doorway. The end table is just off camera in the top right corner. The shower is on the other side of the wall on the left. At least I had a big new bed to toss and turn in.
There are two lights mounted in the ceiling close to and parallel with the front windows. They use compact fluorescent bulbs, which is good. They use decorative bulbs, which is bad. The light barely made a dent in the dark. I read just about every night before bed. This was like reading by candlelight, except the candles were in the ceiling. Similarly, there's a light on the wall outside, but it's too weak to do anything except attract mosquitoes.
The view was as good as advertised. This is what I saw sitting on my bed.
The front wall of the room was all windows. Windows that don't open. In fact, the only way to get air in the room was by opening the front door. Oh, and through the bathroom ceiling.
For reasons I can't fathom the roof of the shower is open. (The giant Flintstones shower knob was a nice touch, though.) There are trees above the opening so the floor of the bathroom was littered with leaves. Even though the place is brand spanking new the shower drain is already clogged with leaves, so there was always nearly an inch of standing water. Before I took a shower I'd have to bail the water off the floor and into the toilet.
There was no hot water but part of the water supply line was in direct sunlight, so the water temperature would swing from cool to scalding hot and then back again without warning. Fun stuff.
I suppose it makes some sense to have an open-ceilinged shower, since the air needs to be vented somehow. It's not like anyone can look down into where I shower, right?
Wrong.
The purple tower is the shower vent. The footpath goes within two feet of it!
At the end of the footpath is the restaurant. Pepin told me there was a live band at the restaurant every Saturday night. He said this as though it were a good thing. Needless to say I didn't sleep Saturday night until after the band quit around 3 a.m. But in all fairness, I wouldn't have slept anyway.
The day I arrived I flopped on the bed to rest and wait for Stevan to call. I knew he would call soon to apologize for ditching me at the airport. He would, right? Of course he would.
He didn't.
He showed up about eight hours later, leading to this exchange.
A: "I was late to the airport."
B: "I know."
(awkward silence)
This is part where traditionally the person playing part A would say "Gosh, I am so, so sorry about that." That page was apparently missing in Stevan's script.
He said he'd heard I'd taken a taxi. He asked how much it cost. I said 50,000 rupiah (about five dollars). This is the part in the script where his character would say "That was my mistake so I'll just subtract it from the bill." Instead he said, "That's too much. You shouldn't pay more than 20,000."
Thanks for the timely information.
After I arrived and before this bizarre conversation took place I fell asleep and discovered the biggest problem with the unusual ventilation system. I awoke a few hours later drenched in sweat. The sun pounds through those floor-to-ceiling windows all day long. Because there's nowhere for the air to go the room gets so hot it's suffocating. At night the island gets pleasantly cool, but my room was still like the inside of the hot dog machine at 7-11. I didn't sleep a wink the entire weekend.
Labuan Bajo is a small town. Everyone knows Stevan. When I told people where I was staying they would always say, as if on cue, "Best place on the island to view the sunset." After two sleepless nights in the sweatbox, and after all the other frustrations I endured on the island (to be detailed in another post), I got a wee bit tired of hearing about how lucky I was.
After all, I was in a fishing village on an island. You can watch the sunset from virtually anywhere. I took this shot from a restaurant quite far away from my room, where I had perhaps the worst meal ever.
That's a pretty good view. I got to the point where I was ready to crack the next time said, "Wow, great sunsets up at Stevan's place."
I don't @#$%ing care about the @#$%ing sunset! I can @#$%ing watch the @#$%ing sunset from @#$%ing anywhere! What I @#$%ing want is some @#$%ing sleep!"
The third night I was so deliriously tired that I covered myself in bug spray and tried to sleep with the door open. But it was too little, too late, and I couldn't relax anyway knowing that I had basically just issued an invitation for someone to rob me. I think sleeping (or trying to sleep) in what was basically a giant microwave oven fried my brain and gave me all sorts of weird dreams.
I imagined how the news might report my death.
An American tourist was found dead in his hotel room today, having apparently cooked to death overnight in his bed. The doctor described his condition as "medium-well". Local residents said it was especially sad that he died last night, because he missed a really nice sunset today.
I wish I could have enjoyed the sunsets more.
I couldn't, though, because I was so miserable.
Even though Labuan Bajo is a major gateway for tourism in the area it is still just a small fishing town. At night there aren't many lights, so it gets quite dark. It's a great place for stargazing. At night all the fishing boats are on the water. Their lights on the water make it look as though the stars come all the way down from the sky and into the sea.
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