Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 1

I’m currently in Surabaya, Indonesia for a plant startup. The flight was Minneapolis -> Seattle -> Tokyo -> Singapore -> Surabaya, which was about as direct as I could figure out to do it. I left at 9 a.m. Monday and arrived at 10 a.m. Wednesday (with an overnight at the Singapore airport). Things are pretty slow at the outset here at the plant as I wait for the last of the construction to be completed, so in order to make it look like I’m staying busy and doing computer work rather than showing my hand and openly reading a book all day, you’re going to get a very detailed account of my trip so far.

Indonesia, Day 1

I flew from Singapore in the early morning. I’ve been to Singapore three different times now, and have always flown in late at night and left early in the morning, so I’ve never seen anything other than the airport and the Crowne Plaza attached to the airport, and it’s been dark most of the time that I’ve been there. I flew Scoot Air, which is a small airline based in Singapore. Their strategy appears to be offering cheap flights to less-touristy locations (such as Surabaya) and having any amenities be at an additional charge. There were no free beverages or anything else on the flight, and the seat was extremely uncomfortable, although I checked a bag for free and the plane and service and everything were fine. Not bad for $78 one way.

A note about the Singapore airport experience: you go through security when you go to your gate; the gate opened a little more than an hour before departure, and there were two gates served by the single security checkpoint: my flight and a Silk Air flight to Darwin, Australia. As you might expect, the clientele for those two flights were considerably different; I was (I think) the only westerner on the flight to Surabaya (and I was nearly a head taller than the next-tallest passenger), and the flight to Darwin was evenly split between groups of (white) students and elderly (white) couples. A woman with (white) hair shorter than mine came through security as the line was forming to get on the plane to Surabaya, and she looked a little confused, but just fell into the line because what are you going to do? I was pretty sure that she was headed to Darwin, so I told her that this wasn’t the line for her flight, and she didn’t follow at first, but eventually she got it. Don’t follow me lady, I’m with these dark-complected folks over here.

I landed in Surabaya at about 10:30 a.m. If you didn’t have anything to declare, you were supposed to be able to go through the “green channel” for customs, but there were only three lines, and they were all the “red channel” for people with things to declare. I am still not sure if there was any way to bypass that or not, but if there was, I missed it. The whole baggage claim/customs area was a congested mess of families with carts piled high with luggage, but I made it through in 30 minutes or so. There was supposed to be a driver from W- there to meet me, but I couldn’t spot them in the mass of people at the entrance, so I settled down to wait, secure in my knowledge that I would be pretty easy to pick out of that crowd. After another half hour or so, I was proven correct. In the meantime, I’d received an email that I didn’t need to come to the plant until the next day, so I wasn’t in any big hurry.

The parking lot was on the south side of the airport, and we needed to go north to get to the hotel, and it took about 30 minutes to get from the parking lot to the north entrance to the airport, because the road was about 1 ½ lanes wide and overrun with heavy vehicle traffic while scooters weaved in between the vehicles. Surabaya is the second-largest city in Indonesia, with a population of 3 million in the city itself and 10 million in the metro area. It appears that any road that is an expressway (limited access, where scooters aren’t allowed) is a toll road, and traffic lights are few and far between. I also haven’t seen any evidence of public transportation, so it’s about like you might expect given those constraints.

I’ve decided to keep a running D&D-style attributes matrix based on my work travel experiences. Your mileage may vary, of course. Here we are so far:

Lawful Good: TBD                 Neutral Good: Brazil                       Chaotic Good: Indonesia

Lawful Neutral: China            True Neutral: Singapore                  Chaotic Neutral: Malaysia

Lawful Evil: Japan                  Neutral Evil: Eddyville, Iowa        Chaotic Evil: Mexico

I checked into my very nice, 4-star hotel, where I have a room on the Executive Floor and the rate is somewhere around $35 a night including meals, but alcohol is additional. I had lunch in one of the several hotel restaurants; I’ll go back and look up what it was called, but it was a chicken drumstick and a couple of beef skewers with a fried egg on top of a cake of seafood fried rice, with a few vegetables on the side. Pretty good!

By this point, it was 2:30 p.m. or so, and I went for a walk. Surabaya is aggressively pedestrian-unfriendly, at least in the several miles of neighborhoods between my hotel and the central downtown area. If there’s room for a sidewalk, then there will be scooters or vendor carts or a car parked directly in your path. Several “streets” are so narrow that I could stretch my arms and nearly touch the buildings on each side, but that doesn’t mean that scooters won’t buzz through there while families hang out on the stoop in front of their apartment. 

It’s tough to navigate on foot, is what I’m saying. I saw a few brave souls on bicycles, but motorized transport is pretty much the only way to go.

I’m going to include a couple of photos of the cemetery that I walked through here, because I don’t think any description that I could make would do it justice.

I walked past the edge on my way out, and then thought I could cut back through on my way back to the hotel as dusk descended at about 5:30 p.m. (this near-the-equator year-round-equinox stuff is difficult to adjust to). This is where I have to assume that Indonesia’s general lack of motivation to fuck up a lost dorky looking white boy really shone through, because nobody messed with me or even said anything that threatening, as I doubled back a couple of times, obviously lost, and they just hung out and made their trash fires on the ground and did not assault me. Thanks very much for that, random decent folk who are unconscionably poor but not predatory.

Indonesian children hanging out on the street apparently like to call me “Mister” and want to shake my hand. There are a few white people about, but I could see where my presence in their neighborhood would be a novelty, and I admire their ability to not run away in horror, unlike their rural Chinese counterparts. This “mister” stuff happened on a number of occasions in the afternoon, with the largest group being 8-10 kids who shook my hand in turn. I didn’t really have a good feel for the vibe going in, so I didn’t know if they were going to ask for money or what, but it seemed very genuine and cute after having it happen a few times. I try to make a not-uncomfortable amount of eye contact, smile and keep walking fairly briskly when in doubt of my situation, and that seemed to work well.

My destination was a monument commemorating the Indonesian victory over the Dutch in 1945, securing their independence, and the Surabaya museum nearby, which had a similar theme. I didn’t find the monument, which either wasn’t located where google said it was, or I just didn’t recognize it, and the museum had just closed when I arrived, so that was an overall bust. Oh well. The river running through the central city is pretty nasty-looking. I stopped at a Giant hyper-mart on the way back to the hotel and checked out their grocery wares. The plant I’m working at while here makes palm and palm kernel oil, and it’s the local custom for that to be packaged in plastic bags, kind of like a quart-size Capri Sun, except clear. So that’s weird. It seems like Indonesia has a little different outlook on packaging recycling – lots of disposable containers. I’m sure their amount of trash generated and overall carbon footprint is much smaller than the US, but we definitely do a lot more virtue signaling with our packaging choices and preference for four-cycle engines.

I was pretty much beat by the time I got back to the hotel, it was dark, and since the day’s Ramadan fast had just ended at sundown, the hotel restaurants were packed, so I just downed my welcome-gift plate of fruit that had been left in my room and called it a night after watching some French Open tennis and AFF U19 soccer action.

Go To Day 2