Lessons:
1. You should look things up on the Internet. Failing this, you should ask people who work at venues through which you pass where things are.
2. You should write down the address of your hotel in a new, unfamiliar city. Do not assume that cab drivers are familiar with all city hotels.
On Thursday afternoon, we flew on Garuda Indonesia flight from Denpasar (Bali) to Jakarta. The flight was uneventful, save the delicious in-flight cuisine. The food on the plane, for a ninety-minute domestic flight, beat the previous night's dinner in Ubud.
Upon arrival in the Jakarta airport, we collected our luggage in Terminal 2. Adam had remembered that Terminal 2 is the domestic terminal, and so we had to get to Terminal 1 for our Lufthansa flight to Singapore. We waited (and waited and waited) for a yellow interterminal bus, pausing once to see if a cabbie would take us. Adam asked a cab driver, who said, "Terminal 1!?" shook his head, and drove off. The bus arrived about one hour before our international flight was to depart. We went to Terminal 3, the budget terminal in Jakarta, and then (ever so slowly) to Terminal 1. As we approached Terminal 1, Adam asked the man seated next to him:
"Excuse me, do you know where Lufthansa departs?"
Reply: "Oh, that's in Terminal 2, the international terminal. This [Terminal 1] is all domestic."
Whoops. We continued our tour of the Jakarta airport, with visions of a missed flight and a wasted night (and day) in Jakarta melting like hallucinations on the bus windows.
We returned to Terminal 2 (not 50 meters from where we had waited for the bus) with about 40 minutes to spare. Thankfully, the efficient Germans allowed us to fly and we departed for a brief jaunt to Singapore.
...
Upon arrival to Singapore, we rushed a little and luckily caught the last train from the airport. The station agent saw that we didn't have time to buy tickets, and so waved us through, telling us to pay at our arrival station. At the arrival station, we explained that we had no card, and so the station agent opened the gate for us, asking for nothing. Welcome to Singapore.
We hailed a cab in the Bugis area, and asked to be taken to the Moon Hotel.
"What's the address?"
Well, the address was something Adam had planned to look up while at the Jakarta airport.
The cab driver asked three other cab drivers, none of whom knew the hotel, drove around several blocks, and let us go for a fare of $10.25 and a stern lecture on the importance of writing down hotel addresses.
We walked to two coffee shops, looking for Wifi in order to find the hotel address online. No luck. Adam walked into a backpackers' hostel and asked to use their Wifi. The receptionist, a smoking old man, indicated that the only internet was on a nearby computer, and was for guests only. (He also was unfamiliar with our hotel.) A few minutes' pleadng and offers of cash didn't persuade him to let Adam use the computer.
Downstairs, a friendly curry shop cashier pulled out his iPhone, looked it up, and wrote down the address. We hailed another cab, and ($8.00 later) arrived after midnight at the world's most efficiently laid out hotel room:
The bathroom was right behind the bed headboard. The bed took up the width of the bedroom. A desk pulled out from under the only table in the room. It was not a room for two people who are embarassed by each others' bodily functions.
And apparently in Singapore there are smaller hotel rooms.
We met up with Danny Hidalgo and his girlfriend Sonali the next day, and spent the next two nights in their much more spacious apartment. Story to be continued.
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