Selina Xu

Day 1

We pulled up to the Anmon Resort in a veil of rain. From the lodge, the whole place appeared a contradiction: tropical downpour on a stark desert landscape. In the distance were the pointy tips of the infamous white tents that populated Instagram feeds. On the buggy, we streaked past various porcupine-shaped cacti — plants that shouldn’t exist in Indonesia’s climate. The white teepees stand like a battalion of cones in formation.

Inside the tarp, our room had a hippie-meet-Pocahontas aesthetic: kerosene lamps shone over pristine white beds, Turkish carpets over dark wooden floorboards; the air-conditioning was so cold I shivered.

The Pool

When the rain cleared, we headed towards the Crystal Lagoon: the largest man-made lagoon in Southeast Asia. Outdoors, the sun was white-hot, roasting us. The weather had flipped without transition. Within five steps I felt my body burning from within.

“This is hotter than Singapore,” croaked Xin Min, who looked hot in her bikini.

“Wanna take a photo?” I asked, melting in a windbreaker I was wearing to protect my exposed skin.

When at last we made it to the lagoon (after a buggy ride that rescued us), my heart sank. In a pool the size of around three football fields, there was not a single soul in sight. The sole people we saw were lagoon staff, who hid in the shade of trees, and a handful of guests like us under umbrellas.

When I pictured beach vacation, I somehow never imagined the heat. The sheer unbearableness of an unrelenting afternoon sun. The sepia-toned cerulean waters, the white concrete banks, the burning tarmac: I felt anything but relaxed.

“I’ve never seen you talk this little,” Xin Min said. I grunted.

She had bought two swimsuits for this trip and now we could barely force ourselves to go into the water. After some dithering, Xin Min set a timer for 10 minutes. Then in we went.

The water was cooling but it felt synthetic, chlorinated the way no seawater is. We swam for a bit, like ducks on display. In the distance, the lifeguards and a smattering of guests peered at us, confounded, from the shadows. The sun was scorching my face by the second, like a fryer.

And when the sun finally went from irritating to intolerable, and when we felt like we milked enough of this lagoon that we had paid a premium for, we tottered away. I was drained.

The BBQ

Then came dinner: our pre-ordered barbeque under the stars. Already laid out under an open-air tented patio were wrapped plates of skewers, uncooked but already marinated. But the first thing I saw was the insects: all over the tarp, around the lamp, on the settees.

When I pictured barbeque, I somehow imagined us coolly grilling the skewers while observing a sky full of stars. I didn’t picture the flies, the flames, being scalded by oil, the thin line between raw and charred meat, and awkwardly poking holes in the metal foil while squid blood dripped. I didn’t picture us struggling with the metal tongs, the plates, and flipping the meat so incessantly with barely a breath to eat. For the whole few hours I utterly forgot to even crane my neck to look at the stars: they were an afterthought. I was starving and fending off insects. When I ate my first chicken skewer, I was so eager I dropped it on the floor. Soul-crushing.

By the time Day 1 was over I was exhausted. The resort experience was a mirage. It was as though I was stuck in some pirated B-grade version of my imagination. A movie set of a vacation. Despite how insanely photographable everything was, everything was jarring.

“You know what it feels like?” said Xin Min on a beanbag. “It feels like being in an empty amusement park. Like a badly done Disney without feel-good vibes.”

“Tomorrow let’s get out,” I said.

Day 2: the water village

Our plan to escape from this escapist retreat was to head to Tanjung Pinang, the provincial capital Riau Islands, an hour’s drive from the resort area. I have to admit it was probably a bad idea since we booked a tour package.

The car streaked past manicured trees and purple bougainvillea bushes, like a scene right out of Singapore. And then we were waved past the resort gantry and the roads became bumpier, the traffic heavier, the shrubs got wilder, and suddenly we could see the vast majesty of the countryside. Durian trees on faraway mountains; campaign posters on walls, flags fluttering in the wind. It was like two different worlds.

We headed first to the Senggarang floating village, where early Chinese immigrants had landed and settled. Around us locals went about their daily lives. In the maze of roads on the water, we passed by grand concrete houses built on stilts and dilapidated wooden shacks that looked like a hazard with gaps in their floorboards revealing murky seawater.

“Let’s go to the next temple?” asked Harry, our driver-cum-guide.

There’s a Chinese idiom called zou ma guan hua, which roughly translates to looking at flowers from atop a trotting horse. It was weird how our glimpses of this village — of Buddhist altars behind windows, of a faded Lee Min Ho poster on a dusty green tarp, of potted flowers overseeing a dried seabed of detritus of the trash, of washed-up rubbish and sewage in the mud — felt comforting. Was I another sort of tourist, the kind of who chased after an elusive idea of authenticity and reality, and consumed poverty?

As I snapped photos, I thought of white men in top hats centuries ago, probably escorted, gawking at native habitats under the pretenses of civilization. Was this not new-age colonialism? Singapore building a resort on Indonesian land, like it was our backyard? Me standing here?

At least I was contributing to the local economy, I tried to tell myself as I lay face down on a massage bed for a session included in the tour package. But really, there was nothing authentic about this day either.

Nature

The sea saved the whole vacation.

We winded up at Lagoi beach around sunset and low tide. The shore was a tessellation of ripples, mirroring the cloud wisps in the darkening sky. We rolled up our pants and went into the water, toes brushing against weeds, hairy like the ocean’s scalp. Tiny waves crashed against our thighs.

We were the only people there. The sea was ours.

And at dusk, against a gorgeous salmon-hued sunset, clutching fat coconuts and sipping (pretty lousy) mojitos, breeze grazing my cheeks, I felt at last that I’d tapped into a version of reality I was after. Maybe I wasn’t so hard to please after all. I felt that same happiness too the next morning, as we sped off toward the islets, donned snorkel gear and dipped into the waters to touch Nemo fish. I felt that too at night, amid the mangroves, cupping fireflies, incandescent flecks against a sky so full of stars it looked violet.

Nature was the greatest novelty.

We had escaped from one gimmicky amusement park into another consumerist universe. But amid nature my conscience and overactive imagination quietened. And so the weirdness receded.