The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands

4. Fantasy Island

4 Fantasy Island It is Friday night and Andi is taking his weekly forty-minute ferry ride from the World Trade Center in Singapore across the border to the Indonesian island of Batam. He has just gotten off work at one of Singapore’s docks, where he loads containers that will be shipped around the world. Upon arrival and after passing through immigration and customs , Andi is surrounded by calos (touts), but in the crowd he quickly finds his usual taxi driver, who takes him straight to the main town of Nagoya, where Sri, his Indonesian girlfriend, is waiting for him. Andi has rented a room for Sri in a three-story ruko building, which is at the higher end of the scale in terms of price and quality, with solid walls and clean, white tile floors. The room is simply furnished with a king-size mattress, a small plastic table, a television set, a refrigerator, and a few posters of Sri’s favorite Indonesian pop stars on the wall. Andi used to travel to the Malaysian border town of Johor, which has provided opportunities for similar forms of excursions in the past. Increasing prices, overcrowding, and the Malaysian state’s regulation of “sin,” however, have made Batam and neighboring islands a new frontier for prostitution and drug use. These days Andi comes to Batam once or twice a week and stays as long as he can, whether a couple days or only a few hours. Often he just spends time in the small room he rents for Sri, watching TV and chatting with other people on the same floor, among them a Chinese Singaporean man who occasionally visits his mistress. On this particular evening Andi showers and takes Sri out for dinner at one of the town’s many food courts, packed with Singaporeans who have come to Batam for the weekend. His Manchester United soccer jersey, baggy jeans, and red Adidas shoes mark him as Singaporean. Just before midnight they take a taxi to Ozon, where they consume Ecstasy together. Andi usually has Sri buy the drug for him and they split one pill between fantasy island : 99 them. He doesn’t approach the dealers himself. “I like for it to be placed in my hand so that I can just put in my mouth.” On Batam Andi experiences, as he puts it, “total enjoyment,” which means “doing Ecstasy, listening to good music, and having a woman,” all of which would be more expensive and dangerous in Singapore. Batam, he says, “is like fantasy, Fantasy Island, while Singapore is like reality.” Taking Ecstasy in particular allows him to forget about the pressures of everyday life in Singapore and to avoid thinking about the future. “Ecstasy,” he tells me, “clears my head of all the stress that I feel at home.” This chapter shifts attention away from Indonesian migrants who come to Batam in search of a better life, and toward transitory Singaporean men such as Andi.1 As Singapore has become increasingly prosperous in relation to neighboring countries, a growing number of its citizens can both afford and desire to leave the country as tourists. They do not have to look far. The Growth Triangle includes an efficient transportation infrastructure, as ferries run from Singapore’s World Trade Center to Batam approximately every fifteen minutes between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. The number of tourists, the majority of them Singaporeans staying only a day or two, has increased dramatically since 1990, making Batam the third most popular tourist destination in Indonesia. A billboard advertisement for Southlinks Country Club. Photo by author. 100 : chapter 4 Lonely Planet’s widely read guidebook to Indonesia recommends to its largely Western readership that “there is no reason to pause [on Batam] longer than it takes to catch a boat out” (P. Turner 2000, 602). But Singaporeans such as Andi do not read such books. They learn from friends and acquaintances. If they do read about Batam, it is on low-tech Internet sites such as the Batam/Riau Entertainment Update,2 where one can ask advice about how to deal with prostitutes and avoid scams (Lindquist 2008). Their movement is typically concentrated not to places of formal tourist development , but rather in the spaces and relationships that the Indonesian state identify as liar, or “wild,” “undomesticated,” “unlicensed.” Andi, who is in his late twenties, has a...