"Batam Trip 2005: Fri 25th Mar - Sun 27th... " a Pulau Batam Travel Page by DarkRay

25th March 2005 being the Good Friday holiday meant that a long weekend was in order during this week. My buddies and I were feeling a little stressed out from work and so decided to take a short weekend getaway to Batam.

We had chose Batam because in mid-March 2005, there was a feature in our national English daily, The Straits Times, mentioning about how much Batam had cleaned itself up, ever since the raids conducted by their local authorities on the various casinos in the island. Through the last few months, Batam has also tried to position itself as a family-friendly location, by downplaying its more "seedy" establishments.

The convenience of not having to go through the hassle ot taking a plane and the island just being a short 45 minutes ferry trip obviously helped too.

For the regular tourists (well, like me) from Singapore, there are basically 2 areas of interest, Waterfront City and Nagoya.

Waterfront City like its name suggest, generally caters to visitors interested in water related activities such as cable skis, and parasailing. Unfortunately, some of my friends were not feeling particularly athletic during this time and so we decided to stay in Nagoya instead.

Nagoya used to be famous for their casinos, and er... "red light activities". But after the recent cleanup, it's now focused on providing affordable shopping and dining facilities, and accomodation. Great, just the things which a typical visitor from Singapore would like.... People like me ;-)