The seventies Hippy Trail 4

19-4-1974
Pin Guan Hotel
80 Owen Road
Singapore

Dear folks,
How are you all going, 'ey? I am now in Singapore as you can see - i suppose. Singapore is a really big modern western style city and just looks like any Australian city. I bought a movie camera today - a Chinon 45(5X magnification zoom, slow motion, and it is beautiful) for ninety Australian dollars, which is about 315 Singapore dollars. Well let me get back to where I was. Singapore has many big british style buildings that are big and like the typical Martin Place, Newcastle Post Office type of buildings and the city is really well laid out and there are many parks and plenty of space in the city.

Singapore

The British really handled it designing this place and building it. It has really got a huge harbour with thousands of ships of all shapes and sizes. It really is a center of trade. They make nothing just trade from other countries. You can get goods here from all over Asia, just everything. The people here are not very friendly at all. They are mainly Chinese, Indians and Malays. The chinese seem to predominate here. It is really a change from Indonesia where all the people smile and laugh and say hello to you and want to talk to you but here in Singapore no-one laughs or smiles or says good day. Must be because they live in a city. (Sydney is just like that as well).

Well I shall now tell you where I have been the last couple of weeks. We left Kuta on 6-4-1974( April 6) and caught a bus to Surabaya in East Java. The road through Bali was incredible - really beautiful rice paddies and deep streams cutting through the valleys. There is surf all along the west coast of Bali and there is even surf in Java and Sumatra but we did not look there. We caught a ferry across to Java and continued on by bus to Surabaya, which is a really big city of two million people. I was quite surprised. They have many factories there.

Surabaya Java Indonesia

In Surabaya we stayed at a big house with servants and all. From Surabaya we caught a train to Yogyakarta in Central Java where I learned how to do Batik painting for two days. The batik painters here are really incredible and they get some beautiful colours with dyes and wax. Some of them even have modern styles and copy Picasso and painters like that but most do traditional Indonesian legends like Barongs and Ramayana and Ranggda the witch.

Jogjakarta to Tanjung Pinang

From Yogya we caught a train to Jakarta - the ride was really uncomfortable. Jakarta is pretty well laid out and has lots of parks in the center. We got a ship from the harbour, Tanjung Priok, on Monday 15th. The ship was the Tampomas which went to Tanjung Pinang, a small harbour in the Riau Archipelago just near Singapore(40 kilometers away). The ship was chock-a-block with Indonesians and we slept on the deck under a tarpaulin. It was not exactly the Hilton but I do not mind at all, except that it rained the first night but I only got a little bit wet.

The boat ride was nice and lazy and we just lay around the deck all day and watched the islands float by. We got to Tanjung Pinang on Wednesday morning and were taken into the harbour in an outboard driven sampan. (Continued next page.. )

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