The sky was dark when our Gojek driver picked us up from Nusa Dua to return to our AirBnB, an hour-long journey. My friends and I were tired from our afternoon jetskiing and parasailing activities, and coaxed into further sleepiness by the cocktails and sandwiches at the beach resort after. Our driver wasn’t much of a chatter, thankfully. I took shotgun and we were all quiet as we started heading home.
There was some traffic halfway through the journey, and the car crawled along. Suddenly we heard sirens.
I looked out my window and found the source – a police motorbike, weaving its way through the traffic.
“That’s illegal,” the driver beside me said, maybe his first utterance that trip. I looked over, confused. Then I saw a fat white car trailing behind the motorbike, and an envoy of police motorbikes in tow.
“Is that guy rich?” I asked.
“Yeah,” it came out as a half-laugh, “very.”
It was easy to keep talking from there. I asked him about how Bali’s changed. Well, before 2010, he said, tourists would come to Bali for the culture. Its temples, palaces, museums, paddy fields. After a certain point though, tourists started coming for smoothie bowls and Finn’s Beach Club. And now there are foreigners, specifically white people and Singaporeans, who relocate and live in Bali, but who work remotely and earn in their home currency. Needless to say, it jacks up the prices of everything.
After a pause, he asked us where we came from. My friends and I looked at each other and laughed.
“What do Indonesians think of Singaporeans?” I asked.
He tried to paint it in a nice light. “After COVID, the Singaporeans we see here are more… positive.”
Turns out the Singaporeans he’d driven around in Bali before COVID tended to think everyone was out to scam them. Whenever he’d try to ask a simple conversation starter like how many days they’re staying in Bali, the Singaporean would think it’s a scam, get defensive and say something curt, like “we already have a driver”.
I gave a nervous chuckle. I’d been a little worried myself whenever a service staff in Bali would ask where we’re from or how many days we’re staying. Our last Gojek driver had also tried a few times to ask us some casual questions at the start of the trip, which we weren’t the best at replying to carry on the conversation. Turns out they were all just being friendly, trying to build a bridge with a stranger. Something that Singaporeans aren’t always the best at doing.
The good news was that after COVID, our driver saw more Singaporeans respond positively to these types of questions. Maybe it was all the Netflix shows and TikTok that we’d consumed over the pandemic that finally taught us about small talk, and got us being more open to the world once we were allowed to travel.
(Ironically, more than half of scam victims in Singapore today are young adults!)
As we were reaching our AirBnB, he asked us if we knew about Hotman Paris. A famous Indonesian lawyer and businessman.
“Hotman Paris? A celebrity?” I asked.
“A weird guy,” he said. “He owns Atlas Beach Club in Canggu. He’s surrounded by a lot of young women working for him. Super weird.” We all laughed incredulously.
The next day we were browsing in a clothing shop along one of the streets in Canggu. The lady working was short and had a sweet smile, and we chatted about some things. She asked where we were from.
“Singapore!” she said, excited. “I like Singapore, I’ve been there.” Her husband was German, and didn’t yet have permanent residency in Indonesia, so while waiting to renew his visa they would often go to Singapore. Later she let slip a “you’re very friendly, but not like all Singaporeans”.
I asked her too about how Bali’s changed. She talked about having grown up near Canggu, and how beautiful the beach was. But after returning from her studies abroad, she was shocked to see how much Canggu had changed, the narrow streets now stuffed with restaurants and cafes and shops and the endless construction of even more things.
“There are so many trucks now because of the construction” she said, “and the roads aren’t built for it. The government keeps taking all the foreigners’ money to build new buildings and shops and cafes, but they never use it to invest in the infrastructure like our drains or roads. The traffic is so bad and it’s dangerous to walk along the streets too, because of all the trucks, and because there’s no pavements.”
The last bit especially struck me, because I’d assumed that our having to walk stiffly in a straight line squeezed to the sides of the road was a quirk, just one of those ‘Southeast Asian things’. (How funny, Singaporean me was trying to romanticise and claim some Southeast Asian identity points.)
Obviously this wasn’t how things were supposed to be. These narrow, bendy streets just about one lane wide were never meant for copious cars or trucks – they were sufficient when it was primarily motorbikes and pedestrians.
Out of curiosity, and because I was just tickled by the man’s name, I asked her if she knew about Hotman Paris. I pronounced it wrong at first, not widening the “a” to an “ah” in “hotman”, but she recognised it after I adjusted.
“Of course! He likes young women. Taller and fairer than me, thankfully,” she joked. “But we like him. He seems very flashy, but he came from a humble family near here. Now he gives back a lot to the poor and needy, so he’s well respected.”
Before we left, she mentioned that she might move to Singapore with her husband. I asked if she’d miss the Indonesian food, but she said it’s not so bad because Singaporean food has – here she used a phrase in Bahasa Indonesia that I didn’t catch – a similar taste, because we use similar spices, cooking styles, ingredients. Ayam goreng and beef rendang are Indonesian dishes, but also Singaporean dishes.
joy wang 
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