Weekend getaway - Batam
So a couple weeks ago my girlfriends and I decided to have a weekend getaway at Batam - primarily because we've never traveled together (and we've been our 'sisterhood' for a good 7 years now) and we didn't have time/money to plan a fancier vacation. But to my complete surprise, Batam was AMAZING and I would definitely go back.
I'm going to run you through our 2D1N getaway. We leave Singapore on Saturday morning. None of us are early risers and we figure there's no rush getting to Batam so early especially since we can only check into our hotel starting at 3pm. So we take the 10:50am ferry. Before we leave, we buy a SGD 40 1L bottle of Jose silver tequila and margarita mix (yeah, we gettin' lit). DYK #1 - there is a one hour time difference between Singapore and Batam(???!??). So we reach Batam an hour later at about 11am (Batam time), get picked up by the uber helpful driver - Rino - and head to our hotel. Alinson Boutique Residence. We found this hotel on AirBnb - and it was exactly what we'd hoped for. It is everything like what the pictures show. We were 4 girls - we had two king-size beds in one room with a little kitchen. But most importantly, with a gorgeous pool right outside our doorstep.
So we drop off our stuff and Rino (which was a bonus - we didn't think we'd have him all day for ourselves!) took us to our first stop - go-karting near Golden View Hotel. Its costs each of us about 14SGD for 10minutes and honestly, the cars didn't go as fast as we wanted them to and the small circuit soon got boring to driver around over and over again. But anywho, it was fun enough. Rino then took us to an activity site a little ways down that had archery, paintball shooting, flying fox etc. So we tried them all!
By this point, we're all starving so we ask Rino to take us somewhere that has vegetarian food (he was quite surprised by this since most people come to Batam for it's delicious and cheap seafood) and he drove us to Nagoya mall. This is Batam's most famous mall. We managed to find a Nasi Padang stall at the food court which had some vegetarian options but I won't lie - it's not easy to find vegetarian food or communicate what vegetarian food is in English.
Once our bellies were full we headed straight for... massages!!! I know what you're thinking, it's a terrible idea to get a massage right after you eat. You're right, it's a terrible idea, but we'd have about 40mins of digestion, so we were fine. We went to this place (can't remember the name) and got full body 60min aromatherapy massages for SGD 15!! THAT'S VALUE FOR MONEY YO. Anywho, we were all nice and drowsy by the end of the hour so asked Rino to drop us back at the hotel and we'd stay the night in. That's when we made our margaritas and played various drinking games. But the most fun game was 'friend bingo'. For those of you who haven't watched Brooklyn nine-nine (why?!), it's where you create your own 5x5 Bingo sheet but instead of numbers you write down predictions of what you think your other friends will do. Obviously these can't be stupid things like they'll eat or use the loo or sleep etc but more interesting things that you know because you've known your friends for so long (like they'll get drunk first or they'll trip over something). When that event happens, the person who that's written about, takes a sip (or shot). The first person to cross out predictions horizontally, vertically, or diagonally wins. The most memorable one was that three of us guessed the fourth would spill her drink at some point in the night because she's such a klutz haha.
So like good girls, we went to bed fairly early, got in a good night's rest, woke up for "breakfast" which ended up being bread and a load of spreads, ate our bread and headed for the pool (with more tequilas). Now the thing that's real nice about this is that it's not a private pool, but the whole time we were there, there was no one else in it. We spent a good two hours taking loads of pictures on my friend's iPhone X and after we were all decently tanned and tired, showered and checked out. Rino took us to Harbour Bay and we ate a nice Italian restaurant. We had a decent vegetarian lunch and then head straight to our ferry point and took our ferry home. We were back in Singapore in an hour, back home where we'd left less than 36 hours before, rested and vacay'd.
I cannot highly recommend Rino and Alinson Boutique residence enough. They're the sole reason I want to revisit and do more touristy things like visit the famous bridges on my next weekend getaway.
I mean, how cute are we? And also, how rad is my "Bro do you even leviosa tank"?!
Tanned AF,
Niharika