why wy?

there are two parts to bintan - the posh resort side and the seedy-looking town where the locals actually live. We weren't going to the posh end, so our fellow travellers were mostly elderly housewives going to gamble (singapore has no casino - yet) for the day, returning in time to cook dinner; or single men with hardly any luggage or just a towel and some clothes. The massages in town are famed for being more than just a massage. At the indonesian terminal, some of these single men were greeted by women dressed much too loud, much too friendly to be their wife or first mistress.

The kelong itself is an hour's drive from town, and thankfully was sleaze free. Picture a wooden structure on stilts built around a central "courtyard", which is where you fish (picture above). At low tide we saw a majestic stingray, almost a metre wide, slowly making the rounds. Tiny fish were guarding burrows in the sand, while their prawns clean house. While it was good viewing, it was not good fishing for my uncles. It was a good thing we didn't have to catch dinner.

However, we did catch an octopus, which did a houdini-worthy escape by slipping through the wooden planks of the kelong, the gap being just one finger wide. Finally caught two dinner-sized snappers the next day, i played a part by catching smaller fish as live bait.

I must have looked really bored, because I ended up giving short treatments to two uncles and mum. I also heard really outrageous stories, like how my great grandfather knew gongfu and used the long staff to fight. He came to Singapore from Swa Tao province in China, and did some sort of protection/bouncer job but he died when my
grandfather was young. It was a mysterious death as well (more so because it is lost in translation), he either died of stress; was very angry; or had some massive internal injury.

My grandfather had a jackfruit tree in the garden. In the days before modern plumbing, he would collect the family's pee to water the tree. The fruit was enormous and oh so sweet.

One of my uncles had a 10-cent sized sore on his knee. The matriach of the household, my grand aunt, declared the wound would heal if he put cow dung on it. And it had to be warm, fresh from the cow. Not knowing better, they followed her instructions and
the sore promptly became septic. Finally, my grandmother carried him off to the doctor, one leg twice the size of the other. He still has the scar today, 50-some years later.

PS: project get-a-tan succeeded beyond expection, currently embarking on project peeling sunburn.