Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
Chinese exotic dancers offered me drugs and sex in Indonesian Borneo. Never underestimate a Lion's Club connection.
Feb 18, 2000 | At a bar on my first night in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, two Chinese exotic dancers from Jakarta sitting at my table offered me an ecstasy pill.
"No, thanks," I said. "I've got a busy day tomorrow."
It was true. I'd flown in on a last-minute assignment. I had just one contact in Banjarmasin and it was a shaky one. J. ran a guest house, and he owed a friend of mine a favor. It wasn't much to go on, but he was all I had, so earlier that day I had checked into a hotel and gone off to find him.
I found his guest house at the bottom of an alley beside the river. It was a small, clean place, cheap and functional, the sort of establishment that heads the Places to Stay list in a Lonely Planet guidebook. J. was out so I sat and waited, thumbed through some old guidebooks and read of J.'s jungle treks in the guest book. They were ecstatic. Perhaps I should have taken that as a warning.
J. arrived an hour or so later. He was a stocky man with a winning smile. What I wanted to achieve was an impossible task in an impossibly short space of time. He listened and frowned.
"Is it possible?" I asked.
"Of course, it's possible. It will be hard, but you can do it," he said slowly. "We'll ring some people at the tourist office. You should meet the head of the department. We should also ring ahead to Pontianak and tell them you're coming. Are you a member of the Lion's Club?"
"The what club?"
"The Lion's Club. Everybody's who's who in Banjarmasin is a member. I became a member three years ago."
"No. Would it help if I was?"
"Maybe," said J. "But you should come along to the monthly meeting anyway. You're lucky. It's tonight. You might make some useful contacts."
And so that night, my first in Banjarmasin, my first in Kalimantan, dressed in the best attire I could cobble together from the crumpled contents of my backpack, I found myself in a banquet hall surrounded by Banjarmasin's worthies.
Now, I've never attended a meeting of the Lion's Club in my own country, or anywhere else for that matter, and I have no idea what its members discuss or hold forth on. I still don't.
The proceedings in Banjarmasin were carried out in Bahasa, a language I can use to order a plate of fried rice, find the nearest toilet and buy a beer. The Banjarmasin Lion's Club meeting discussed none of these. It lasted a long time. Being a Muslim chapter of the Lion's Club, it also eschewed alcohol. And so I sipped on an orange juice and fidgeted. Studied the hairs on my arms. Examined the people who sat around me. Crossed my legs. Uncrossed them. Smiled at J. from time to time. Nodded at the portly, beaming gentleman sitting across from me.
Then the exotic dancers appeared on stage. The two of them cavorted through a couple of Indonesian love songs, and then one of them took up a microphone and broke into an enthusiastic rendition of "Be-Bop-A-Lu-La." She clambered offstage and into the audience and danced around us all, before stopping in front of me and handing me the microphone.
I did the best I could, which is to say I tried to stay in tune. But before she could whisk the microphone away from me, I managed to whisper in Chinese: "You're Chinese, aren't you?"
She threw me an incredulous look and danced off.
Shortly after that, it all wound down. The ritual exchange of name cards took place, promises were made, vague appointments were floated, and then J. and I found ourselves out in a steamy equatorial night among the hawkers and becak drivers.
"I need a beer," I said.
"There's a place around the corner," said J.
The place around the corner looked like an ex-pat tavern -- without the ex-pats. No sooner had we stepped in than a shout went up. It was the dancers surrounded by a group of Indonesian businessmen.
"Come and join us," they cried out.
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