Surayaba, Indonesia

Today’s private tour for the two of us was guided by a 30-something man whose name was Lucky,
“probably chosen by my father because of the cigarettes,” he says with a cheeky grin. He lives 1.5-hours by bus from the port in a city of 1 million.

Surabaya literally means “shark/crocodile” and can be found on statues and animations throughout the
city, even on flags advertising FIFA soccer. As far as history can tell, the name was given in the year
1293. Surabaya is Indonesia’s 2 nd largest city with 3 million people. The city has a river cutting through it whose bridge is now red, serving since 1700s as dividing line with Europeans living on one side of the city and Chinese, Arabs, and locals living on other side. Today, post-independence, Chinatown thrives over there and the locals live wherever they wish.

Soon after pulling out of the port area, sirens behind us caused us to pull aside to let the police car pass,
surprisingly followed by at least two buses from Regatta to get them the 2.5-hour drive to the Old
Kingdom and back before the ship was to leave by 4. 

The traditional market was our first stop. This market was really tight with little space for people to
walk while sellers prepared their goods for sale using the same aisles and women with fifty-pound bags
on their heads calling ahead sort of like beeping the horn of a car to get people out of the way. We
went to the Arab quarter and visited the mosque. Men only could go in so we left Jen in a courtyard and
walked back to where a large group of men were listening to an Imam reading the Koran. We did not go
in and when we got back we found Jennifer being interviewed by four college students. A young girl was the ring leader who was brave enough to lead the discussion. Jennifer asked what they wanted to know about Americans and this threw them as it was outside the standard context of the conversational
English they expected to use.

The college students left but before we exited we were found by a group of high school students. They

wanted a picture but were very shy (think junior high dance), so one of their mothers stepped up and
asked for a photo, but that did not enervate the kids.

You will notice yet another Chinese-themed religious area, but please note that it is a m osque rather
than a temple. We’re definitely in Arab country. It is situated next to school so the overflow for worship
can be used in their space, and vice versa. This mosque is named for Cheng Ho (here he is again!) and an extra addition near the mosque entrance was a sort of diorama of his story.

The famous Majapahit Hotel was our next stop. Made efamous by the battle caused here (keep reading)
AND because Charlie Chaplin stopped here. I used Wikipedia to help with the story from our guide: “It
opened in 1911. Two wings were added from 1923 to 1926 and an Art Deco lobby extension was opened in 1930. The opening was celebrated with a royal party attended by Crown Prince Leopold III from Belgium, Princess Astrid from Sweden and Charlie Chaplin. During the WWII Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies from 1942 to 1945, the hotel was renamed Hotel Yamato. It was used as the headquarters of the Japanese forces in East Java. [3]  The hotel was the site of the famous Hotel Yamato on 19 September 1945 when pro-nationalist Indonesian youth revolutionaries tore away the blue portion of the Dutch flag flown above the hotel to change it to the red-and-white Indonesian flag in the lead-up to the Battle of Surabaya. Following this incident, the hotel was renamed the Hotel

Merdeka (Independence Hotel).”

A couple buses from our ship were eating lunch in their fancy buffet room; since we were on a private
tour, we didn’t join them, but we received a gift from the hotel’s bakery: two pieces of cake in sacks.
Very delicious. 

Our next stop was lunch at local restaurant with a set menu: an entire fried fish, fried rice, and steamed
vegetables that were a cross between spinach and bok choy.

On the way back to the port, we stopped at the Heroes Monument which honors all who fought in the

Battle of Surabaya (above), against the well-weaponized Europeans. The Sarabayans ended up using
only a few guns they had and sharpened bamboo poles to fight as the statue portrays.
We stumbled back to the ship, glad to escape the 95 or so degree temp with humidity about the same.
Sorry, we know it’s colder where you are…