T A B L E_T A L K Wherever you go, the barbecue seems to taste different. Find out where Table Talkers have found BBQ heaven in the Wanderlust discussion area   ___________________ Want to learn more about beads and beignets? Search barnesandnoble.com's huge selection of books about Mardi Gras ___________________ R E C E N T L Y Mardi Gras unmasked By Zachary Karabell New Orleans' biggest bash features days of flesh, booze and flashy costumes. But what happened to the festival? (02/28/99) Railway ties By Morrie Erickson A traveler discovers the real Burma on a train to Mandalay (02/26/99) Escape from Tashkent By Jeffrey Tayler A Peace Corps worker unwittingly falls into a romantic adventure with a Russian waitress stranded in Uzbekistan (02/25/99) Ground zero By Ellen Meloy Excerpt: The Last Cheater's Waltz (01/24/99) Death in Ghana By Tanya Shaffer A simple succession of events in an African village leads to a tragedy -- and a traveler's haunting sense of hopelessness (02/23/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		Batam, Indonesia, was a lot less than the brochure promised -- until two traveling musicians found the Nagoya ice cream shop. BY DOUGLAS A. KONECKY The most amazing thing about Batam was how unlike the brochure it was. When Yosi and I had been in Singapore that morning, wondering what to do and where to go on our last day before returning to the States, and we had seen gorgeous brown-haired Malay Ginny and delectable black-haired Thai-Chinese Mei, in crisp, blue uniforms under a glorious full-color poster that trumpeted "Batam Island! Come To Paradise and Be Home The Same Day!" -- it had seemed irresistible. Ah, we'd been bushwhacked again by Singapore girls, exotic blends like gourmet San Francisco coffees: "My father from Java, his mother from Burma, my mother Irish, her father Thai." Singapore girls make Paris look like Fresno. Ginny and Mei giggled when we told them we wished to buy the simple round-trip ferry tickets for $15. "Tee-hee, no," Ginny said. "Well how about the Super Package?" I asked. "Ha-ha, no good," said Mei. They stopped giggling only when we agreed to move up to the Super Deluxe Package, which for $8 more got each of us $40 worth of scrip redeemable at the "World Class Duty Free Shopping Port of Batam, Indonesia!" We also got the special brochure, with pictures of impossibly beautiful white and brown people, models presumably just like us, carrying brightly wrapped boxes and bags filled with booty they had purchased at the World Class Duty Free Shopping Port. "You have to hurry," Mei said. "Oh, yes. Ferry leaving in only one hour," added Ginny. So Yosi and I blew a kiss to Ginny and Mei as we left, and they blew one back, and the last we saw them they were still waving, probably whispering to themselves that there went two of the stupidest gringos in the history of tourism. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The ride over from Singapore was fascinating, mostly because we got to cross Singapore Harbor, which is one of the busiest in the entire world. There were freighters in back of container ships behind home-made sampans to the rear of gigantic polished supertankers glistening with fresh paint, dwarfing ancient fishing boats decaying through nine different colors of rust. I, a landlubber by birthright, had never realized ships could be so huge. It made me rather bilious. So I pulled a deck chair over to the stern rail, leaned my feet over the edge and tried to do a math problem, adding and subtracting boats to keep my mind off my stomach, until I fell asleep in the hot sun. When I awoke Yos was shaking my arm. "Look, look, we're here, Indonesia," he said, excited. I looked at my watch; an hour had passed. We were now sailing by tiny, unpopulated islands, palm-treed and wide-fronded, with a larger island looming ahead on our left. We could see villages with tin-roofed huts built onto stilts over the water. Yosi, my friend and guitar-player partner, is Israeli. Things he sees always remind him of home -- well, almost. As the little islands passed by, Yos said: "This looks like Eilat, on the Red Sea ... except for the little huts. And the stilts. And the color of the water." The ferry was slowing down. I could stop doing math problems. We passed a beautiful, beckoning harbor, and then another not-quite-so beckoning harbor, and then a harbor where you wouldn't dock your worst sampan, and finally, at a denuded spot where the barren red earth lay piled along the beach like slag from a strip mine, our ferry tooted its whistle and turned toward the dock. "Uh-oh," I said. Yosi got out the brochure, stared at it, looked up, looked back down at the brochure, looked up again. Everyone on board was doing the same thing. From a distance I could make out a few buildings and a boat landing, with a flagpole flying the red-and-white-striped Indonesian flag, and a huge billboard on top of what looked like a dilapidated warehouse. I could read the billboard clearly: "INDOOR ALPINE SKI SLOPE." Under the large English letters were Japanese characters that spelled out the above English phrase in phonetic Japanese: "In-doe-a Aru-pine Skee-ee Su-ropu." This sign was twice the size of the warehouse building under it. But as we pulled next to the dock and the deck crew tossed the starboard stays onto the wooden pilings, it became obvious that the Indoor Alpine Ski Slope was boarded up and deserted, which was understandable since it was at least 100 degrees on the pier. There was a second large sign that read "WORLD CLASS DUTY FREE SHOPPING" on top, "Wu-ru-du Ku-ra-su Tzu-tzi Fu-ree Shap-peen-gu" on the bottom. The second sign was pointing at the first sign. I studied Japanese for years. Nobody can sell salt like the Japanese. Sometimes it's salt, but sometimes it's sugar. There is nothing wrong with sugar unless you are trying to buy salt. If I had realized the slick brochure we had been shown in Singapore was advertising an Indonesian enterprise designed in Tokyo, I would have wanted to taste my tea before buying the Super Deluxe Package. As we stepped off the boat onto the dock, we took one look and immediately had the same thought as everyone else on the ferry: Book Return Passage Now. First we had to queue up and show our passports to Indonesian teenagers in drab olive army uniforms, then there was a crush of people running to the ticket counter. When we got there, it was chaos. Everybody on the island was trying to get off the island. The lines were 10 people thick and equally deep. Bribes were obviously called for, and we didn't know how much to offer. And anyway, we'd just gotten there. "This is stupid, Yos. C'mon," I said. "We've only got one day to see Indonesia. Let's go see Indonesia." "Well ..." he said, as he took one last look at his brochure, tore it in half and walked outside into the kiln-like heat. We stopped in front of the abandoned Indoor Alpine Ski Slope. "Can you picture the guy who came up with the idea for a ski slope on a tropical island?" "I hope he's working for the Arabs now," said my good Israeli buddy. That's how we found ourselves trudging down the left side of the little macadam road leading away from the dock, when a clattering, ancient blue Toyota with bald tires rolled up on our right. Through the window I could see that the car had practically no floorboards, and the driver had a pile of towels draped over his front seat. Earlier I had looked on the map and seen there were two cities on Batam: Batam City and Nagoya. So I said, "Nagoya," and the driver nodded, motioning us into the back seat. The second we got in, we smelled the burning rubber. "I think your car is on fire," Yosi said. "Nagoya," said the driver, and we were off -- bouncing toward a town that we knew nothing about, feeling like Bugs and Daffy, our little toon car trailing smoke out of both rear windows. N E X T+P A G E | The search for music that isn't "New York, New York"   _________________________________ For more information: _________________________________