INDONESIA - JAVA: SURABAYA, PART 3 (BEING SICK IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY)

 July 7 - July 10, 2023

Our plan was to spend one day and one night in Surabaya and fly out the next morning to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where we planned to stay at the Tangkoko Nature Reserve for a few days before flying to Bali on July 10th. 

It didn't quite work out that way.

But first, some information about our hotel in Surabaya, the Hotel Majapahit, which played an interesting role in Surabaya's history. It was built by the Dutch colonizers in 1911, then expanded in 1926 and 1930. Charlie Chaplin and various European royalty attended the opening. As a side note, I have discovered that Chaplin traveled to Java, Bali, and Sri Lanka in 1932 and made an amateur film of his time there. He was well-known and hugely popular on the islands, and I'm sure it was a boost to his spirits during a difficult time in his career.

Anyway, the Hotel Majapahit has changed hands and names many times in the last 112 years. Today it is a five-star hotel and one of the best hotels in Surabaya.

Photo from Hotels.com

The hotel neighborhood is pretty swanky.

During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies (what Java was known as prior to and during World War II) from 1942 to 1945, the hotel was used as Japanese headquarters and renamed Hotel Yamato. After the Japanese surrendered, the hotel reverted to the Dutch, who raised their flag over the hotel. However, on September 19, 1945, a group of incensed young Indonesian revolutionaries who saw the flag-raising as a symbol of Dutch colonial control climbed the flag pole and ripped the bottom blue stripe off the Dutch flag, leaving just the red and white stripes, which happen to be Indonesia's flag. It's a story that belongs in Hollywood.

It is a grand hotel, by far our best of the trip, and the amazing thing is it only cost us $76.61/night. 

We were welcomed with a glass of cold fruit juice, exactly what we needed.

The lobby:

Following the porter to our room:

Our room was large and had two beds (a blessing, considering what the next few days were like), a seating area, and a very large bathroom. It also had fantastic air conditioning, which would turn out to be a critical need.

We were located at the far end of the courtyard on the second floor. I don't think we ever had anyone in the room next to us, so we had a lot of privacy. The view from our window was quite spectacular.

Bob had started to not feel well in the late afternoon, but we were thinking it was the lack of food and hydration. However, he was feeling progressively worse after we checked in. I had thrown a thermometer into my suitcase at the last minute--it was literally the last thing I packed--so I pulled it out. He had a 101° fever. However, extreme hunger won out and he insisted on going to dinner in the hotel restaurant.

Bob had very good, very spicy beef rib soup and I had oxtails with a side bowl of delicious beef broth and veggie soup. I didn't get a picture of his, but here is mine.  We both had a couple of different drinks, trying to make up for the lack of liquid during the day.

Bob went downhill from there. He had developed a hacking cough, was feeling unusually exhausted, and was running a fever that wasn't abating with Tylenol. Then he got the worst case of the chills I think he has ever had, even as the fever intensified. 

Naturally, our first thought was Covid. I had brought along two Covid tests, so we used one. Whew. Cross that off the list.

At about 2:30 AM I took Bob's temperature. It was 102.5°. I got him more Tylenol, sponged off his forehead, neck, and wrists, and most importantly, convinced him he could not get on a plane in the morning.

DAY 1 of our extended stay:

When I got a wake up call at 4:30 AM, I told the desk that Bob was ill and that we would like to stay two more nights, the length of time we would have been in Sulawesi--our next intended destination. We had decided to skip that part of the trip and hoped he would be well enough after two more days to re-enter our itinerary in Bali. The hotel desk person said he would see what he could do. Ultimately, we were able to stay in our room for the same price per night we had booked it for on Hotels.com months earlier. 

At 5:15 I went down to talk to the tour guide and driver, who had come to take us to the airport. I realized that I needed to tip them (even though our guide had been awful), so I went back to the room--a long walk as our room was at the farthest possible point from the reception area. 

After tipping them and sending them on their way, I talked to the front desk, confirming our extended stay, and they said they had a doctor on call who was coming in at 9:30, and Bob could see him if he wanted to. We decided that would be a good idea.

I worked on contacting Adventure Indonesia, our tour company, to notify them of the changes they would need to make for us. (We would have been  sunk without them.) We had to completely skip Sulawesi, stay in our hotel two more nights, and fly from there to Bali, the next place on the agenda after Sulawesi. Andre, our coordinator, was fantastic, and we can't recommend him and Adventure Indonesia enough. 

We lost the money we paid for the flight to Sulawesi as it had happened by the time I got hold of Andre, but we got a refund for the flight from Sulawesi to Bali. Andre booked a new flight from Surabaya to Bali via Jakarta--not a non-stop, but the best flight option at this point. Now we just needed Bob to get better.

The doctor and a hotel "translator" (for what it was worth) actually came to our room. The doctor spoke very little English, but we used the magic tool of Google Translate and were able to say what we needed to say.  I wanted to take a photo, but in seemed a little inappropriate. This is the best I got:

He took Bob's temperature in his armpit (very old school). It was still high. He borrowed our thermometer to take it again. He listened to his heart, lungs, and gut with a stethoscope. He looked at the drugs Bob takes every day. It wasn't a super thorough exam, but probably enough. He wanted bloodwork and wrote up a lab order and then four prescriptions for decongestant, cough relief, antibiotic (Cipro, I think), and 600 mg acetaminophen for Bob's fever. Nothing too sophisticated.

The hotel handled picking up the medicine for us and called a cab to take us to the lab, which was less than a km away. (It took 9700 RP, or 63¢, to get there, but 23,000 RP, or $1.48, to get back. We think the taxi driver on the way back was detouring to get more money, but when it is just $1.48, who can complain?)

The lab was very modern and looked more like a bank than a lab. We were obviously in the wealthy part of town. Bob was seated in an over-stuffed easy chair, and a woman took two vials of blood.

The results came in 4-5 hours via What's App, which is so fast! They must do the analysis in the same building. Bob was negative for malaria (we were taking malaria meds so weren't too worried, but I guess the extreme chills he'd had were a concern) and negative for dengue fever. Whew.

Meanwhile, this over-the-top wedding was going on in the courtyard below us. We had a bird's-eye view of the event. The flowers alone must have cost a fortune.

We decided it was a good time to have our laundry done, and we had it picked up in the early afternoon. Sometime later Bob couldn't find his wallet. He thought it might be in the pocket of one of the pairs of pants he sent to be laundered. I called the laundry, found someone who spoke minimal English, and sure enough, 30 minutes later our doorbell rang (yes, we had a doorbell) and a beaming young man held out Bob's wallet. WHAT A RELIEF. I gave the honest young man 100,000 RP as a reward, the equivalent of $6.50, and he went away very happy.

The laundry came back the next day in this nifty basket, and the cost was minimal.

Bob slept most of the afternoon. At 6:00 PM I ordered a pizza via room delivery, following the doctor's advice to skip spicy foods as long as Bob had a fever. A bit later we shared an Indonesian-style banana split. That really hit the spot, at least for me!

Bob went back to sleep. His fever continued during the night, and I'm not sure he got much sleep..  

Just a note here about the hotel's stellar customer service. After returning home, we realized we had not paid for the doctor, the labwork, or the medication, not to mention for someone from the hotel picking up the medication for us. Bob emailed the hotel and eventually got a bill for about $50 for ALL of that. Pretty amazing. 

DAY 2 of our extended stay:

We woke up around 6:30 AM, both of us coughing now. I wasn't feeling too well myself at this point, but I wasn't running a fever--unless you count cabin fever, and I had that to the extreme. Bob's breathing sounded bubbly and squeaky, and as he got to the end of the Tylenol dose period, his temperature would shoot back up. He was also sweating a lot.

And yet he really wanted to get out of the room, so we went downstairs to try out the breakfast buffet around 8:30 (after most the people had eaten), only to discover that neither of us had much of an appetite. We ate some fruit and pastries, drank some guava juice and had a few bites of fried eggs, but the best thing in the buffet (for me) was the chocolate milk. It really hit the spot.

We trudged back to our room and collapsed on the beds, feeling far from 100% and wondering how we would make it out of the hotel the next day. We stayed in our room for the next 6 or 7 hours, mostly sleeping (Bob) or sleeping and reading (me). Bob was still running a fever that ranged from 100° to 101.5°.

We ordered room service again, and were grateful for quick service and prices that were the same as in the actual restaurant in the hotel. The food was good. Bob had some soup and I had duck. Again, we felt so lucky to be in THIS hotel for this particular "adventure." We were so well-taken care of. 

Later in the day, I was feeling better and going a little stir crazy sitting in the hotel room, so I took a walk around the hotel. The Hotel Majapahit is a huge two-story building surrounding two lush inner courtyards. It has 143 rooms and suites as well as conference and banquet facilities for up to 700 people. The largest suite is 800 square meters, or 8,611 square feet!

The landscaping is beautiful.

I discovered the second courtyard and a ballroom.

I found a painting of the famous flag-raising/flag-tearing incident I mentioned at the beginning of this post:

I also found an actual photograph of the event. The caption translated from Indonesian reads: "The blue color was torn off and the flag was raised again as the red and white. Hotel Yamato Surabaya, 19 September 1945."

At about 4:00 Bob was feeling well enough to go to the restaurant for some drinks. We figured there wouldn't be many people there at 4:00, and we were right. We were the only customers.

Bob had a mocktail with lychee, strawberry, and sparkling soda. He wasn't impressed. He also had one or two Diet Cokes. I had something I thought would be a chocolate milkshake, but it turned out to be fancy chocolate milk topped with fake whipped cream. 

I knew we needed to start moving a little more, and I convinced Bob to walk down the street with me. There was an outdoor food fair going on, so the street was closed to cars. There were about 20 food booths, a jump house for kids, music coming through speakers, and a police presence. The food booths would have been right down Bob's alley if he were healthy, but he wasn't even tempted. That's unusual, even for SICK Bob.

There was a gelato shop across the street, and I at least convinced him to stop there. Ice cream was one thing that kept sounding good to us. I had chocolate and taro, and Bob had nutella and strawberry. 

We went back to our room and Bob crawled into his bed. I took is temperature--still hovering around 101°.

I was hungry, even if he wasn't, so I ordered dinner from room service, trying to keep it as mild and digestible as possible. It looks pretty American, doesn't it?

We were supposed to be picked up at 5:30 AM the next morning for a flight to Bali. I set my alarm for 4:30 AM, prayed for a miracle, and went to bed.

The alarm went off at 4:30 AM. The miracle happened--Bob didn't have a fever, although he was really dragging. We were driven to the airport at 5:30, ready (more or less) for our next adventure. Of course, we didn't have to wait long for the next adventure. There were multiple glitches in our flight to Bali, but I will save that for the next post.