World Scenic Flights by HeliGraphix

At 10 AM we met up with Ken at the Harbour front and bought the tickets for a fast ferry transfer to Batam/Indonesia. The check-in was a similar procedure to that at the airport; after all, you are entering a different country, even though it somehow doesn't feel that way.
The ride as such was smooth and really fast; about one hour later we disembarked and went to the immigration - you need to purchase a visa to enter Indonesia unless you are a Singapore resident or from a handful of selected countries. There was only one person issuing the documents, and even though there were just four people in the queue, he clearly couldn't cope. One visa required something like a hundred work steps, and the part we liked best was when the guy manually typed our passport numbers into two different computers, printed out dozens of different documents which he stamped, folded and tore off in a complex manner, and finally zipped (!) our passports through an automatic reader!?! What an amazing way to burn time!

Ages later we finally left the terminal, and our friend Lee was already waiting to pick us up with his car. Batam is an island off the coast of Sumatra and the home of many fishing villages. In recent history it is being heavily industrialized plus opened for tourism. Compared to Singapore it is a day and night difference, everything is very basic, from the roads to the housing and lifestyle. It immediately reminds you of countries like Egypt, Nepal and India.

We had lunch at some seafood restaurant which was built on stilts into the river/sea (like most of the houses on the whole island); you first had to choose the stuff you want to eat, then they fished it out of some basin for you and cooked it. Not really something I like, and especially not Saskia; however, the final product was quite good.
Just a couple of meters away from the restaurant was a half-sunken ship; together with some smaller boats, more buildings on stilts and the turquoise water this formed a unique and unusual scenery - perfect for flying! However, Lee and Ken pointed out this might get us into serious trouble as the villagers didn't like aliens. Lee reported about an earlier incident where insane amounts of money had to be paid to the corrupt authorities just to get out of such a situation alive.
Since the villagers were all Muslims and thus filming can be difficult (they sometimes believe that pictures take part of their soul away), we decided it was best to walk away with a bleeding heart rather than ending up in difficulties.

We continued to a kind of hill with a good overview over a wide river cutting through the endless green of tropical forests and a couple of houses in the distance. A good backdrop for a long pass with the heli, and we pulled out the machine and camera for a flight. Everything worked nicely, and a couple of minutes later it was all finished. The shot below was taken later and shows Ken, myself and Lee.



We sometimes regret not to be able to do some real hardcore 3D flying ?but this not what the WSF project is all about, and any kind of fun flying just puts the heli at stake. Damaging or crashing the machine could be the end of this tour; it may be hard to understand from a comfortable chair in front of a computer screen at home. But it becomes very real if you travel half way round the world, have to negotiate with security and authorities in half a dozen languages and feel like you haven't slept in three months.

Next we visited some other places on the island but found nothing that would have beaten the first scenery. So after a nice and all too short day Lee dropped us at the ferry terminal, and we went back to Singapore.

Ken had brought along his Dremel tool to cut a groove into the Three Dee MP's Jesus Bolt so we could use a normal slot screw driver to get the bolt out of the center piece. It turned out tricky so Ken had to go back home in order to fetch some heavy duty tools. In the meanwhile we started packing our stuff for air transportation plus transferring the latest data to our notebook and burn it onto DVDs.
Ken was back just after midnight, and we worked through things until about 2 AM; like mentioned earlier, he's an incredible person and a real man of action. Without him it would have been a serious problem to disassemble the helicopter. We hope to see both him and Derrick at next year's Toy Fair in Nuremberg/Germany - we'll do our best to arrange some hotel rooms right in the middle of Nuremberg's red light district for them. :-)

After just 1.5 hours of sleep we boarded the taxi to the airport ?next destination is China, and we'll be reporting from there!