The longest day slowly comes to an end.

The end of the longest first day.

The day was not as yet finished, after the bus dropped us off at the Sofitel Hotel we had over an hour before gong out to dinner. Erle and I decided we just had t have a quick swim in the huge pool as we were so very hot and sweaty and just worn out as it had been an extremely long day with fancy welcome dinner still to come. We all chose to go to the local Cooking School for dinner, where young chefs and waiters all learn their trades. The food was just lovely all beautifully decorated and served perfectly, we dined with Dorothy and Winnifred the 2 nice Kiwi ladies and very much

 enjoyed our evening out. The most unusual of the food served was Crispy Rice coated Chicken, it was lovely and the Coconut and prawn soup served in a coconut shell was also divine. We were supposed to be getting to know our fellow travellers but really all we got to know were each other!

After dinner we all walked back to our Hotel braving the busy streets full of traffic, and collapsed into our beds for a good nights sleep.

Our long day finally ends.

Our long day finally ends.
After talking to the kind receptionist at the Club Med desk about our need to have a closer easier to get at room, like not half a mile away from everything, mainly because as I had pointed out we were ‘old and feeble’ well not quite! but certainly we were much older than 9 out of 10 of the other people staying there. We walked back to our room and took the receptionists advice, had a lovely shower and a lie down on the super king size bed, even napped a little before the phone rang, it was the nice lady from the desk offering us another closer room, would we care to come have a look at it and see if it would suit us better. Does a duck like water??
We were taken to a nice but small definitely not superior room with 2 single beds, it was on level 4 a ground floor room and close by the elevator, reception, free internet and the nice Panorama Bar in fact all of these were on the same level, couldn’t be better, we took it instantly. The big Waterfall Restaurant was just 2 floors down by the lift, we didn’t need to walk in the rain at all. A major consideration because it rains hard here on Bintan Island every day at some stage, sometimes all day!
We settled into our new room and immediately lay down for a little rest before we thought about dinner.
Dinner at the Waterfall Restaurant was quite an eye opener, except we did not have our eyes very open we were still extremely tired. The amount of food took our breath away there was sections of Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Japanese, Italian, English food every night, plus often other countries food too. Almost too much selection to choose easily what we wanted! We were given a large table and soon 3 other people joined our table, all staff at Club Med, it surprised us that the staff dined with the guests, though we soon got to enjoy having company at meal time, this first night we were just not in the mood to make small talk, we just wanted to have a meal and get off to bad. The food was so good we enjoyed our meal immensely and a couple of glasses of wine with it.
We traipsed back to our new room and collapsed into bed about 8.30pm.

On our bed there was this wonderful doggie made out of towels to welcome us. photographed on our balcony.

Finally our longest endless day was over. We think the day lasted 35 hours, but was probably longer if the time differences were taken into account.