Today was our last day in Jakarta and we intended to relax most of the day. We had an 11am massage appointment but went to the swimming pool first to take a dip. At the deepest point it was 1.5 meters and the pool wasn’t very large. We shared it with 2 very noisy kids too, basically the girl screaming at her brother to leave her alone.
Afterwards we went to the spa and they lead us to a couple’s room. We had an aromatherapy massage included and also signed up for an extra 60min facial that was less than $20USD per person (I can’t remember the exact price). It was a bit weird when we got into the room because they gave us disposable underwear, so far I’ve been to places in US where you are required to be completely naked or like in Korea where they give you a massage with all your clothes on, I’ve never been to an “half-clothed” place.
The first thing they do is give you some ginger tea and rinse your feet. They ask you to select an aromatherapy oil, they offered only four types. The massage itself was quite nice and I was falling asleep… but the facial was even nicer as I truly dozed off a few times and I could hear Ron snoring. I really enjoyed the cucumber water towelettes they put on my eyes and all the nice soothing creams.
After our 2 hour treatments, they were supposed to give us some Alila Momento of spa products to take home with us but the lady at the counter did not know what I was talking about so we figured we’d ask later at check-out.
We had lunch at the other hotel restaurant called Shanghai Storm. We had simple things like fried rice, fried pot stickers, fried taro cake, stir fried French beans with beef, and fried corn cake.
Everything fried, bad huh? Oh well, we were on vacation 😛
As we were exiting the restaurant, a dragonfly was flying about and landed on this branch of the flower arrangement, quite pretty don’t you think?
We spent the afternoon shopping at the Blok M mall and had to head back to the hotel early in order to pick up our luggage and head to the airport. We made the mistake of not heeding our hotel’s advice and took a non-Blue Bird Group taxi. The guy said he’d promise to get us there quickly (took us about 30 minutes to get to the mall from our hotel) and it’d be the same price (35,000 Rupiah) as when we came to the mall (oh, 1USD = +/-9000 Rupiah).
What a mistake. The guy ended up taking us on the highway where we had to pay toll (5000 Rupiah) and we went around in a huge loop around the city and it took almost double the time (over 50 minutes) and almost double the cost (the meter was at 54,000 Rupiah). We knew he was trying to rip us off so the hotel staff helped to negotiate with him that we’d only pay him 35,000 Rupiah plus we already paid him the 5000 Rupiah for the toll. It wasn’t the cost for us, more of the principle of it. The guy finally accepted it and left.
We had the hotel car take us to the airport instead of trying to deal with the taxis again. It was only $15USD anyways so not that bad.
At the airport, we ran into another problem. When checking in you have to pay 100,000 Rupiah departure tax per person. We only had about 150,000 Rupiah left and $50SGD so we ended up paying the 50SGD and they only gave us 50,000 Rupiah in change. They rounded the exchange rate to 5000 Rupiah for 1SGD, usually it’s at least 6000 Rupiah or more. At that time though we didn’t care and just wanted to get back to Singapore. Not a good way to end a vacation but oh well, c’est la vie.
