The restaurant and the whole hotel basically only run by few local females on shift, and also an uncle who was the handyman for everything. Every facilities and resources were very limited to the point that we couldn’t find any meals eventhough we tried to order few hours in advance, not even instant noodle because the caretakers of the hotel were left without any supply or cash. (If you give enough time, like order dinner in the morning, you can choose the most sumptuous meals you want and they would prepare for you in gigantic gargantua megaloman portions. (read: huge) Alternatively, we had to bring our own raw food for them to cook. (See Fishing) Anyway, we had to take care of ourselves; collect and bring out our own rubbish, asking for towel or toilet paper, and basically cleaning our own room during our stays.
They promised us the uncle would come and check the aircon. We requested to move to another room but it seemed everywhere is the same. It’s not the room or aircon, but the electricity. Anyway, we found room number two at least had ceiling fan. We would be more than happy to open the window, since the scenery was gorgeous and it could be windy, but the mosquitoes were killing. Without mosquito’s nets, we needed to barricade ourselves inside.
I actually like original room number 8 because it was bright, very suitable for us who needed to meddle with camera stuffs every night and the bed equipped with pillows and bolsters (bolsters!) look comfortable and clean. Room number 2 lighting was somewhat darker but it had nicer toilet. The toilets were similar except number 8 had funny curbs and uneven depression here and there that made it look unclean.
So we moved ourselves to number 2, and I took the liberty to exchange pillow, bolsters and the bedcover from room 8, also hold ransom to the room’s towel hanger, we would need two for laundry, towels and wet diving clothes.
Anyway, since we were going to stay for two weeks, we wanted to make ourselves comfortable. From acquisitioning of the remote control (yes, they kept it in the restaurant) although we found out later that we didn’t really need to because there were only one or on good days, two channels available. Hi, TVRI! The most boring channel but it’s the Indonesian national channel. The thing that changed was, it had advertisement now! And mine, oh mine, it only had two commercial advertisements that repeated every 10 minutes. One of the advertisements was a preserved sausage that had kind of catchy song that I swear, for the last three diving days, it kept repeating in my head under water. I got so intoxicated that I told hubby the minutes I found that damn sausage in the supermarket rack, I would buy one.
Second, since the floor felt a bit icky, I took the mopping business in my own hand, as the same time ensure that the mat we stepped in everyday was clean so that we could sit on our clean floor. I also bought bleach (gasp, shamelessly admit a bit of OCD I have, bleach is my weapon), to help disinfect and clean the toilet. The toilet was clean, it's just they were using coloured cement to install the tiles, so the tile gaps are in dark grey color. I just want to be really sure it's the color and not dirt. The sweet thing aka auntie style of happiness, with the bleach, we got free detergent. Wahoo…! Hehehee…
We also emptied and refill the big pail for freshwater stock in the bathroom. They had shower but we prefer to use mandi style because the shower flow was weak. In Indonesia we call it ‘mandi pake gayung dan ember’ but for angmoh, they called it ‘mandi’. I guess they just picked up the easier to remember word. I have seen the term appeared in a lot of places, even formal publication, so I guess they made it legal now. It sounds funny for us who recognized the word though.
We could actually see the effort of the owner to make the hotel good, all the sanitary equipments and aircon were brand new and had reputable brand, including the toilet bowl we could only find on high end mall in Indo and even Singapore.
Another effort to make everything better, we bought a fantastic human invention of all times, wakaakkaka, mosquito killer badminton style. We forgot to take its picture so I googled it (sidenote: what is it with google still being red-marked in Word? It’s time they make it a verb already!). Back when my family had this fantastic equipment it only had one layer of wire and reputed to have mosquito only fainted instead of dead. The current one had three layers and rechargeable battery so we only needed to plug into the power socket instead of changing the battery. (Wahoo! Alor has good technology standard to my opinion :). So after buying this racket that cost about five bucks, we were having great time killing mosquitoes. I might be animal sucker that I hesitate to even kill a fly, for mosquitoes, I will hunt them down and make sure they can’t reproduce, but since I don’t have accurate motor skill, I kill them cold dead. Blood suckers.
So every time we saw something flying, we only needed to swing the racket and pltzzzz bzzzz blllzzzzz sparkzzzz krtttzzz, the fellow would end up smoking hot. If we just came back from diving, the two of us would fight over the racket and there were normally a swarm of them flying over our bags or inside the cupboard, we could hear endless multiple sparks that sounded like music in my ears.
Ours was red but everything else looks the same. Thanks for random person in cyber world whom I stole this image from.
Too bad our fun only lasted for less than a week. Maybe extensive usage, the racket lost its power, it was not spoilt, but didn’t electrocute well anymore. Too bad, we wanted to bring it back here so probably could have the same fun if we go out for photo outing in the parks. Luckily, I guess we managed to kill good amount of mosquitoes, eventhough we still needed to be protected by repellent 24 hours a day, we didn’t really see the ‘swarm’ anymore.
Another good thing about the room, it’s spacious and had enough power sockets. In remote places like this, we consider it as good as long as they have a free power socket for us to charge stuffs. This hotel has three, one was used for TV. It also has a big coffee table inside the room for us to convert it into charging and food station. We had nice bamboo chair to sit on or spare place for towels inside the room, long bamboo sofa in the back terrace (which provide quite a nice view also), and two sets of chair and coffee table in front terrace to sit, relax and had breakfast. Too bad we didn’t really make use of this to sit around because of mosquitoes and also because of sometimes over-chatty neighbors.
They also have small plastic wall cabinet in the toilet where we could put toiletries (got special place for toothbrushes!), and a cupboard inside the room for our barang2 so we could keep them neatly. I would say that we managed to make the room felt homy for two weeks. Beside the not so cool aircon, they made the effort of turning on generator (there you go), so on great days, we actually need to use the blanket even before sleeping time.
Despite the numerous blackout testified by other guests and Thomas, we only encountered two black outs, one lasted less than half an hour and the other was before we left for diving. So it’s not bad at all.
For the location, it was also great. Every morning Thomas would pick everyone up with his van, it took less than five minutes journey to the jetty. There were also two warungs in less than ten minutes proximity and for another fifteen minutes walk, we would reach the street full of food and fantastic shops that sell fantastic mosquito racket. We had dinners outside here few nights during our stays.
The bay that we were facing everyday was beautiful, it’s the deeper end of the bay we travel every day. We were facing the tiny island, Pulau Kapas where there was supposed to have unique dive site. Very unique indeed. Fancy diving with saltwater crocodiles? You can find 10 footer black, white and red saltwater crocodile here. No bluff.
The corridor in front of the room. The walkway to each room is the lower part on the left of the column, we hardly used that though. It's difficult to drag megaloman bags and it's made of lose pebbles!
Forget to take out the laundry.. last day laundry, try to catch the last drop of afternoon sun.
This is the mini outdoor private corner living room in original room 8.. Nice! 
Ahhh.. the daily view from the terrace
This is the view from the back terrace. 
Sunset 
Sunset and the secret path coming from and to back of the rooms.
Some abandoned structures next to the room block. Still don't know what are those. Jumping base to the crocodile infested water sea? Hmm... maybe!
The bay in front of our room. Sometimes local fishermen passed by with their outrigger.
View to the other side of the room block. 
