TheAugBunnies

For Christmas long weekend in 2015, Missus and I decided to embark on a trip to Batam. Batam is located just 40min ferry ride away from Singapore and is a great place to relax and unwind from the hectic Singapore life. It is a great option for tourist to experience a different rustic landscape and is also widely known to be great for their inexpensive golf courses.

For our trip to Batam, we purchase the M card at $15 from M1 to make use of the free data roaming service in Indonesia. For $5, we are able to get 1GB of data usage for 3 days which was sufficient for our trip to get in touch with friends and families. Details here

We left Singapore for the 315pm ferry from Habourfront with Horizon ferries to arrive at Habour bay terminal. We wanted to try the business class tickets this time to experience what sort of luxury it brings. Return trips for economy class tickets cost $48 including taxes.

Unlike airlines, we do not get priority boarding but we had nicer and larger seats. We were also served water, mints and wet wipes to freshen up which was nice. The biggest benefit of paying an extra $8 per person was that we were able to disembark from the ferry first before the regular ticket holders thus we did not have to queue up for too long at Batam customs.


After clearing the customs, we decided to head to the local supermarket in habour bay mall to stock up on some snacks before heading to our hotel. We booked the Novotel's Business King Suite with its 81sqm room. The rooms was huge but its design were somehow dated. Have a look at our in depth review here.


For dinner, we decided to head out instead of having the Christmas special menu hosted by the hotel which does not seem to be too popular. We arranged for the hotel to bring us to Red crab restaurant using the hotel card as it is impossible to get a cab. The hotel car costs 50,000 IDR/$5.15SGD which was not too expensive. Trip took about 10mins.

We had a sumptuous seafood dinner at Red crab and we spotted several other Singaporeans in the restaurant.For in depth review of Red Crab, please click here.
We decided to grab some bubble tea at Ding tea after our dinner considering it is almost half the price of what we pay in Singapore. Took a short walk in Nagoya Hill's supermarket and we decided to end our day early.
There seem to be no buses available and one can forget about any train service that we come to take for granted in Singapore. The only means of transportation in Batam for tourists seems to be only taxi or private car.
Touts are readily available to get you a taxi outside Nagoya Hill and we took one back to Novotel paying the same 50,000 IDR/$5.15SGD. We tried to negotiate for a better price but our attempts were flatly refused. I heard of people only paying 30,000IDR for similar trips though but I was not in the mood to argue too much over small change.

We spend the final hours to order a cocktail from room service to enjoy with our snacks that we bought earlier before turning in.


Check out the video review:




Day 1 Itinerary

Singapore(Habourfront terminal) - Batam (Habourbay terminal)
 Batam (Habourbay terminal) - Habourbay Mall
Habourbay Mall - Novotel Batam
Novotel Batam - Nagoya Hill Red Crab Restaurant
Nagoya Hill Red Crab Restaurant - Novotel Batam

View Day 2
View Day 3

For more great reviews, be our Facebook friend or follow us on Instagram and Twitter!!!