Lost Baggage Singapore 1990

From 2020

The Bugis people were great voyagers from Sulawesi. They sailed small crafts from Padang Padang to many ports of the Far East ranging from Burma to Northern Australia. Many practiced piracy and as Thomas Forrest wrote in A Voyage from Calcutta to the Mergui Archipelago, "The Buginese are a high-spirited people: they will not bear ill-usage...They are fond of adventures, emigration, and capable of undertaking the most dangerous enterprises."

Most westerners are unfamiliar with the Bugis and especially their complex five gender society.

Men and women are joined by 'bissu' which combined all five genders, 'calabai' a false woman, and 'calalai' a masculine female.

Thriving Bugis communities existed throughout the Orient, although few as famous as Singapore's Bugis Street on which calabai transgenderettes gathered in the 1950s to sexually entertain randy sailors and curious travelers. According to legend the easy way to discern which working girls were female and which were trannies was that the calabai were beautiful and the female hookers were ugly.

Singapore banned wanton behavior in the 1980s to transformed the tawdry area into another worthless shopping mall.

In 1990 I flew from Sumatra to Singapore. Back to the modern world away from orangutans, volcanos, jungles, and cannibals. My bag wasn't in the carousel. I informed the airline of my loss. They gave me money for a hotel and food and said to come back tomorrow. I had the shirt on my back. I exited from the terminal to discover a elderly Chinese man sitting on my bag. He didn't understand a word I said, but surrendered my bag. Lucky and I took a taxi to stay at a cheap Chinese hotel on Bugis Street.

The trannies were few.

The sidewalks were clean.

The Long Bar at Raffles was undergoing renovations.

I left the next day for Penang.

Each time I returned to Singapore, I stayed for enough the time to catch the train.

Singapore has nothing to offer anyone looking for a walk on the wild side. Not anymore.

It's the most boring big city in the Orient, but not in the 60s.

It swung with the best of them.

Bugis Street selama-lamanya.

Forever.

Singapore NO NO 2013

Back in the 1950s more adventurous western travelers to Singapore frequented Bugis Street to view the Pearl of the Orient's notorious cavalcade of beautiful transvestites. The laissez-faire atmosphere of the sex entrepot was an affront to the city-state's puritanical President and by the late 1980s Bugis Street had been sanitized of perversion and by the 1990s Singapore was considered the least sexy city is Asia.

Tai-pei came in a close second.

In 2004 I missed a connecting flight in Tokyo. The passengers from my 747 were transported to a Narita hotel. We were given drink and dinner chits. I dined with two attractive Singapore business women coming back from New York. We drank several beers in the bar and I asked the about their lives at home.

"We work and ship. That's what Singapore girls do?" Suzee had lines growing in the corners of her eyes. She was pushing 35.

"What about boyfriends?"

"No boyfriends." Suzee shook her head in disgust. "We work too hard and Singapore men work too hard to have time for us."

"Do you go to clubs or bars?"

"No, we shop, we eat, we sleep and in the morning we go back to work." Suzee's friend was in her late-20s. Something about her thin lips said that she had never been kissed by a man or woman.

"And what about when you were in New York?"

The two laughed together and Suzee fingered the rim of her beer glass. "We worked, shopped, and ate, but not too much, because we don't want to be fat like Americans. Sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about." My countrymen were verging toward a majority in obesity, but even the fat people were having sex. "What about another beer?"

"Sorry, no, we have to go work a little before we sleep."

They excused themselves, giving me their extra drink chits. I went to bed with a good buzz and in the morning caught an early bus to Narita to catch my flight to Bangkok.

Singapore gained further attention for their inherent prudishness when Singapore Airlines announced that sex would not be tolerated in the luxury suites of the new Airbus A300.

"Passengers will be asked to refrain from sex," an official explained to a press member examining the double beds in the giant jet's 12 luxury suites. "All we ask of customers, wherever they are on our aircraft, is to observe standards that don't cause offence to other customers and crew. Nothing different applies for our Singapore Airlines Suites customers."

This proclamation must have disappointed sexual adventurers seeking the thrill so eloquently described in Erica Jong's novel FEAR OF FLYING.

"So they'll sell you a double bed, and give you privacy and endless champagne and then say you can't do what comes naturally?" Tony Elwood said while flying with his wife with aboard the inaugural flight from London to Singapore. Julie Elwood added, told The Times of London. "They seem to have done everything they can to make it romantic, short of bringing around oysters. They shouldn't really complain, should they?"

People have been having sex in airplanes without the luxury suites.

Mostly in the bathrooms, which are very cramped quarters like the backseat of a VW, only you can't stand in a Bug.

The ban is useless, because people will do what they want and the beds in Airbus A300 have already been baptized by Airbus employees.

They are French and Paris is tres sexy.

If Singapore Airlines is serious about the sex ban, then they will have to hire sky marshals to enforce their edict.

Impossible?

Not for a city-state that requires everyone to wash their hands after going to the bathroom and where the police have dogs to sniff out violators.

The canines could easily be trained to sniff out something else too.

The crime of high-altitude sex.

Bad people.

Woof-woof.

Other Singapore laws

No chewing gum

No spitting

No jay-walking

No gay sex

No bungee jumping

So obviously no chewing gum to work up a spit to lubricate your gay partner's nether gate before engaging in sex whilst bungee jumping.

Very bad people, but they were fun and sexy too.

Maybe one day the past will catch up to the future.