Colonial heritage embellishes Majapahit Hotel in Surabaya

By Mehru Jaffer

SURABAYA (JP): If you want to continue from where the colonial powers left off you might want to visit Hotel Majapahit in Surabaya. The hotel is a haunting reminder that makes you secretly grateful, for a few fleeting moments, to the colonial powers for coming by.

Celebrating 90 years of service in June, this architectural delight in the heart of East Java's most important city has recently spruced up nine of its Majapahit suites and individually redesigned them.

Besides separate bedrooms and lounge areas, the suites have been upholstered in silk, fitted out with wooden panels, parquet flooring. The bathroom fixtures have been plated in 18 karat gold. Each suit has different artifacts and lighting. The presidential suite is the largest in Asia, with its own kitchen and servant's quarters.

Here, even ducks are spoilt silly. Nine of them are permanent residents at the hotel, hanging out in brass shelters with a private pool nearby that lies beneath the shade of an ancient tree. In return, all that the ducks have to do is to parade for guests while they sip the largest cappuccino in town in the tea lounge, which faces the south garden overlooking a carpet of grass.

As the clock strikes 3:30 p.m., a red carpet is unrolled from the entrance, across the Art Deco lobby to the garden. The ducks then wobble and flap their wings all the way along it into the fountain. After shaking themselves dry and having pecked at the snacks scattered for them on the grass, the ducks return to their quarters behind the walled hotel grounds.

And the guests go back to putting more on their plate from a selection of delectable Indonesian and European savories. There are 14 teas and seven coffees to choose from, along with six types of sugar from the country's plantations.

The duck parade was part of the celebrations to mark the 90th anniversary of the hotel. It was first opened in 1910 as the Oranje Hotel by Lucas Martin Sarkies. Son of an Armenian who left his native Iran in 1869 for Malaysia, Sarkies named the hotel after the Dutch royal family. His father is the same man who bought a bungalow in 1887 in Singapore from an Arab trader and converted it into a 10-room guest house that eventually expanded to become the most magnificent establishment east of the Suez. Also known as Raffles Hotel.

The Eastern and Oriental Hotel on Penang, Malaysia, built in 1880, set off the trend of offering memorable homes-away-from- home for the rich and famous who loved to travel. In the end, owner Arshak Sarkies competed with other facilities offered at the chain of Sarkies hotels. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Arshak is said to have invited guests to stay free and loaned money to others in need.

The Strand in Rangoon was the next to open by yet another Sarkie brother, followed by the Oranje Hotel (Majapahit Hotel) in Surabaya. Over time, these grand hotels suffered terrible neglect and ruin. In fact, by the late 1980s The Strand was described by one critic as a "rat-infested firetrap". Fortunately all the hotels have been resurrected to their past splendor: the Raffles at a cost of US$110 million in 1992, The Strand at US$12 million and the Eastern and Oriental Hotel in Penang in 1998 after a US$26 million facelift.

The elegant musical soirees held at Hotel Oranje inspired Joseph Conrad to write about the place in Victory, a novel he wrote during his travels to the Malay and Indonesian islands in the early part of this century.

Apart from hosting celebrities like Charlie Chaplin, the hotel served as a historical venue for a five-year armed struggle against the colonial powers. The Japanese renamed it Hotel Yamato and used it as a boarding house for its soldiers and as a camp for Dutch prisoners of war.

After World War II ended, the English and Dutch country section office returned to Surabaya to occupy room 33 at the hotel and plant the Dutch flag on the terrace. But a group of freedom fighters stormed the building, climbed up to the terrace and tore away the blue strip from the bottom of the Dutch flag, leaving the red and white colors of the Indonesian flag intact. The foreigners were forced to retreat and the place was known for sometime as Hotel Merdeka (Freedom).

It was renamed Majapahit in 1969 after the last great kingdom of ancient Java and was renovated between 1994 and 1996 by the Sekar Group and Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group at a cost of US$35 million into a 5-star deluxe Hotel.

The hotel appeared in Jalan Raya Pos (The Great Post Road), a Dutch documentary film that was screened at the Jakarta International Film Festival last year. Named after the great road that was built in 1810 by Dutch governor-general Marshal Daendels that spanned the length of Java, connecting Anyer in the West to Panarukan in the east, the film talks about life as it was across the island under the repressive regime of former president Soeharto. It also portrays development activities, including the construction of toll roads by Soeharto's daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, and the renovation of Hotel Majapahit.

"A part of the film was shot in the hotel as it is located bang on Jalan Tunjungan, an area that formerly included the Great Post Road," Yudyrizaird Hakim, the former public relations manager of the hotel who appears on screen told The Jakarta Post.