Tourist industry authority
Although many a time I flew JAL on my trips to Japan, I nonetheless could not help but feel my heart fill with a blend of pride and pity every time I saw a Garuda aircraft lonely resting in the parking area of Narita Airport. The plane always looked innocent.
I could not fly Garuda because the frequent flight delays, as rumored, were dreadful. It is commonplace for passengers to raise complaints for bad service in letters to the editor in popular local papers.
Recently I flew return in a Garuda Airbus to Ujungpandang. I prepared myself mentally in the event that I would encounter any unpleasantries in the flight service. Unexpectedly, nothing of the sort happened. Everything went as smooth as a whistle.
Dissatisfaction was met only in the cafeteria of Ujungpandang airport, where for lunch I had Coto Makassar (local soup specialty) among the noted popular delicacies. I was upset to find that all the sweetbread lumps in the soup were terribly hard. I gave up eating them.
My greatest disappointment, however, was at Kendari airport. During Japanese occupation in 1942-1945, Kendari was one of the strategic outposts of the Japanese navy.
When I entered the hall of the airport building, I looked for a bathroom. A foreign businessman whom I accompanied had the same intention. My heart sank and I felt ashamed when I looked up and saw the roof wide open and under repair. The floors had turned into a splashy mess by a past downpour. To my dismay, the condition of the toilet was just indescribable. On top of that, the electric light happened to be off. The foreign guest and I queued up and unloaded ourselves in complete darkness. And the smell was disgusting.
Then followed the drive from the airport to the project site. The widespread potholes in the roads had been turned into muddy puddles by the rain.
Fortunately, a happy surprise emerged at Hotel Aden, Kendari, when I saw some foreign tourists seemingly enjoying their meals in the dining room.
In witnessing such scenes in the remote countryside of Southeast Sulawesi, a passage from the Garuda magazine obtained in the aircraft is worth quoting, which reads: Indonesia's natural resources promise the potential of national wealth for the wellbeing of its people and prospective investors in various fields of endeavor, including the tourist industry.
This kind of expression must remain only a cliche-ridden piece of rhetoric, if the realities reveal conditions as depicted above.
The main theme that I wish to stress upon in this writing is the government agency in charge of managing and supervising component institutions of the tourist industry.
If the flush toilets in the hotel and the water supply in the sink in the lavatory of Merpati MZ 717 (which I flew from Kendari to Ujungpandang on Aug. 13) were out of order, I would strongly feel that the government agency in charge of tourism management was not operating.
S. SUHAEDI
Jakarta