Prescott and I escaped the resort this morning; we struck out on our own and took a really hot walk on the road that leads out toward the real world.  Unfortunately, we never found the real world — we mostly found that you can walk a good distance on Bintan and find neither a stunning view nor an intersection.  But we were both very glad to get out nonetheless.  We found flowers (of course):

And we played with the sensitive plant we found in abundance, which does things you do not expect a plant to do:

We also found a mini-haze source.

The guy on the right there (whom you can barely see) was using a long stick to toss plastic sheeting onto that smoldering pile of logs.  It smelled as terrible as it looks.

We returned to the resort feeling both refreshed and exhausted, happy to find our way to the shower and breakfast and then the pool.  We then took the ferry back to Singapore.  I’m going to miss having a view of the ocean unimpeded by tankers.  As Prescott has noted, if you want to attack Singapore, you just need to disguise your naval vessels as tankers and plant them off of the Singapore coast.  With the traffic here, it’s likely that no one would notice the difference.