Jac in Jakarta

 

My 12 hour flight from London was pretty smooth – several empty seats, so I had one empty one next to me, in front of me, and a woman directly behind me but she had two empty seats next to her so if my reclining bothered her she was free to move. Excellent! And I was in the row behind the shortened exit row, so the guy in my window seat could get out without bothering me (I was in seat 75 on this map). I watched District 9 (great), a travel show on Ramadan in Australia, the first part of Avengers (not great! Not even good enough to continue) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (great!) plus read a few short stories and even slept several hours.

We took off about 45 minutes late from London, which made my 90 minute connection in Kuala Lumpur for Jakarta pretty tight. I made the flight, but as I suspected, my bag didn’t – although the flight took off 30 minutes late, so I’m sure they could have done something if they’d been desperate. Instead I waited around the airport for an hour for it to arrive on the next flight, along with a half dozen others who’d landed with me. Immigration was interesting – I knew from previous research that Indonesia had just recently granted visa-free entrance to British tourists, but this wasn’t reflected on the airport signage. So I went to the visa counter and showed my British passport and they said I didn’t need one – I was mildly concerned that they’d just try and take my money anyway, so that was nice. After the visa queue (which was actually empty) I went to the arrival queue (also literally empty), where the guy inspected  my passport for a few seconds and then stamped it. Then I walked along into what looked like the normal immigration queue area, which featured those lines of queue ropes, but was all closed off in favor of the two small desks I’d just been past – because it wasn’t busy enough? I walked straight past a guy sitting in a chair against the wall who stopped me and checked my passport again, and then I was done with immigration and through to hang out at baggage claim. I noticed here that pretty much everyone was wearing pants and a shirt, despite it being tropical weather – presumably because of the conservative nature of the region. I only noticed people in shorts and short skirts in the larger expensive malls, I assume some correlation with Westernization.

Tim had told me to catch the Damri bus to meet him at a shopping center – unfortunately I was his first visitor so it turned out this bus stopped just short of this shopping center! It was only a few hundred meters, but since Jakarta isn’t a walker friendly place this meant walking on the footpath next to the freeway, crossing a three lane road with all my bags, etc. It didn’t take too long to meet up, and then we went into the plaza to grab something to eat – some nice classic curry and rice along with some kind of orange drink that is apparently very common there. Afterwards he said we should grab some groceries so we went to the grocery store at the bottom of the mall, which had somehow closed since he was there a week or so earlier – it seemed to still have cashiers running and people buying stuff but all the shelves were empty and the place was partially dismantled and demolished!?!!!! We caught a taxi back to his place and he took me on a run up 42 stories to his rooftop to see the sunset. From here I also got to there the city called to prayers, which was fascinating. This is the first place I’ve ever been with a broadly Muslim population, and we could hear dozens of mosques running slightly out of sync, so the singing started in one spot and then built up until they were all going.

We went for dinner at a nearby restaurant where you order a ton of dishes, eat what you want, then just get charged for what’s gone. The best part was jackfruit curry, only because who knew there was a thing called jackfruit?!?! Jac ate jackfruit in Jakarta. Yessssss.

Sunday

Sunday morning (6am-noon?) is car free along the main road in Jakarta, so we got up crazy early (6am) to join in while it was cooler. It was pretty fascinating – tons of people just walking, some of them in workout gear, some people jogging, quite a few on bikes. The buses still run, in their dedicated bus lane in the centre of the street, but the bikes use that lane until a bus comes then all swerve out into the walking area – so you have to be a little careful. There were tons of Barca outfits, lots of matching Dad-and-toddler versions even. We walked for a while, picked up some kind of fried coconut batter that neither of us was a big fan of, then turned around and headed back towards a café Tim described as ‘very Melbourne’.  He said it’s normally full, but it was deserted at 9am – a waiter said it doesn’t get busy until noon.

We went home to have a lunchtime nap and then headed out to see the National Gallery and National Monument, taking a micro bus – 40c a trip, wave one down and pay the driver/guy collecting. Tim said that since they’re so cheap, before he knew where they all went, he’d just jump on one heading in the right direction and jump off if it turned off his path, catching another one.

The gallery was an odd building – a number of big signs and a noticeboard advertising cultural events, but we couldn’t spot the entrance. We went in to a side gallery that was showing an exhibition of “the most important Spanish fashion designers” which was actually pretty interesting, especially the one photo which had masking tape added to cover a bare nipple. There were some kids also in there who asked us if they could take photos with us, Tim said this is pretty common for him in touristy areas. After this we wandered around a little, convinced that there was a main exhibition as well, and eventually found it. It turned out to be on Indonesia’s Independence, with some quite interesting paintings where I felt like I was missing a ton of symbolism. There was also a 10 page typed Word document about the experiences of one Dutch guy during the fight for independence which was quite curious – it included stories of how he had run a group of commandoes and killed people, then about page 7 it started featuring some quotes in Indonesian, the next couple pages were written entirely in Indonesian, and then the last three were all blacked out like a censor had been through.

After this we walked through the streets a little way to get to the National Monument (abbreviated to MoNas – Tim says he has lots of fun trying to understand all the abbreviations like this!). It turned out there were gates at either end of the park and we were in the middle so had to walk quite a way. We bought a coconut and some fried bananas from fruit stands, and strolled in. It’s an austere place, but we’ll populated with people walking, jogging and flying kites. Fortunately the monument was already closed so we didn’t have to decide if we wanted to climb it 🙂 With all the Indonesians around taking photos, we were pretty confident someone would eventually ask to take a photo of us so we could get one of us in front of the monument from them, and indeed a group of about ten teenage(?) boys from out of town approached us and we spent several minutes taking group photos and individual photos with each of them, it was pretty fun!

Leaving here, we spotted the free government city circle tour bus, which we knew stopped at the mall near his place, so ran for it and jumped on. At the mall we decided to check out the rooftop bar for some city views – very nice! It was hard to find seats but we spotted a tourist couple that had been on the circle bus taking up a booth and asked if we could join them. We chatted for a bit – she was a teacher from Holland taking a sabbatical, they were headed to Sulawesi for a month and then going to spend several months on Curacao, where he had worked years ago.

Once home for the night, we decided to watch a movie. We watched one called Habibie and Ainun, the biography of a former Indonesian president. It was quite odd – the main character had a bafflingly weird laugh and disingenous childish smile, and the movie skipped over how he had graduated from an airplane builder to vice president. The next morning Tim said this to his roommate’s Indonesian girlfriend, who explained that the weird characteristics were just like the president – and she found us a video clip of him doing exactly that laugh, so props to the actor!

Monday

I helped Tim wake up for a run and then went back to sleep while he headed off. We had to go to his work to pick up his tickets and cash for his visa run to Singapore with me, which was interesting – took a couple micro buses, walked a way, through a market area. I met a colleague of his who asked if we could buy him some Bitcoin from the Singapore ATM, was very excited to hear I knew about Bitcoin and sad that we weren’t hanging around to talk about it! Once he had his trip packet, we went to the work canteen to buy some of this  bubble-tea-esque dessert. Very odd, but it really worked quite well as a mixture.

To get to the old town, we took the ‘real’ TransJakarta bus, which has bus stations in the middle of the road and you have to swipe a card to get in. It was only midday so not too crowded, but still pretty cramped. All the TransJakarta buses and the trains have a front section for women only to cut down on harassment, and the buses have little icon signs saying regular stuff like “give up your seats to the elderly” but also “don’t grab women’s butts”. I didn’t have any trouble myself and noticed quite a few other women in the mixed section. When a seat opened up it seemed to be offered to nearby women first. Quite interesting.

Once we got to the old town station, it wasn’t very clear where to go so we asked a local who pointed us down the street. It looked strangely deserted, and it turned out that was probably because all the museums are closed for Monday. We walked around the square, stopping to chat to an excellent statue actor, then went into the café Batavia feeling like we were giving up on the cultural activities for the day – it turned out to be an amazingly well preserved hundred year old building with a guide to all the old buildings around it in the menu, excellent! The building was lovely, the food was excellent, A++ would visit again. We decided to go see the old bridge nearby based on the menu guide and walked along the canal to it – a very odd area, some buildings being restored by a local heritage society, others in the process of falling down. The canal smelled terrible – apparently the Dutch built them to feel at home but they just turned into stagnant messes filled with rubbish.

Once back to our starting location, we could see the bus station we’d arrived at, and walked half way around it, but couldn’t see the entrance. We asked directions a couple times and ended up in the train station so caught a train instead – perfect since Tim had wanted me to experience peak hour trains! We had to transfer so got out at the correct station, and Tim had heard an announcement as we arrived that we needed to go to platform 5 for our next train, so we headed over there. But we double checked when the train pulled up, and were told that it was a different train and we should be back at the platform we’d started at. So we walked back to platform 3, and asked a guard if this was right, and he said no, platform 5! We were obviously a little confused so said we just got sent back to this one – he laughed at us and explained that the trains left from both platforms. It turned out that we had been just missing our train each time we crossed the tracks and waited for a train to go past instead of rushing ahead of it like most of the locals. Of course now that we’d missed three trains in five minutes, it was about 15 minutes til the next one which we did catch.

Tuesday

Up at 4am, felt terrible but that seemed pretty reasonable. However when we got in the cab I started thinking I might actually feel sick, and as we pulled up to the terminal 30 minutes later I jumped out and threw up in a bin (nice timing!) I assume it was something I ate…Tim said he was glad we hadn’t gone to a street vendor for dinner as then he would have been feeling guilty 🙂

Tim headed off for his 6am departure and I sat down to wait for my noon plane. I thought perhaps I should just get an earlier flight but it was too hard, and then I spotted a lounge on the landside of security so paid the $15 to go in and slept on a couch for a couple hours, then had a shower and some orange drink and felt much better. Once checked in, I went through immigration into the duty free area and bought a bottle of water. Turned the corner and there’s the security checkpoint that makes you throw out all your water – wtf? Someone should calculate the cost of bullshit imaginary security just in traveller money spent on water + plastic bottles thrown out.

Impressions

I don’t think I would have enjoyed Jakarta at all on my own, but with my personal tour guide, it was quite interesting and fun catching local buses and walking around. Alone I would have been way too intimidated to do much within a few days. The weather was a bit of a shock coming from London, but having air con at the house (and in all the malls and main buildings) made it easy to handle! If anyone plans to be in the area I’m sure Tim would love to be a host again, although apparently his new place won’t have air con or even room for a guest, so it wouldn’t include accommodation 🙂