An Afternoon in Jakarta

After wandering around in a market, visiting a mosque, and talking to the local version of a relief society, we got in these tiny three wheeled cars and braved Jakarta’s traffic to go to a restaurant for lunch. This is a lot more daring than it sounds.

Traffic in Jakarta is insane! Mind you I think traffic in a lot of places is nuts. Ulaan Battar comes to mind. Turns out Jakarta is far from the only city in Indonesia with nutso traffic. But that’s a story for another time.

What really distinguishes the craziness of Indonesian traffic has to be the motorcycles. There are more of them than any other vehicles. They filter their way to the front at every red light, whip around corners, pack in tight together, and turn up everywhere.

It didn’t take long to reach Fatahilla Square where we stopped for lunch at the Cafe Batavia. The restaurant is housed by a 200-year-old, colonial style building, the walls of which are covered in pictures. They range from old time movie stars to pop idols. Every square inch holds framed images. Even the bathroom stalls are filled with pictures. I have no idea whether any of these people ever actually ate at the restaurant, or even came to Indonesia. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

The place had the open spaces and old world grandeur that makes me think of Hemingway on safari. We were served my favorite kind of meal. Specifically, platters of food I can barely identify which we could help ourselves to. We could take as much or little as we pleased. There were half a dozen to choose from.

At that stage I was still on my diet. Or rather, I hadn’t completely given up on it yet. So even though I did try a bite of everything, I didn’t actually gorge myself. If I had it to do all over again, I’d probably still have held back. Not that the food wasn’t tempting. It was delish! Just that I needed to keep myself in check so I could make it through the trip.

After eating, we went back out on the square for a quick walking tour. The square has been blocked off with large, round balls that I first mistook for over-sized cannon balls. I’m not sure how these keep the masses of motorcycles out, but apparently they do. This opens up the flagstone area for pedestrian sight seers and tourists on bicycle.

I should probably explain the bicycle bit. There were several places where long racks of them were lined up. Often they came equipped with an extravagant hat. The idea was to rent the bicycle and hat, then have your friends take pictures of you wearing the hat and riding around in the square.

There were also a number of people in mascot costumes that you could pay to let you take a picture of yourself standing next to them. For the most part this meant handing your cell phone to a friend and mugging while they used it to take your picture.

At one point some locals wanted to have their picture taken with us. We were taking pictures of them. It’s only fitting they should do the same. I’m in some stranger’s photo collection in Indonesia now.

We stopped in one of the buildings. At first I thought train station, then bank. Turns out this is the post office. You can do a lot at a post office. For instance, you can get your ID renewed. However, you can’t get your money changed from USA currency to Indonesian. For that you need either one of the money changers in the airports, a store that will do it, and ATM machine, or some guy standing around on the corner that everyone will point at and tell you to go there. I wasn’t comfortable with that.

From there we went across the square to the building that was used as a capital when the Dutch were in power. If you look to the left of the column in front you’ll see a kind of gray area near the stairs. This was their prison.

When the prison was in use, there was no glass covering. Apparently the stonework is valued more now than life was then.

This is not so surprising in the light of Indonesia’s history. Indonesia as a whole, and Jakarta in particular, has suffered a number of invasions and uprisings. The Dutch are hardly the first to claim ownership. Before them came people from India and the Mideast. After then came the Chinese and Japanese. All have left their stamp on the country. Sometimes in blood.

At one point so many people were executed that the bodies were piled into a hill that is called the Red Hill even today. Don’t ask me for the details, my notes are too badly messed up to be able to tell you.

We went around a corner to find a street with relatively little traffic. I like the way the palms look with the colonial style buildings. However, there were a lot more people around than the picture might make you think. I had to edit out several people sitting in a doorway on one side, and a guy taking a picture of the same thing I was after on the other.

After wandering around the historical areas for most of a day, getting bacon on the bus and watching modern day Jakarta whisk past was a head turner. Even if I wasn’t all that impressed with the internet, I have to admit that Jakarta has every modern convenience that I could find in the states. This is no back-water town. I’ll get to those later 🙂

The next morning we headed straight to the airport. It turned out to be one of the prettiest terminals I’ve ever cooled my heels in. The gardens were so well maintained that I did a double take to make sure we were really in an airport.