Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia and is in Java. Now, I never knew this until I looked it up, but it’s the 12th biggest city in the world, which is no small feat.
The other big fact about Jakarta is it rains all the time. I don’t think it ever stopped the entire time I was there. So much so that to cross the road during a seriously hard downpour, I had to take my shoes and socks off, roll my jeans up and wade across four lanes of kamikaze traffic Indiana Jones style ,although being minus the whip and the hat. Probably minus the debonair good looks too but that’s a private joke between me and a couple of friends at home.
Jakarta is also not the prettiest city in the world either. In fact, you could say it’s one of the ugliest. Although, it is sorting itself out and becoming much more generic in the number of shiny glass malls that are springing up all over the place. Normally when I do a trip like this, I’d gem up on tit bits of factual information about the place, or at least have some inclination about the social make up of the place, but on this occasion I failed to do any of this. Even so, there are not really many things to gem up on over Jakarta that you can’t absorb anywhere else in Indonesia, which is a place I’m going to be spending a lot of my time over the coming year. In fact, I’m back in a few weeks already to knock off two of my top ten dives that I want to do. More on that another time though.
Jakarta is touted as being a pretty unsafe place these days. After having spent 5 years of my life living in Brixton in South London it take a bit more than a bit of rumour to faze me, so I was not too concerned about this. Although seeing metal detectors at the front of hotel foyers is something I’ve seen many times before, it did make me realise that this is still a place that has had its fair share of trouble in the last few years. Besides the obvious threats of people wanting to blow up the All You Can Eat continental buffet counters of mid range business hotels, the rest of the city is comparatively safe. Indo people are some of the friendliest I’ve ever met and simply love to chat to you and have a natter. This is even more so when you go shopping at some of the local malls. There is none of the incessant “You wanna buy DVD???” or “Lalf Loren Sir?” to which I was already mentally preparing to compartmentalise into my white noise part of my brain.
In fact it was quite the opposite and actually a very pleasant experience all in all to go shopping in the local district of Glodok, which I highly recommend.
Glodok is the main Chinese influenced market area in Jakarta. It’s a bit of a visual onslaught and not really for the faint hearted. It’s a very traditional old street market with local fruit, seafood and every other manner of delicacy from skinned frogs, live bugs to small birds in cages being sold for god knows what. It’s all opposite an open sewer with houses backing on to it in a scene not a million miles removed from the Dickensian scene of Oliver Twist with the slums of East London in the background. I spent half the time expecting the Artful Dodger to jump out from behind a stack of half filled ships barrels and cordon me with some rhyming slang patter about it being a decidedly tricky but right old larf on his manor or something.
It was actually quite a laugh wandering the roads around here and as rough looking and strangely smelling as it was it was a good experience. I’ve not learnt much Indo yet, but hearing Ole (Hello) every few feet, often accompanied with a very toothy grin was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon.
After this little escapade and after getting completely drenched yet again in another horizontal flowing rainstorm I chanced upon a local mall named ITC. This was a quite an old fashioned street mall, mostly for locals and pretty much void of any toursist. In fact, I was the only Caucasian there at all - and being slightly taller than the average Indonesian, I did cause a few stares and sniggers from the predominantly female crowd. The joke for me here being that a size 36 pair of shorts can be found (albeit slightly dodgier than the strict quality control that Mr Ralph Lauren would typically allow out his front doors) but can not be found for love nor money in Singapore.
I should really have taken some more pictures here. I think I need to get over my typically British anxiety of photographing random people doing things.
Another odd thing about Jakarta is just how screwed the traffic is there. The city sprawls over 30 miles in every direction but still has no MRT, no subway, train network and a woeful bus network. All the small tuk-tuks you’d see in Thailand and India have been been banned from the roads, so nearly everyone drives cars on roads untouched in the last 10 years. It takes forever to get anywhere and I came within a whisker of missing the return flight home after an epic 90 minute journey to travel 10 miles through town to the airport. How people get around daily I’ve no idea. You’d need the patience of a saint.
So in summary, Jakarta was a great place to visit for a day or two. There is absolutely no real reason to go there apart from to transit to somewhere else. It’s grey and it’s scruffy. The locals stare at you in a friendly and welcoming way and speak the most odd language to you like you have been speaking it all your life.
It’s the Birmingham of Asia.
Enjoyed the posting -thanks Andy
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