This wasn’t our first visit to Indonesia. We’d spent a couple of days in Bangkok on a round the world adventure in 1980, and a few weeks on Bali a bit after that. I’d also had a week or two’s work trip on Java — now, that was an eye-opener, if you want to know how your aid money sometimes gets spent.
Anyway, this was just a holiday. We liked to travel light, and independently, and not book ahead. That was part personal preference, but partly just that we were too busy to think much beyond asking ourselves — how about a few weeks in Indonesia?
In this case we went to see Heather’s brother Jim in Brisbane, and from there caught an early flight to Jakarta. I was going to write a diary, but past Day One I seem to have given the idea away.
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The alarm went at 4.00am to give us time to get to the airport. It was an hour and a half to Sydney, an hour and a half in the terminal there and another 7-1/2 hours flying time to Jakarta. We spent the time boning up on the Lonely Planet. My initial wish to pre-book our first day’s accommodation soon evaporated when I saw the price of international hotels. Besides, we were arriving in the early afternoon so there’d be time to find a place.
There wasn’t the same sense of shock as we landed. Last time it had been very new and I’d been aware how little open space there was between the rusted roofs as I flew down over the houses. There was a brief initial shock of heat as we walked down the air bridge into the new air-conditioned terminal, and we were soon through Customs. We probably paid Rs.10,000 too much for a taxi to Jalan Jaksa, which the Guide said was the best street to look for lodgings, and were instantly approached with an offer of lodging by a genial chap lounging on the footpath.
We took it, the first losmen we were shown, clean and quiet at the end of a drab alley with a view of Jalan Thamrin’s high rises behind. We dropped our things, padlocked the room and, bloated with money belts and necklaces with our valuables, sweltered our way to Jalan Thamrin, nosed around Sarinah and the other buildings, ate an early tea in a place off Jalan Jaksa and went exhausted and early to bed. The two beds in our little cell were hard but comfortable and we slept comparatively well under a fan that we left on all night.
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We woke at 4:30 to the sound of a muezzin reminding us that this was a Muslim country. We’d seen the mosque, Indonesian green, just down the street on a corner as we’d walked back from eating the previous evening. We dozed until 8.00, waited in the queue for the mandi — lounging in the little courtyard, watching a German boy with a notebook computer — refreshed ourselves and ate breakfast. Sometimes I feel we travel principally to see people’s different approaches to providing us with budget beds and breakfasts. On this occasion breakfast was miserable Muslim bacon, truly strangled eggs and refreshing tea in a glass.
We caught a taxi down to Sunda Kelapa, the old docks where I had been in the early ‘80s with a Japanese fisherman during a trip up to Pekalongan on a boatbuilding mission. Back then we’d paused briefly to look at the beautiful Malaccan schooners unloading at the dock, then tramped out through the squatter villages, past the Passar Ikan, or fish market, and crossed the canal via a little footbridge — nonresidents paid a toll. We’d walked down narrow concrete paths through the shanties and sludge, unnerving our local guides, and come eventually out to the water’s edge where we squatted and watched men building a boat with hand tools in the crudest of circumstances.
This time Heather and I walked along the immense pier with the beautiful, extravagantly sheered schooners lined up by the dozen down one side in a smooth sea of oily garbage, all discharging beautiful rainforest timber into waiting trucks.
Ever since that day I’ve looked with disdain at hardwood outdoor furniture. What waste.
All the work was done by hand, of course. Men laboured up and down the gangways under heavy loads of roughly sawn planks. The dockside was a bedlam of diesel fumes and honking and shuffling traffic. As before I had that feeling of awkward admiration for the wiry little men from the dockside slums labouring under their loads of timber, or struggling back up the plank gangways with return cargoes of rice and flour and cement. They paused briefly as they dropped their loads, watching us and fiddling with the little fabric cushions they used between their shoulders and the baulks of timber.A boatman paddled us up the breakwater past schooners waiting for dockside space in a line that extended for hundreds of metres. Cheery boys paddled small boats and called to us. Young men stood in dinghies to caulk the occasional hull. Then we stood off and observed in quiet the throbbing city under its impenetrable cloud of dust, smoke and fumes, then slipped back under the mooring ropes towards the muddy shore, where last time I had watched the men building their boat.
As we drew in, our boatman watched frustratedly as his mates picked up a lucrative crowd of clean packaged tourists for the trip we’d just completed. We walked back through the toil and noise on the opposite side of the pier, where the motorised vessels were worked, then crossed back for a last look at the beautiful schooners and the grey bulk of the squatter villages, the wreckage of the abandoned dry dock and the open expenses of low grey mud before heading for the fish market.
\We were approached by a young guide, a student whom we’d already rejected as expensive and unnecessary. This time we agreed a price and headed into the narrow lanes of the Passar Ikan. Being now midday the selling was well over except for displays of little fish in the stalls, gleaming with water tossed over them from buckets by the vendors. The open spaces were taken up by more trays of fish, split open and drying in the sun — our assurance, we hoped, that the fresh fish was in fact fresh. Down the alleys shop after shop catered to the boats and local community. We considered a little satay grill, but did buy a sarong for Rs.6000. Everywhere was friendly.
We headed to Old Batavia across the stinking canals (nobody washing in them now — we’d heard that Jakarta was gradually been cleaned up) and past the old cream-coloured Dutch Go-Downs, the open square, its street market opposite the impressive old government buildings, and into the streets of Glodok.
In the fish market we had caught glimpses of the barriers behind which the Chinese lived and worked. Here in Chinatown were entire streets, drab enough on the outside, of ceramic tiles and jewellery, evidence of real wealth behind the tired frontages of Jakarta. Here the Javanese came and worked for their Chinese bosses then went home. We window-shopped for bathrooms, talked with our guide about the Chinese and their “capital”, then dug deep into the side alleys, no wider sometimes than the corridors of New Zealand houses, but cleaner than many places we’d been — though nowhere in Jakarta looked as defiantly unsanitary as bad parts of India.
Here there were twittering birds to lighten the day and always the constant press of domesticity and commerce. No one took any notice of us except for a cheery kitchen hand operating from a bench on the side of the alley who noisily waved a handful of frogs in our faces before dispatching them wholesale with an oversize knife. We passed another man plucking chickens over a cauldron, and then were in a covered food market with piles of chickens, and hanging portions of beef, some with hoof attached, and slabs of pork, and fish in tanks, and skinned frog legs, and cooked goods and fruit and vegetables. Some sections were too humidly aromatic for comfort, but we squelched down the wet, muddy paths in good time, remarking how far we’d come since that time in Florence when the sight of tiny naked birds in the market, arrayed in broad, careful banks with identically wrenched necks had almost made us heave. Then we turned right into a Chinese temple, full to overflowing with huge, man-size, sweating red candles, smaller votive candles by the hundred, and incense sticks — the whole even hotter than outside and full of smoke, incense, and intense but not unfriendly Chinese tossing sticks and wooden dominoes. This was rather strange — the heathen Chinee tossing for their lucky numbers before the lapsed Christians and their Muslim guide. As we left, and smiled at the friendly attendant, we saw a man in the corner in passionate conversation with his cell phone.
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We were glad we’d hired Dadi — glad too we had him still, to get us back out to the street. We paid him and ate in a Chinese businessmen’s restaurant — quite expensive, the menu loaded with matter-of-fact pictures of heathen meats, and not very good. Still, the waiters here were the first of many to rush out with something we had forgotten as we left.
We caught a taxi to the National Museum, which was closed of course. We walked on — by this time extremely hot and, in my case anyway, blistered and footsore — across the open park past the enormous granite column of Monas, with its gilded flame, and towards Jalan Jaksa, which lay just behind. Then we changed our minds and headed back to Sarinah and Jalan Thamrin for cold drinks and cooler clothing, and a ten minute wait for a phone conversation to verify our AMEX cards, and walked wearily home.