Fear—of strangers, of being embarrassed, of threats to personal safety—is the travelers usual, if often unadmitted, companion.

-Paul Fussell, The Norton Book of Travel

I was scared coming to Indonesia, especially arriving in “The Big Durian” Jakarta itself. All the news from here is bad news, the latest being the widespread flooding the past few months. Reading my guidebook, it seems flooding disabled the city in 2002, 2003, and 2006 as well. The Jakarta Marriot was bombed in 2003 along with the Australian embassy in 2004. Massive protests erupted in 2003 and 2005 against proposed hikes in fuel-prices. Nothing compares though to the riots that erupted twice in 1998. On the back of the Asian Financial Crisis and a massive devaluation of the rupiah, Jakartans turned their anger on their city and its Chinese residents. Many burned out and destroyed buildings can still be seen around the city today, as the riots nearly leveled the capital. The small, but wealthy Chinese community was scapegoated for many of the problems and they bore the brunt of the violence, as victims of murders and rapes. On a sidenote, Chinese in Indonesia have had a rough history, also being massacred by the Japanese and by Indonesians under the Dutch. With several tsunamis and a couple of Bali bombings in the past five years, the rest of Indonesia doesn’t have much of a better reputation than Jakarta. But I’ve never heard anything good about Jakarta. Just bad stories of violence: getting mugged while out walking, getting robbed by taxi drivers, having your bags slashed while on a bus. All the stories and all I’ve read even prompted us to reserve a room ahead of time, so we could just go straight from the airport to our hotel. But after two days here, I can say its not that bad. It’s not a beautiful city or one with a whole lot to do, but its not the hell-hole people have described it as. It crowded and crazy, but people have been friendly and helpful. The food has been pretty good. And today we saw the best museum we’ve seen since Greece, or at least Turkey. Who’d expect Indonesia’s National Museum to be nicer and have better exhibits than Thailand or Singapore? Coming here, my fear was similar to the fear I had before arriving in Cambodia- a country with a violent past, which nobody ever had anything good to say about. And nothing bad happened to us in Cambodia, in fact we had a good time. This isn’t to say that nothing bad won’t happen to us here in Indonesia, as we could get mugged or have something stolen while in Indonesia. And I’m not saying fear is irrational- you won’t find Baghdad, Gaza, or a host of other dangerous regions on our itinerary. Thus far while traveling, we’ve tried to be careful and cautious, but we’ve been lucky and fortunate too. But regardless of what has happened or what will happen, my point is that you never really know about a place until you go there.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain. – Mark Twain

Exploring a couple areas of Jarkarta today, I found that it reminds me of India in many ways: hot, smoggy, more men than women out, no crosswalks, familiar sounds of the rough sputtering motor of three-wheelers, and the smells of food and oil simmering along sidewalks lined with a hodgepodge of ramshackle food stalls. Only Jakarta is not as crowded, not as dirty, and not as loud. And I didn’t see a single cow. It’s not that I have found Jakarta to necessarily be like India, but there are things that have reminded me more of India today than any other place we’ve gone since leaving the sub-continent.

Last night we hopped over the equator with a short two-hour flight from Johor Bahru to Jakarta. Having arrived in Jakarta late last night, today was our first taste of Indonesia. This morning we hailed a cab to take us to the Maritime Museum. I thought it would be a good place to begin to understand the city, since it got its start as a port (known as Sunda Kelapa in the old days, Batavia under the Dutch, and Jayakarta under the British). The cab ride was sweltering. It was only around eleven in the morning, but it was unbelievably hot. Phuket was so humid, sometimes it felt like we were breathing water. Then Malacca and Singapore were just plain hot. But Jakarta seems the worst of both worlds- super humid and crazy hot. Not only was it unbearably hot, but the traffic was just gridlocked. The six kilometer ride took over twenty minutes in the congested polluted streets. Tons of exhaust, no order on the roads, and large pools and puddles settled on the low-lying parts of the road.

We made it to the old watch-tower which used to direct traffic over the old harbor. The tower was closed, but it was cool to see. The tower is surrounded by a small stone square complete with cannons still in place, but it just overlooks a polluted canal and tons of traffic these days. We walked over the Maritime Museum, but it was also closed. I got a few photos of the old building though, which was some consolation. We checked out a nearby market which was kind of disappointing. Chinatown was next on our list of things to see/do. We would’ve walked but didn’t want to walk through the flooded areas we had to drive through, so we took another cab. The cab driver didn’t know exactly where we wanted to go, so he dropped us where we thought was close. After wandering around a bit in the heat, we stopped for some drinks. Nobody had a clue where the two Chinese temples our guidebook mentioned were. Leaving the café, we decided to just go back to our guesthouse. It was hot, nobody (including us) knew where we were, and Joylani and I were both getting irritable. But as we were leaving, I asked an older man sitting on the steps of the café if he knew of the temples and he did! He pointed us in the right direction. We had actually passed it a couple times in our wanderings, but had missed it since it consisted of just a small road set back behind some small alleyways from the main road. We didn’t go in the temples as they were mostly filled with homeless. Walking around Chinatown was interesting though. It was run down and there weren’t a ton of Chinese people everywhere. Joylani said it was the least amount of Chinese people in a Chinatown she’d been to, adding that it was quite a contrast to the sterilized Singapore Chinatown. At least we got to see what Chinese people here eat, which is always exciting. We saw bowls of small turtles, a table of skinned frogs (next to the table of live frogs), but I couldn’t find the monkey meat I’d heard about. Aside from what we saw, anti-Chinese sentiment is incredibly strong in Indonesia (especially Jakarta) and I will write more about this and the other violent events of Jakarta’s recent past in tomorrow’s post.

mmmmm….skinned frogs

After Chinatown, we headed over to the National Monument, which is actually just a large square with an incredibly huge tower in the middle of it. It is joked to be Soeharto’s “final erection” referring to the dictator’s last accomplishment before being forced out of office. We took an elevator up to the top which afforded awesome views of Jakarta’s skyline and endless urban sprawl. I should add smoggy to that description as well, as it was some of the worst smog we’ve seen.

me holding Soeharto’s “final erection”

watching the Jakarta police practice dealing with mock protesters for the upcoming Olympic Torch relay (from the top of the tower) was mildly interesting…nothing like watching a bunch of police peel off from their column to disable a terrorist food cart.

Below the monument is a simple museum chronicling Indonesia’s history through dozens of dioramas. It was a pretty weak and propagandized museum, but it was interesting nonetheless. By this time we were pooped and we took a rickshaw back to our guesthouse. We crashed for a few hours before venturing out again for some dinner later. First impressions of Jakarta/Indonesia: hot, crazy, good food, cheap, and interesting.