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