October 4
Aside from an hour delay leaving Melbourne getting here has been very smooth and easy. We had very good seats with leg room and beyond our usual anxieties encountered no problems over what became a 21 hour day for me until I discovered Catherine had booked an airbnb apartment on the 15th floor of a huge building. I was fulminating over the claustrophobic trips in a lift just as we commenced an extraordinarily dangerous taxi ride from the airport. Like the ride from Denpassar to Ubud last year which took 2 hours to go 40 k, the drivers weave through the traffic and only considered the road a rough guide, but this driver did so at very high speed often in the emergency lane terrifyingly close to the concrete barriers and the blind sides of vehicles large and small alike. I was deeply relieved when we finally hit the log jammed streets where nothing beyond a snail’s pace is possible. Even the lift didn’t seem so bad by that time.
Although Catherine slept well tiredness dogged me throughout yesterday, but we did do quite a bit. Jakarta is a bit like paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock and others of his ilk. It’s just been splattered everywhere without any real focus, themes emerge which are probably all contestable, but once you start to drill down into the mess you realise there is a lot going on that defies your preconceptions of what urban aesthetics should be about. Mostly it’s chaos, crap and confusion held together only by the sheer mass of humanity that lives here. However after just one day walking to the fairly bland major national monument, visiting a ghastly vast modern shopping mall, a truly intense place called Blok M Square, and then going to dinner at a beautiful restaurant serving a wide range of Indonesian dishes we would never get in Australia, you realise how little you learn from the surface of things.
I’ll mention Block M Square. Maybe it is a square but there is no open space I could see where we were. There are hordes of people, mostly young but not only. Loud music, food, streets clogged with pedestrians. It contains a 6 or 7 story ugly building with each floor filled with stalls selling dreadful jewellery, clothes, etc. Some floors are dedicated to technology or something else. It’s the kind of place you imagine an appalling disaster, a fire, a building collapse, hundreds of people killed. You travel up on a couple of escalators, not all working, and down again lost in a state of communal psychosis until you reemerge on the streets that are mostly differentiated by the high temperature and humidity. Even getting a taxi back was not a simple process. We took our lives in our hands as you must to cross a very big road to a shopping centre only a bit less mad than Block M, where we had remarkably good coffee some other food we shouldn’t have had. Still extremely crowded. While this is all a very negative sounding vision, oddly it was not a negative experience. There is just so much life going on, and people are very polite and good-natured. We were the oddities there. There are very few tourists in Jakarta, but we feel perfectly welcome.
I get the feeling that if you were young and had the right temperament for it you could have a very good time in Jakarta. Young people feel dominant in a way that they do not in Australian cities.
Catherine researched restaurants for dinner and found the one I mentioned nearby. From where we are you walk down some very narrow streets, always in bad repair, tricky to navigate, but some filled with tropical trees and very charming. It is less than 10 minutes away in what seems to be a large old house. It is just one of two restaurants in this building in an otherwise residential street. Businesses and homes do not necessarily exist in discrete zones. For example a bit further down this street is a Volvo dealership and all sorts of businesses among the houses. This gives some sense of the interior of this restaurant.
October 7
We are in Bandung not having taken the whoosh train because it involved a longish trip to the outskirts of Jakarta in order to catch it, and another at its destination. The old train is city centre to city centre and you get to see some scenery although not as much as we hoped. We were in first class although we had not planned it that way, it just happened, so we got a bit more comfort and attention. We enjoyed it although not without the discomfort of weaving through kilometre after kilometre of very poor urban areas. There is virtually no barrier between the train and properties, which are just metres from the track. All it does is to move along a low speed constantly tooting to signal its presence.
Jakarta is no doubt just another mega city with mega poverty and it is difficult not objectify it as just the landscape that goes with the territory but occasionally something does cut through your carapace. I began to notice the cats that live unobtrusively on the streets. They appear to all belong to a single, small and slight, tabby breed. Ribs are sometimes visible. They hang around on footpaths where they exist, in the corners of buildings, under trees, preserving what little energy they have not unlike the thousands of Grab motor cyclists waiting for customers, the food and other street vendors, the homeless and so on. All in stark contrast to the relentless thunder on the roads, although even that can sometimes seem more performative than serious. Where on earth are they all so desperate to get to? Godot would have a good time in Jakarta.
Coming out of the station at Bandung we were immediately accosted by a driver who promoted himself by taking a great interest in us, where we came from, what we are doing, etc. Initially we rejected his intrusive approach as a matter of principle but then realised he was not threatening and as a good a bet as any. In the car he continued to talk ten to the dozen, but he was clearly an intelligent and interesting person and we enjoyed the conversation although we did not commit ourselves to further excursions with him as he would have liked. His excitable chatter was always punctuated by little laughs, possibly due to nervousness, and he told us a quite a bit about himself. No education, taught himself English to a surprisingly high standard in just the last year and a half, and speaks a smattering of other languages plus his native Sundanese and Indonesian. Easy to see why he talk is a key component of his business model. He has 5 children, one a bonus child he got when he married. He is 35 and life is pretty hard so he is keen for his children to get educated. Apparently you cannot even get a job in a supermarket without a basic diploma and private schools versus the public system is a thing here too. He can’t afford to send his children to one as he would like.
The house we are now in is more of a unit, very modern, comfortable, we were even able to watch an episode of East of Eden on Netflix. Getting some dinner was not so successful. The main local roads are as busy as Jakarta and almost impossible to cross even with our gradually improving technique and confidence. We finally got to a restaurant that Google Maps told us had vegetarian food, in fact it had none, so we went into a supermarket and bought some yoghurt and fruit and brought it back here.
Bandung is the location of a very famous gathering of nations in 1955 of what we would now call the global south, and a key moment in a movement toward non alignment during the Cold War. The Australian government attended in an observational role only. Other than that it is not famous for anything much and not particularly talked up as a tourist destination, but in many ways that makes it more interesting. We are certainly no less oddities here and we notice some people staring at us, even the occasional giggle. They are also very polite and friendly, find someone to speak English with us if necessary, and forgive our blunders without comment as they did when we failed to get the fruit weighed before going to the checkout in the supermarket. It is very hot here though.
Evening
On the way to breakfast this morning we bumped into an Indonesian couple dropping their daughter off at a primary school. They had excellent English as it turned out they had lived in New Zealand and Melbourne among other places around the world, and are soon heading to Canada, but Bandung is their principle home. They recommended that we go and have coffee at the place below. It has a remarkable view over Bandung, so that’s what we did.
After having a very good cup of coffee and pastry we went back to the city centre planning to eventually have lunch in a restaurant that had some vegetarian dishes. Once again Google Maps directed us to a place that apparently served quite a few. I’m not sure where the information is sourced, but for the second time there was not one vegetarian meal on the menu.
There is no escaping the fact that our age has a large impact on our decisions as travellers. The prospect of long hours on trains, planes and automobiles, difficult terrain topographically and challenging conditions biologically, limit our adventurism and sometimes brings it to a complete standstill. We were planning to head off to a town more than 7 hours away by train called Purwokerto in Central Java from which we would get a driver to take us to Dieng, a much admired mountainous tea growing region. This would be a further 3 – 4 our trip on steep roads with a driver or in a bus. Increasingly alarmed as we thought through the details we did a sudden about turn and bought tickets on the train to Cirebon on the north coast. From there will continue east and possibly approach Dieng from the more convention route or maybe do something else. The excessive weight of our baggage was the deal breaker, that and the considerable weight of our years.