Fleeting Impressions of Old Jakarta

Andy Hill

I was coming up on a robust second wind by mid-morning when I arrived in Jakarta. I’d flown out of Hong Kong around 9 p.m., arrived in Singapore around midnight and wandered around the airport until my flight left at 9:15 the next morning.

Pounding the pavement

Singapore’s airport is probably the best in the world in which to spend a night. I was jacked on coffee when I arrived and it was not until 5 a.m. that I started to feel sleepy, at which time I bought another coffee and got pretty riled up, eager to go somewhere new.

I reached Jakarta around 11 a.m. with dark, baggy eyes and a chipper step. With the small amount of time I had available, I knew I wouldn’t be able to even scratch the surface of the “Big Durian,” so I resolved to spend most of the day at Kota Tua, the old, historical, colonial section of the city, and leave it at that.

I caught a bus from the airport to the central train station for about thirty five cents, then a taxi to a backpacker area, Jalan Jaksa, for the equivalent of $2.

I found a room for $10, emptied some clothes from my bag and headed down to the street. Picking up a cup of black coffee at a street stall, I received directions to the closest stop of Jakarta’s public bus system, a ten minute walk.

All of this was effortless. I boarded my bus and several people came up to me to make sure I understood how to get to my destination. I didn’t expect the place to be so friendly!

Maybe it was because of the fact that I was low on sleep, but riding through the city was a trip. It’s definitely the busiest, largest, dirtiest, most insane city that I’ve ever been to. Not one of those things is bad, though. Jakarta was just so intense.

An urban maelstrom

I reached the Kota Tua stop and meandered my way through shoulder-to-shoulder throngs towards the main square.

There were stalls offering bakso, soto ayam and jamu, a guy selling heavy metal t-shirts, some people setting up an art exhibition that looked like some kind of altar to Kali, performers decked out like green army toys, cowboys and statues, people playing all kinds of music and trannies bouncing around with microphones hooked up to ghetto boxes.

In the large public square there were street performers eating fire, art students drawing, old people taking pictures of their families, young people awkwardly giggling at each other, beggars, young mohawked punks trying to look tough and me, wandering around, completely agog.

A group of high school girls interviewed me for their English class, asking me things like “what is your opinion of the temperature in Jakarta” and “what is your favorite color?” They gave me a bracelet when they finished and scampered off, squawking to one another.

A man about my age came up and said he’d like to “accompany” me, saying that he wanted to show me the area and practice his English. We talked about what we did with our lives, his studies and whether America was like Indonesia.

We talked about Jakarta; how its infamous traffic made getting around almost impossible, how pollution had made the air practically toxic and how notoriously corrupt and hopelessly bureaucratic its politics were. I asked him if he liked living there.

He looked at me, laughing, shocked, and exclaimed, “Of course!”