Oh, Oh, That Smell. Can’t You Smell That Smell?

Soekarno's Last Erection
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By Dan

Well, that blog title would have been appropriate for many of the places we have visited on our journey. Jakarta, a city of over ten million and the capital of Indonesia, follows the lead of New York City (the Big Apple) and is called the Big Durian. A durian, as anybody who has traveled in Southeast Asia knows, is a large, spiny fruit that is legendary for its foul smell. The Wikipedia entry for durian quotes a travel writer as follows: “... its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.” Other comparisons have been made with the sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray, and used surgical swabs, according to Wikipedia. Thus, the blog entry for Jakarta, the Big Durian, scores the dubious honor of the That Smell title.

With friends inside the National Monument
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Jakarta was quite a change for us, coming from the extremely well-trod tourist paths of Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, and even Kuala Lumpur. It was refreshing and invigorating to be in a place where relatively few people spoke passable English, virtually nothing was written in English, and very few white faces were visible. At the same time, though, Jakarta had maybe the most slick, fancy malls and restaurants we’ve seen since leaving Europe. Go figure.

First, our arrival. Indonesia offers a “visas on arrival” program to visitors from many countries, including the US, so we lined up to fork over $25 each. Several of us had passports that were just about out of blank pages, and the visa man was particularly officious, but we managed to prevail on him to put his Indonesian visa (a big sticker) on a page that wasn’t designed for visas. At our next stop, immigration, the guy was not at all happy about where his colleague had put the visa, but again we managed to get through.

Ahhhh.....the simple pleasures!
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On our way to baggage claim, we passed a row of ATMs. Since there is no rhyme or reason as to where airport ATMs are located – sometimes they’re only inside the terminal, sometimes they’re only outside (even if you need money inside, to buy a taxi voucher or something) – we’ve learned to grab money when we can. In this case, we needed a lot, because we were meeting a travel agent and paying a bunch of cash for some airplane tickets and a boat trip that the agent had arranged. Indonesian rupiah run at about 9100 to the US dollar, so we were paying the agent almost 14,000,000 rupiah. The zeros make your head swim. The first ATM dispensed money in 5,000 rupiah notes. Getting $1500 in $5 bills is a very slow process. The next ATM had 10,000 rupiah notes (Indonesia’s largest note, roughly $11), which sped things up, but it still took eight separate transactions to get the money we needed.

Downtown Jakarta
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Baggage in hand, and having handed over our wheel barrow full of rupiah to the travel agent, we hopped into a taxi and headed into Jakarta. It was a beautiful, four lane toll road with no litter, not too many garish billboards, and seemingly mellow drivers. We’re going to like this country. We also passed some amazing 20-story apartment complexes and shopping centers that looked like they were lifted right out of Orange County, California. Once off the toll road and onto the streets of Jakarta, though, we started passing roadside food stalls, open drainage ditches, and streets without sidewalks that confirmed that we were still in Asia.

Cafe Batavia
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Our hotel, the Karya Bahana, which was well-located near the center of Jakarta, was, well, a little rough around the edges. Maybe we’ve gotten soft, having stayed almost exclusively in hotels and guesthouses focused on Western tourists for the last few months. Or maybe it was the “What, you’ve got a problem with that?” response when I pointed out that my hot water heater had clearly previously caught fire, and was non-functioning. Or maybe it was the crowds of men who sat around in the public areas smoking cigarettes and not talking. Or maybe it was the guy who propositioned Christina in the hallway. Or maybe it was when they lost the key to our room during the day and didn’t seem too bothered by it. Or maybe it was the woman who called at 5 a.m. and insisted that I had met her in the bar and had promised to invite her to my room. Or maybe it was just not our best choice of hotel.

Dutch East Indies Maritime Museum
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The next day, Christina and the kids headed for the nearby American Embassy, to get more pages put into passports. Apparently, they spent an hour filling out forms and waiting around, all to have some blank pages taped into passports. It was probably a good reminder that Americans have their fair share of slow procedures, ridiculous bureaucracy, and inefficient services, just like everybody else in the world. I, on the other hand, went to the train station to buy two sets of train tickets for some of our onward destinations. The people at the ticket counters politely chuckled at my weak attempts at Bahasa Indonesia (a few phrases remain lodged in my head from a long trip in 1989), and worked with me in halting English, but handed over the needed train tickets with a minimum of fuss. I still think we’re going to like this country.

Polluted harbor area
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We had arranged to meet in the middle of Merdeka Square, a huge square/park in the middle of town that is dominated by the Monas, a 70 meter tall monument that is very phallic in appearance and is thus referred to popularly as Soekarno’s Last Erection. Soekarno, as those of you who saw the movie “The Year of Living Dangerously” will remember, was Indonesia’s first president, and the guy who declared independence from the Dutch in 1945. Inside the monument, we listened reverently to a tape of Soekarno making his declaration, admired some other little symbols of national pride, and then took the elevator to the top to enjoy views out over Jakarta. Back at the bottom, the dioramas showing events from Indonesian history were helpful, as well.

For the remainder of the afternoon, we tried out another side of Jakarta life. As a treat for the kids, we had burgers at the Hard Rock Café, where we were the only Westerners in sight, and then wandered around a couple of fancy malls for a bit. It was a nice way to dodge the heat and rain for a while. There are more fancy stores concentrated in these malls than anywhere in the Bay Area. However, there don’t seem to be very many shoppers, leading us to think that the developers and retailers have built in the hopes that the crowds will come, but the crowds just don’t quite have enough pocket change to be able to do so yet. Then, we went to a movie at a beautiful megaplex that was much nicer than the Metreon or any of the newest complexes in Walnut Creek or Pleasant Hill. Catching a movie was a real treat, since it was only our second big screen experience of the entire trip.

The next day, we took a $4, 30 minute cab ride north to Kota, the old part of town which is near the ocean. We had a great lunch at the Batavia Café, a fun spot just dripping with character. The large room in an old Dutch trader’s building was all done in Javanese teak wood, had slow-moving fans hanging from the high ceilings, and was dotted with big potted palms. The bar in the next room has made Newsweek magazine’s list of the coolest bars in Asia a few times. I obviously haven’t read Newsweek in a while, since I didn’t realize that cool bars qualify as news, but I couldn’t disagree with this bar ranking high on such a list. We were unable to find the old cannon in a square nearby which reputedly brings fertility to women to sit on it, but we did manage to catch sight of some Buginese schooners in the harbor. The Buginese are a seafaring group that is based on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, to the north of Java, but spends a lot of time on the water between the two islands. At least in the old days, they sometimes supplemented their income with a bit of piracy. The shouts of scared Dutch sailors, “Here come the Bugi men!” is the origin of the bogeymen that now live under the beds and in the closets of scared children everywhere.

We spent some time in a mediocre museum of Indonesian maritime history, housed in an old warehouse. The Dutch East Indies Company that dominated trade in this part of the world, does make for quite a story. The long trip from Amsterdam to Jakarta, around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean, must have been a pretty unpleasant trip on a slow old boat in the 1700s. And Jakarta, then known as Batavia, was apparently one of the deadliest places around for colonial administrators, thanks to the swampy conditions and associated diseases. Walking on in the area around the port, we passed through some extremely ramshackle stretches of stalls and huts that reminded us that Jakarta is definitely not all shine and polish. In fact, seeing the litter and polluted canals in one area put the kids in a pretty foul mood. And the smell? We didn’t even have to say, “Oh, oh, that smell. Can’t you smell that smell?” We knew we all could.

Our long drive back to the hotel featured a very spirited discussion about the causes and effects of poverty, the pros and cons of colonialism, what the American government and individual Americans can and should be doing to change things, etc. Later, Christina and I chuckled about the discussions a little. The kids definitely don’t adopt their parents’ views as their own on a lot of things, and although we don’t always agree with them, they have gotten very good at arguing their positions with at least some logic and facts. Looks like some of their parents’ lawyer traits have rubbed off, after all. Warning to their teachers next year: hold your class discussions and debates when Grayson and Abby are absent, or be prepared to have them try to dominate the discussion!

Christina and I left the kids at home one morning and went over to the National Museum. This was a good one. Indonesia is comprised of 17,000 islands, and has about 300 different languages used, so there was no shortage of cultures to highlight. Plus, we had fun learning again about Java Man, an early humanoid who for a long time was thought to be the missing link to modern homo sapiens, and “the Hobbit”, another, much later humanoid whose remains were recently discovered and is so named because he stood about 3 feet tall. We left with a determination to remind ourselves about Lucy, the Leakeys, and all of stuff we had learned in East Africa.

So, our stop in Jakarta was pretty interesting. We saw some Indonesian history, both old and new, areas that left no doubt but that Indonesia is very much a developing country, but also some of the fanciest malls we’ve seen anywhere. And, we were continually struck by how remarkably friendly the people are. Everywhere we went, we were greeted with shouts and smiles. That’s probably one of the pluses of getting off the incredibly busy tourist route of other parts of Southeast Asia. It should be a fun few weeks here in the last major stop of our voyage.