Jalan Jalan Jakarta

There’s something truly horrible about feeling sick on a plane. Feeling sick on a plane journey, that with one change took around 14 hours was a new low. Nevertheless, the journey did finally end and we arrived at Jakarta’s international airport bright and early in the morning. Thankfully, the visa process could not have been simpler. Get out money at the cash machine nearby (they did not accept card for the visa itself), pay for the visa, take passport and proof of payment to the next desk, receive shiny visa stamp. Done. Well, we then had to pass through customs but that’s a given where ever you go. Getting a Sim card and a taxi in the plaza outside was simple too, soon enough we were hurtling through the traffic towards our destination.

We’d decided on Kota Tua (old town) to be our base in Jakarta. Once the original downtown of Jakarta, the Dutch East India Company used this area as its headquarters in Indonesia. Since 1949, when Indonesia won its independence from the Dutch, Kota Tua slowly fell to ruin as Jakartas banking and business district was moved to a different area of the city. In 1972 the area was designated a heritage site, yet it wasn’t until 2005 that revitalisation was really started, meaning many of the old dutch buildings still sit abandoned and in disrepair.

Despite it’s slightly rough around the edges appearance, Kota Tua was certainly popular during our time there. The main square (which had been done up), sat just around the corner from our hostel and was filled with locals, all listening to the bands playing, and hanging about. I don’t know if this happens every weekend, or if we got lucky. One man who had not been lucky in his travels was Iman, a Palestinian man who was staying in the hostel with us.

He’d set out to go traveling before covid and hasn’t made it home since but not by choice. Stuck in Jakarta unable to work, without the support of embassy he described himself as passport-less. He said he's tried many times to get his embassy to help him, but now feels like they're there just for show. I can't really understand how abandoned he must feel, how insecure. It puts into perspective how privileged I am to hold a British Passport, not out of some sort of patriotic pride, but because of the doors it opens for me. A British passport is ranked 6th best in the world, where his Palestinian one is at the 105th spot. Although Iman didn’t want to get his hopes up, he received some good news and is hopefully at home with his family by now, finally repatriated.

I would love to regale you with all the interesting amazing things we did in Jakarta, but honestly we were overwhelmed and slightly jet-lagged. We went to the National Museum, the entry fee was ridiculously low and the exhibitions were curated well enough. I feel like it helped us learn somewhat about Indonesia life and beliefs, but with 100's of different cultural and ethnic groups all coming together to make up Indonesia as a whole, I doubt one museum could ever really explain it all in great detail. Apart from the exhibitions on Indonesia, there was an installation about Modern Polish Textile Art - unexpected but interesting all the same.

Apart from visiting the museum, we tried visit the national monument and the park that it sits in, but it was closed. There seemed to be some sort of political demonstrations going on while we were there, or at least that’s what a taxi driver told us later on in the day. The park, what we could see of it through the railings, looked lovely, a large green oasis in the concrete desert that is the city.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about Jakarta. It's not a pretty city, but no one has ever claimed it was. I enjoyed my time there, but at the same time I can’t see myself going back. The parts that we saw were ramshackle and worn, with the occasional plant to liven things up, but we only visited a small part of a mammoth city so I can’t talk about Jakarta as a whole.

It was just a difficult place, not well thought out for pedestrians with paths ending at busy roads with no official crossing, not that we were surprised by this. That’s not to say using taxis is any easier, with many picking you up from a place of their choosing rather than where you actually are. So all in all, it was hot, humid, diffucult and dirty. There was more we could have done, explored more places, visited more museums but perhaps it just wasn't the city for me, and that's okay too.

BONUS : Street kitten that lived at the Wonderloft hostel, adorable. Fun fact: Jalan Jalan means walking around in Bahasa Indonesian.

Trip date: Oct 2022 Next stop : Semarang

Previous Stop: Istanbul (Check out Istanbul Part 1 & Part 2 if you haven't already read it!)