Jakarta the second time
After Krakatau we returned to Jakarta for a couple days. We checked off the last tourist sites on our list of things to do in the “big durian.” First was Kota, the old town centre in the north, with many Dutch colonial buildings. On the way there we passed a cluster of large banks. Outside, we were confused to see several men hanging out on the sidewalk selling bricks of small bills (one thousand, five thousand, and ten thousand rupiah). Some of them had really large amounts of money just sitting on a wagon unattended. It would have been ridiculously easy for someone to snatch these and zoom off on a scooter, and yet no one seemed to worry. Asking around later we learned two things. First, going into the bank itself is a painfully time-consuming process. It can often take hours to get called to the head of the line. Second, robbery is evidently very uncommon here. Evidently it’s common, when buying a car, to go to the bank, wait in an interminable line, and withdraw the full amount. They give you shopping bags in which to carry all the cash — there’s a lot of it because the largest banknote in Indonesia is worth about 10 USD — and you carry these big obvious sacks of money out the front door and across town to the dealership. The dealer, of course, counts it all twice, which takes up whatever time you might have had left in the day.
All this also helps explain why we’ve found that everyone in Indonesia is really reluctant to break bills, and sometimes doesn’t even have the change to do so. It’s because getting small money involves either a long trip to the bank or a fee paid to these men on the street who provide a secondary market in banknotes for those who are strapped for time.
After checking out the town square in Kota and the wayang kulit (shadow puppet) museum, we walked north to Sunda Kelapa, a pier from which sail pinisis, traditional wooden sailing boats. These boats are still actively used in trade, though they mostly have motors now. On the way to the pier we attracted even more than our usual portion of stares. In addition to being white, and on foot, we were walking through a distinctly working-class neighborhood typical of a port. On both sides of the street, men sewed huge tarpaulins in open shops that spilled onto the sidewalk. Other shops sold boat gear or fishing supplies. Everyone seemed to wonder what we were doing here – presumably most tourists take a cab from Kota. But we were left alone, which suited us fine.
Closer to the port we approached the open sewer that Jakarta pleases itself to call a river, and the stench of the river combined with the exhaust of countless scooters and bajaj was nearly enough to make us turn back. Still, we made it to the port, and it was beautiful. There was about a kilometer of huge wooden boats packed cheek-by-jowl, painted in many different colors but mostly variations on white, red and green. Skinny, muscular men shuffled quickly across bouncing timbers from ship to shore, carrying sacks of concrete across their shoulders. Nearby, a handful of men in their underwear hand-washed their clothes in a ditch filled with rainwater. We expected the longshoremen to be unfriendly or at best indifferent to us, but many of them smiled shyly as we took their picture, never stopping, of course, in their work. A few who were idle at the moment tried out what English they had: “Hello mister, where you from?” The light was low and soft, and the whole place had the relaxed feeling that comes from the approaching end of day.
We hired a couple of cyclists to carry us back to the bus station and rode the Transjakarta back to our hotel, with a stop along the way for reflexology, doxycycline, and candy bars.
Our second day in Jakarta, we visited the National Museum. If you go, don’t let a confused cabbie take you to the National Monument instead. It’s a great museum, two wings and five stories full of cultural and historical artifacts from all the very different areas of Indonesia. They’ve got a cool pre-history section too, highlighting the discovery of Java Man and the evolution of homo sapiens.
Our flight was the evening of that second day, and although we allocated a full hour to reach the airport, less then twenty-five kilometers away, and planned to arrive two hours before departure, the suffocating traffic meant it took over two hours and we nearly missed check-in. Our taxi spent the majority of that time waiting on on-ramps to merge onto a toll road. Once we reached the toll road, traffic actually moved at nearly the speed limit.