My tickets from Heathrow to Abu Dhabi and onwards to Jakarta, were economy however they weren’t normal economy. The booking reference number caused the same look of confusion and increased politeness to appear on each consecutive check in woman’s face. She would then call over her superior, who would look at the screen, shrug and move away. My boarding pass was then handed over as if nothing had happened, the pass was normal other than my name was suffixed with VIP. Initially confused by this, I asked the lady at Heathrow what was special about my ticket, she said she didn’t really understand, but she thought it meant she had to be extra polite to me. While my new VIP status was welcome, it didn’t actually translate to a very different service, except I was able to jump queues occasionally; that was until I reached Jakarta.
For one reason or another, my flight form UAE had been slightly uncomfortable so I was feeling extremely tired as I walked off the plane, and mildly apprehensive about tackling Jakarta airport. However at this point my VIP stamp came up trumps, at the top of the gang way was a minute and immaculate vision in pink holding a sign with my name on it. No other visions; minute, immaculate, pink or otherwise; just one extremely helpful woman to help just me. She whizzed me through an odd kind of pre-customs customs desk, who asked some questions I have no idea about, past most of customs to the priority line, past the people waiting in the priority line, past the airline staff who had just pushed past the priority, and straight through customs.
We found our driver, and we were free, spat out into the soggy air of Jakarta. Lonely planet raves about most of Indonesia (I guess it has to) but it’s very rude about Jakarta. The first line of the article says “Jakarta is a hard city to love.”, it goes on to say “its grey, relentlessly urban sprawl…with barely a park to break the concrete monotony”, so my hopes for the city were not high. Luckily the Lonely planet is chatting utter shit. Jakarta is not Paris, nor Venice (although it smells quite like Venice and probably has more waterways), but the metropolis is definitely not grey. It’s every colour of the rainbow, admittedly that does include every shade of brown with bits stuck to it, but it’s not monotonous. It’s basically one massive slum doted, with mansions. The amazing thing is that the slum dwellers don’t seem to harbour any dislike for the mansion owners, unless you’re Chinese you will find everyone friendly.
Indonesian’s (apparently universal) racism towards Chinese people is odd, considering that almost everyone is part Chinese. I think it’s rather like the Welsh and the English, the English are essentially a bigger, better, more developed version of the Welsh, who have very little to do with Wales and can easily forget the place ever existed. The Welsh, on the other hand, have to have regular dealings with the English and are consequently constantly reminded that they are, to put things simply, worse. To compare Indonesia, the fourth biggest country in the work with 750 live languages (rather than one dead one) and 17,000 beautiful islands (rather than 1 okay looking one), to Wales is probably very unfair. However I get the feeling that China casts a shadow over Indonesia in the same way, and the jealousy is similar.
Attempting to describe the traffic here is pointless, and probably fairly boring, but it suffices to say that from Jakarta airport about 10 countries and 50 islands are within range of a 2 hour flight, but it’ll probably take you 3 to 4 hours to drive to the centre of the city. Travelling from our staff house in South Jakarta to North Jakarta and back could easily take 7 hours.
It is proof that god doesn’t exist, that wherever you find a rainy season you find tin roofs. Not as the exception, but as the rule. I probably didn’t quite take on board what the rainy season meant, I knew it rained, but I still had no idea of quite how hard it could rain. Given this, you might suggest that to build Jakarta on a flood plain was something of a mistake. It was, and the regular flooding serves as a reminder of this over thought.
To seem more pictures of Jakarta go to images above.
