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Asia - part V (1)

Jakarta, Bandung, Pangandaran, Yogyakarta

Hector Yague
2005-10-09 09:33:01

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Jakarta

Jakarta, capital of Indonesia in the western tip of the Island of Java, would be the first place on the South Hemisphere I'd visit in my life. Yup, I had never crossed the equator, so this was sort of special to me. Plus the Island of Java sort of carries a mysterious aura to it, doesn't it? you know, one of those places you've heard about but never really had a clue where it was, let alone going there yourself.

On August the 28th I landed late at night at Jakarta's International Airport. As it was close to midnight and the airport is 35km from downtown, all buses had ceased giving service, so I had to bargain hard with the taxi drivers hawking at the airport for a ride. It was an amusing situation, the both parts being desperate to close the deal: me because I needed to find a hotel, and them because they knew I was probably the last customer they were going to get for the day. The price settled from US$16 down to US$7, I finally arrived at the Jalan Jaksa area, where the Lonely Planet guide located most of the budget guesthouses in town. I did fetch a cheap, spartan, bugs infested room. Not too bad for my first day in Indonesia.

Indonesia is a muslim country, so I got to see some familiar sights I had witnessed during my two months in the Middle East: mosques, women wearing black scarves covering their head, speaker-boosted calls to pray, etc. However, it didn't feel to me that religion plays such important role in every day life like it does in the Arab countries. At the end of the day Indonesia is a South East Asian country thus relax and laid back atmosphere is the name of the game here.

However, there's a heavy Dutch architectural influence in Jakarta and Indonesia as a whole, having been a Dutch colony till the WWII. What is even more surprising is the shitloads of Dutch and German travelers here in Indonesia. I ...